Helga media coverage or interview

BRICS Group & Russian National Committee on BRICS Research Publish Article on Possible US/BRICS Cooperation

December 16, 2018by Alicia Cerretani in BRICS updates, Helga media coverage or interview

As part of the continuing impact of Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s October, 2018 address in Moscow at the Institute of Far Eastern Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, a lengthy article, based on her address, was published this week on the official websites of both the BRICS organization and of the Russian National Committee on BRICS Research. The article by Richard A. Black of The Schiller Institute is entitled, “The Trump Presidency: A New Opportunity for the BRICS?”

The Russian National Committee on BRICS Research was set up in coordination with the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It conducts on-going scientific research on strategic policy for Russia, in her role as initiator, in 2006, and as a leading member of the BRICS. The article discusses the surprising potential for US collaboration with the BRICS, beginning, first, with space exploration joint work, and it features Lyndon and Helga LaRouche’s “new ordering principle” for world affairs as proposed by Helga LaRouche at the Institute, in October.

Zepp-LaRouche Covered in Russian Press: The BRITISH Meddled in the US Elections

November 28, 2018by Benjamin Deniston in Geopolitics updates, Helga media coverage or interview

On November 27, Sputnik News published an article covering Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s insights into the British interference in the 2016 US elections. The article starts,

“Washington has accused Russia on multiple occasions of allegedly meddling in the 2016 presidential elections, leading to a special investigation into the matter. Moscow has firmly denied the accusations, pointing out that no evidence has been presented so far to prove them. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the founder of the Schiller Institute, headquartered in Washington, DC, told Sputnik that British intelligence agencies сould have been behind the alleged meddling in the 2016 US presidential elections…”

Read the full article here here: Pundit Suggests UK Could Have Meddled in 2016 US Elections

Zepp-LaRouche: U.K. Integrity Initiative Aims To Preserve British Control

November 28, 2018by Benjamin Deniston in Geopolitics updates, Helga media coverage or interview

On November 27 the United News of India and Pakistan’s UrduPoint news republished a Sputnik wire featuring Helga Zepp-LaRouche (speaking on behalf of her position as the head of the German Civil Rights Movement Solidarity party (BusSo). The article begins,

“The main goal of the United Kingdom’s Integrity Initiative project is to keep the UK influence in global affairs, including by countering Russia as a key player in the international arena and deterring China’s geopolitical ambitions, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the leader of the German Civil Rights Movement Solidarity party, told Sputnik…”

Read the full article here here: UK Integrity Initiative Aimed At Keeping UK Influence In Global Affairs- German Politician

Image credit: Jim Bowen (Hope Mills NC, US)

Sputnik France Covers Schiller Institute Nov 6 Paris conference

November 25, 2018by Benjamin Deniston in Helga media coverage or interview, Media coverage of our activity, Our conferences, World Land-Bridge updates

Paris, Nov. 24—Maxime Perrotin from Sputnik France, authored two in-depth articles covering the ideas presented at the Schiller Institute’s November 6 conference in Paris. Our conference was held to announce the publication of the French edition of the Institute’s report The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge Vol. 2.

The first article was entitled, “The Chinese economic miracle, a defeat of the West’s neo-liberal model” and published on November 2. The second article was published on November 23, entitled, “The new Chinese silk roads also go through … Africa,” and starts with the provocative question: what’s the connection between a canal in the African Rift, the Port of Gwadar in Pakistan and the idea of the coincidence of opposites of Nicolas of Cusa, a German thinker of the middle ages? Answer? The BRI initiative of president Xi Jinping. The article said, Helga Zepp-LaRouche started the conference with the provocative statement, “This dossier contains the solutions to all the major problems that we are undergoing in this planet.”

Zepp-LaRouche outlined the enormous scale of the project, in terms of countries which have joined and overall investments, noting however that it is not a one way road: president Xi Jinping in his opening statements to the China international import export fair in Shanghai early November stated that China would “import” the equivalent of 40,000 billion dollars in the course of the following 15 years! She qualified the project as “the most important at a strategic level on the planet today,” because of its win/win cooperation, the idea that no country is to dominate another one, and because of its adoption of the peaceful coexistence principles laid down by the Bandung conference of the non aligned movement, of 1955, such as respect of sovereignty and peaceful coexistence.

The BRI is not Chinese, reports Perrotin citing Schiller Institute Africa advisor, Sebastien Périmony, who said it has sparked up the desire everywhere to “develop Africa.” After outlining the achievements of the last FOCAC conference in Beijing, Périmony presented ongoing projects promoted carried out by Europeans in Africa such as the Lake Chad Bonifica/Power China studies of feasibility, but also the Inga 3 hydroelectric plant in DRC with participation of a Spanish firm, ACS. But also projects that France could take up: such as the Togo, Niger, Burkina, Ivory Coast loop, which can be coupled to the trans-sahelien Nouakchott-N’Djamena railway.

Perrotin reports also that the Schiller Institute rejects the West’s accusations that China is leading countries into a debt trap, reporting that Zepp-LaRouche turns those attacks around against the IMF and its conditionalities. The author also picked up on the fact that in the 1990’s Lyndon and Helga LaRouche campained, at the end of the cold war, for a Eurasian landbridge. This was their response to the collapse of the Soviet Union, a peace project for the 21st century which would have used the COMECON industrial capacities to relaunch the economy of the former East bloc; a project that was killed by Bush, Mitterrand and Thatcher whose shock-therapy lead to a rapid deindustrialization of the former communist countries.

For Helga LaRouche, Xi Jinping’s concept of “a shared community of principle for all humanity,” is a conception coincident with the thinking of Nicolas of Cuse, and his coincidence of the opposites.

RIA Novosti Covers Helga Zepp-LaRouche on British Meddling in US Elections

November 9, 2018by Benjamin Deniston in Geopolitics updates, Helga media coverage or interview

Following Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s recent trip to Moscow, RIA Novosti (the Russian language state news agency) published two short reports covering Helga’s analysis of the world situation (translated below).

The first wire is headlined “American expert suspects Britain of interfering in the US elections:”

“MOSCOW, October 24 – RIA News. British intelligence agencies may have interfered in the US elections in 2016, said Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the US-based Schiller Institute, a research NGO.

“According to her, employees of the team of then-President Barack Obama and of British MI6 could have interfered in the US presidential election.

“’The reason is that (Donald) Trump during the 2016 election campaign promised to improve relations with Russia. But the British did not want this, because they saw a threat to their position, in that they would not be able to manipulate the situation if the United States and Russia joined forces. The Skripal case and the Syrian chemical dossier emerged in this connection,’ she told reporters.

“According to Zepp-LaRouche, if the intervention of the British in the elections is proven, this scandal will be the biggest in US history.

“This scandal will be bigger than Watergate, the greatest in US history. The midterm elections will show this,” she said.

“An investigation of alleged Russian interference in the US elections, as well as Trump’s supposed ties with the Russian Federation, which are denied by the White House and the Kremlin, is being conducted by independent special prosecutor Robert Mueller, as well as in both houses of the US Congress. A spokesman for the Russian president, Dmitry Peskov, called the accusations of interfering in the elections ‘absolutely unfounded.’”

RIA News, https://ria.ru/world/20181024/1531406869

The Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s charges against British intelligence created such a stir in Russia, that journalist Vladimir Solovyov brought it up during his popular evening talk show, citing at length the above-mentioned RIA Novosti quotes on the British role. His guest, American neoconservative Ariel Cohen of the Atlantic Council, quickly offered an explanation, in which he attempted to dismiss Lyndon LaRouche and his Helga Zepp-LaRouche as unreliable “conspiracy theorists.” Cohen’s intervention, in turn, was forcefully countered by Natalia Vitrenko, the chairwoman of the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, in a video rebuttal she released.

The second wire ran under the headline “Trump could improve relations with Russia, expert believes:”

“MOSCOW, October 24 – RIA Novosti. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institute, a non-governmental organization in the United States, believes that, thanks to a meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin in Paris and the G-20 summit in Argentina, U.S. President Donald Trump could improve relations with Moscow….

“’In the near future there will be a meeting between President Putin and President Trump in November in Paris, followed by the G20 summit in Argentina. If President Trump can, shall we say, ‘free himself’ from the conspiracy taking shape around him, then he will be able to return to those election promises he made in 2016 (on the development of relations with the Russian Federation – ed.),’ she told reporters.

“According to her, if Trump does this and thereby improves relations with Russia, and also tries to improve relations with China, then this ‘will bear fruit, and we can talk about the beginning of a new era, there will be a cardinal jump’ in the global conjuncture.

“As Speaker of the Federation Council Valentina Matvienko noted earlier, Russia has a positive assessment of the prospects for the upcoming November 11 talks in Paris between Russian and US leaders Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, and expects new prospects for Russian-American cooperation to be outlined there.”

RIA News, https://ria.ru/politics/20181024/1531406506.html

Helga Zepp-LaRouche Addresses Gathering in Moscow on Building the New Paradigm

October 28, 2018by Kasia McGee in Helga media coverage or interview, Russia SI activity

The Chairwoman of the international Schiller Institute Helga Zepp-LaRouche presented an overview of the current strategic situation and the perspectives for the future in a speech given in Moscow on Oct. 24 at the 23rd International Academic Conference: “China, Chinese Civilization and the World: Past, Present, and Future”. The event was organized by the Institute of Far Eastern Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Posing the question as to whether human society is capable of an efficient of self-government, Helga Zepp-LaRouche listed the “multiple crises” plaguing the world today: the imminent crash of the trans-Atlantic financial system, unprecedented polarization inside the United States, false flag operations in Syria, drug epidemics, the global migration crisis, terrorism and Nazism, and the increasing disunity in the EU.

While these challenges may seem unrelated, Zepp-LaRouche said, they must be understood as products of the “old paradigm” of thinking. To solve them, one must be aware of the principles defining the new epoch taking form.

She went to identify two “game changing” topics which create “totally opposite pathways for the future”. First, is the “monumental battle” in the United States to determine whether the coup attempt against President Trump will succeed and he will be driven out of office, or whether the perpetrators of that coup, which aims to prevent him from establishing good relations between the U.S. and Russia, will instead be prosecuted. “If Trump can consolidate his position, despite the many hawkish tones coming from the U.S. now, there does exist the potential that he will be able in the second half of his first term to improve relations with Russia and return to his initial positive attitude towards China.”

The second related issue, Helga Zepp-LaRouche went on, is the need to overcome the “Thucydides Trap,” i.e., the apparent conflict “between the power dominating the world up to now, the U.S., and the rising power, China,” by defining a solution over and beyond the specifics of either of them to address the fundamental interests of all nations and “thus shift the level of thinking to a higher plateau.” To avoid such a “Thucydides trap”, she stressed, the U.S. needs to be integrated into the organization of the new world order.

Such a higher plateau of thinking was defined by Zepp-LaRouche’s husband, Lyndon LaRouche, several years ago, when he proposed that the U.S., Russia, China and India, with the support of others, set up a New Bretton Woods system, that is, an international credit system to finance economic development, emphatically including that of developing nations. “The basic conception for such a new credit and economic system already exists in principle in the Belt and Road policy of President Xi Jinping,” Helga Zepp-LaRouche said. Today, it must be expanded and consolidated to respond to the needs of all mankind as a species, such as becomes evident in the field of space exploration.

Indian Scholar: The Belt and Road Came from Lyndon and Helga LaRouche

August 29, 2018by Kasia McGee in Helga media coverage or interview, New Silk Road / BRI updates

Aug. 28 -Mahmud Ali, an Indian scholar currently at the Institute of China Studies at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, posted an article on LinkedIn titled “America’s Foundational Contributions to China’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI)” on Aug. 27. He ridicules the “disdain” from Western officials and media towards the Belt and Road Initiative, and stating that the slanders are “repeated {ad nauseam},” especially in the U.S. But, he continues, the concept “originated in America, with U.S. visionaries envisaging, promoting and advancing the cause of a united Euro-Asian economic space, as early as the late 1980s, before politicians and their assorted advisors had begun considering the possibility of the collapse of the Soviet Union, or the end of the Cold War. It was that American intellectual spark, nurtured by a few farsighted men and women, which illuminated the new world of possibilities. Without it, and direct intervention by governments and multilateral agencies based in America and its allies, there would probably be no BRI today.”

Then, under the subhead “American Prophets Imagine a New Silk Road,” he writes that despite the geopolitical thinking of most people in the West, based on the concepts of Halford Mackinder, “Western thinkers operating outside state-funded national security establishments envisioned a non-competitive, indeed collaborative, vision of the future. One of them, the U.S. politician and co-founder, with his wife Helga LaRouche, of the Washington-based Schiller Institute, Lyndon LaRouche, promoted such a vision, with some success in influencing segments of trans-Atlantic opinion. In October 1988, LaRouche briefed the media in West Berlin on ‘U.S. Policy Toward the Reunification of Germany,’ prophesying the collapse of COMECON economies, and urging food-support to Poland so that a majority of Germans on both sides desired reunification. In December, he assigned a group of Schiller Institute specialists to examine prospects for establishing a Paris-Berlin-Vienna productive triangle. In January 1990, Schiller Institute published LaRouche’s book on a proposed 320,000 sq.km. European economic area comprising a population of 92 million concentrated in 10 large industrial areas, from which he envisaged infrastructural corridors, linked with high-speed railways, radiating in all directions, providing a basis for upgrading living standards across Eurasia.”

Ali goes on to describe Schiller Institute conferences and {EIR} articles between 1991 and 1996 (noting that LaRouche was then in prison), when Helga Zepp-LaRouche presented her speech at the May 7-9, 1996 “Symposium on Economic Development along the New Euro-Asia Continental Bridge” in Beijing on May 8, 1996, titled “Building the Silk Road Land-Bridge: The Basis for Mutual Security Interests of Asia and Europe.”

Then, he writes: “In January 1997, Lyndon LaRouche addressed a Washington conference, urging the Clinton Administration to sponsor a New Bretton Woods system, reorganizing the world economy to prevent disruptive boom-bust cycles, and recognize the global merit of the Eurasian Land-Bridge program. Reinforcing and explaining her husband’s persistent thematic refrain, Helga LaRouche published a commentary titled, `Eurasian Land-Bridge: A New Era for Mankind,’ which was widely circulated across the Atlantic by the Schiller Foundation [sic].” He adds that Helga LaRouche addressed a second conference in Beijing in November 1997. “By then,” he continues, “railway connectivity between coastal China, Central Asia and Russia was a reality; Europe beckoned.”

He next reports on a conference in India organized by Schiller representative Ramtanu Maitra, with leading figures from Russia, China and India, where they “established a Triangular Association with the goal of promoting Indo-Russian-Chinese cooperation in forging a shared vision of Eurasia’s post-Cold War future of peace, progress and prosperity. The effort failed for a combination of distractions and difficulties: fallout from the Asian Economic Crisis, the September 2001 al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington and America’s subsequent Global War on Terrorism, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and then, the Great Recession. Nonetheless, seeds had been sown in the febrile post-Cold War intellectual hotbeds. Ideas analysed at Schiller’s many conferences and events began gelling into policy-frameworks in early 21st century.”

Ali then reviews other Western interventions into Central Asia, including a number of “bilateral investment treaties” the U.S. signed with coutries in Central Asia and the South Caucasus, aimed at capturing the energy resources and breaking them away from Russia and China, and the so-called “New Silk Road Initiative” sponsored by Hillary Clinton (based on keeping Central Asia out of Russia and China influence), and the Lower Mekong Initiative, also by the U.S. State Department.

However, Ali makes a point that the U.S. initiatives were both “much more modest” than the LaRouche plans, or of Xi Jinping’s plan announced in September 2013, and that the U.S. “more candidly advertised their geopolitical drivers.” On the other hand, he concludes, “Beijing emphasized its economic, indeed geoeconomic focus.”

Echo of Helga LaRouche’s EU Summit Call Appears in Global Times

June 20, 2018by Motoki Kasai in Helga media coverage or interview, World Land-Bridge updates

June 18, 2018 – China’s Global Times newspaper today published an op-ed, “Neocolonial Europe Behind {Aquarius}’ Fate,” on the EU’s crisis of African migration. The Italian author, Orazio Maria Gnerre, knows the work of Lyndon and Helga LaRouche. His concluding paragraphs contain important elements of Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s June 16 call for EU-China development of African economies to be the subject of the June 28-29 EU summit – the “Singapore summit principle.”

Gnerre wrote, “Unfortunately, however, the simple solutions presented by the two sides, the government and the opposition, are not adequate. The blockade of ports will be useless if African countries remain underdeveloped in economic and suprastructural terms, and will continue to be the theater of war. It is not possible to export all the inhabitants of Africa either to Italy or Europe given the sheer demographic dimensions.

“The solution, which does not seem to be in sight of the electorate or the European parties, should involve putting an end to the neocolonial process of dispossession of the African region by Europe, perhaps to arrive at a joint economic relationship between Europe itself and Africa, according to the virtuous model that China is implementing in Central Africa. Such a development that is not predatory or politically intrusive could lay the foundation for the future of an entire continent, too often a victim of aggressive capitalism of the West.”

Gnerre has been sent Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s full call for the European Union summit of special character, as have many figures around the new Italian government for whom this is an absolutely critical matter.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche Coverage in Russian Satellite News Agency, Calls for Trump and Putin to Meet

April 19, 2018by Kasia McGee in Geopolitics updates, Helga media coverage or interview, Russia SI activity

Russian Satellite News Agency, Moscow, April 13th — Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the founder of Schiller Institute in Germany, said in an interview covered by the Russian Satellite News Agency that the sooner the Presidents of the United States and Russia meet, the more opportunity they will have to eliminate the two countries’ conflict threats.

The expert said: “As Trump said on Twitter, the deterioration of U.S.-Russian relations is largely the result of actions within the U.S. against him. Special investigations by Mueller and various committees of the country over the past year have found no ‘Russian traces.'”

LaRouche concluded: “The sooner Trump meets with Putin, the more opportunity they have to stop the provocation.”

U.S. President Trump discussed the possibility of holding bilateral meetings with Putin during the telephone conversation on March 20. However, according to the Kremlin, due to the sharp deterioration of relations between the two countries, the issue would not be discussed at the beginning of April.

GBTimes Interviews Helga Zepp-LaRouche on China’s New Silk Road and Europe

February 18, 2018by Kasia McGee in Europe SI activity, Helga media coverage or interview, Helga statement, article, transcript, New Silk Road / BRI updates

Feb. 16 – GBTimes is a multimedia news site, based in Finland where it was founded by Chinese entrepreneur Zhao Yinong, and which refers to itself as a “bridge between China and the rest of the world.” It published the following interview with Helga Zepp-LaRouche on Feb. 16:

China’s ambitious plan to link itself with Europe and Africa through new Silk Road trade routes has so far received a mixed welcome in Europe. The Belt and Road initiative, the brainchild of Chinese President Xi Jinping, proposes to boost trade and economic integration across Eurasia through over $1 trillion worth of investments in railways, ports, power plants and other infrastructure links. The initiative has been officially endorsed by Central and Eastern European countries, many of which are hoping that Chinese investment could create jobs and improve infrastructure.

But Western European countries have been more cautious, with British Prime Minister Theresa May declining to sign up to the initiative during her recent trip to Beijing and French President Emmanuel Macron warning during his trip to China that the New Silk Road cannot be “one-way.” There are also concerns in Brussels about a lack of reciprocity in trade with China and increasing Chinese investment in critical infrastructure in Europe.

The German-based Schiller Institute, however, has for the past several years been campaigning for the Belt and Road initiative in Europe by organizing hundreds of conferences on the topic. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the institute’s founder and president, talked to gbtimes.com about the initiative and why she believes Europe should embrace it.

Q: What is the Schiller Institute?

HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE: The Schiller Institute was founded in 1984 as a think tank, with the main idea behind it being that peace and order in the world would only function if each nation would relate to the best cultural tradition of the others and vice versa. One of the focuses was to fight for a just new world economic order, something like in the tradition of the Nonaligned Movement, especially inspired by the ideas of my husband, Mr. Lyndon LaRouche, and secondly to fight for a renaissance of classical culture. I gave it the name of [German philosopher] Friedrich Schiller because his image of man was the most noble and beautiful one and I thought such a conception was urgently needed in the political realm.

Q: How did you first get to know China?

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: I went to China for the first time in 1971 on a cargo ship, which was repaired in Shanghai. So, I had plenty of occasions to visit many factories, children’s palaces, and the countryside. I also went to Shenzhen, Qingdao and Beijing, and that left a very lasting impression on me because this was in the middle of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and China was very much different then. But it started a deep interest on my side in Chinese philosophy and culture. And then I was also inspired by the changes which took place in China after the reforms of Deng Xiaoping, and I visited China many times in the 1990s and the 2000s, and especially after Xi Jinping announced the new Silk Road. And I could see the dramatic changes and the economic miracle which China has undergone. I feel very privileged that I have sort of personally witnessed the unbelievable transformation of China over almost 50 years.

Q: You mentioned President Xi Jinping who proposed the Belt and Road initiative in 2013. The Schiller Institute has been very supportive of this initiative. Why is this?

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: First, the Belt and Road initiative is presently the most important strategic initiative on the planet because it proposes what Xi Jinping calls a community for shared future of humanity. The idea of one humanity is a perfect conception for overcoming geopolitics, which was the reason for two world wars and, in the age of nuclear weapons, can lead to a terrible catastrophe just as big. If you look at the incredible progress this initiative has made in the five years since it was announced, you already see a tremendous transformation where the developing countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia, for the first time, have legitimate hope to overcome poverty and under-development. It just happens that the Belt and Road initiative is very much in accordance with proposals my husband and myself have made during the last decades. After the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991 we proposed something that we called the Eurasian land bridge, which was the idea to connect the Eurasian peoples and industries through development corridors. The Chinese government picked up on the proposal to organize an international conference in Beijing in 1996, in which I participated as speaker. Already at that point China considered the development of the Eurasian land bridge a strategic initiative, but this was put on hold due to the Asian financial crisis of 1997. We were then extremely happy when Xi Jinping announced this policy in 2013 — with China’s economic power all these plans can now be realized. Why do you think the Chinese are interested in this idea of bridging the Eurasian continent? China has developed its own economic model of lifting its population out of poverty and it also wants to contribute to eliminating poverty on the world scale. I think that is a very different approach to many other countries. There are now only 30 million poor people left in China. In comparison, there are 90 million poor people in the European Union and more than 50 million people who are officially poor in the United States, but no clear plans to eliminate poverty in totality. So, you are saying China is currently the only major country that has a global vision? Yes. I participated in the Belt and Road forum in Beijing last year and everyone who participated in this conference had a distinct impression that we were witnessing the beginning of a new era of mankind. At the 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi promoted the goal of having a fully developed, modern, culturally advanced, happy country by 2050 — not only happiness for the Chinese people, but for all the people in the world. Normally politicians in the West think at best until the next election, and I have not heard from any Western leader a plan on how to uplift the entire human species in the next 30, 40, 50 years. The idea to create happiness for the people as a policy goal was last heard during the American revolution when it was set in the American Declaration of Independence that it is a fundamental right to have life, freedom and happiness. This is a notion coming from Latin [sic — she said Leibniz] and it means the ability of people to develop their full potential. I have seen in China on many occasions that people really think that way. They have the idea that there is no limit to their ability to self-perfect to improve society and relations between nations, and it’s a completely different spirit to what you find anywhere in the West.
Q: All Central and Eastern European countries have officially joined the Belt and Road Initiative, but many Western countries including the U.K., France and Germany have been more cautious about it. Why do you think this is the case? ZEPP-LAROUCHE: When certain politicians in these countries say they want to insist on standards and rules, and that they don’t want the spreading of Chinese investment in Europe, I think it’s a question of geopolitical control. The EU for example could have developed Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, but they didn’t. When China then comes and starts to build the kind of infrastructure that the EU did not build, these countries are happy and want to go with the new Silk Road. And that causes some people who believe in geopolitics to see it as a threat. The present Western system is based not on the common good as a primary orientation, but on monetarist profit-making. This system benefits those who speculate and those who run the banking system. But it leads to such things like the 2008 financial crisis, which was a systemic crisis, and nothing has been done since other than quantitative easing and pumping money.

Q: But do you think China itself has overcome geopolitics?

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: I know that that is not the view of many politicians in the West, but I think assumptions about China are just people’s projections of what they themselves think. I am not a naive person — I have studied this in depth and looked at it closely — and I do think that China does not plan to dominate the world with its system. The Chinese model is more attractive, and many countries want to repeat what it has been doing, but I don’t think China wants to impose its values. My explanation for this is China’s Confucian tradition. For example, Christians are supposed to win other people over to Christianity, but Confucianism does not do that. Confucianism is perfectly happy to live in coexistence. And if you look at the entire history of China, you never had religious war. You had Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism and Christianity all living in a perfect ecumenical harmony. So, I think in Chinese history, you don’t find anything which would give credibility to the claim that China is not doing what they say. I think they are doing exactly what they say they are doing and they mean it.

Q: What would it mean for Western European countries to join the Belt and Road Initiative?

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: It would mean that there would be a shift towards the real economy. Right now, you have this money-makes-money philosophy, but if you look at even an advanced country like Germany, there’s a tremendous backlog in infrastructure. There are warnings by some of the logistic organizations that Germany is about to lose its standard as a location for industrial development because of the collapse of the infrastructure. So, if European countries would join the new Silk Road it would mean that they could basically renew their infrastructure like China has done, and to build fast trains among all major cities. With the policy of the Troika [European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund], the industries and the economies of the Southern European countries were destroyed. Now you see that with the advantages that come from Chinese investment in the Piraeus port and other projects in Greece, it’s going upwards. And with the EU, it went downwards. The same is true for Italy, Spain and Portugal. Europe could also participate with China in the reconstruction of Southwest Asia, of Syria, of Iraq, because you must bring economic development to these countries if terrorism is supposed to be eliminated. You have to give young people a future which they don’t have right now. It would mean you could solve the refugee problem in a human way.

Q: But do you think that some Europeans might be cautious about the growing Chinese influence because they think they might have to someday accept the same kind of restrictions on freedoms that China has at home?

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Yes, but if people are worried that they may lose some of their hedonistic impulses — well, that might not be altogether such a bad thing. Because what we are seeing right now is a decadent society with all the violence, pornography and drug addiction. You have an opium epidemic in the United States, which is contributing to the fact that life expectancy is going down for the first time. If there is any parameter for the functioning of an economy, it is the life expectancy. If an economy is doing well, it’s increasing and obviously it’s an indicator that there is something fundamentally wrong if it’s going down because of suicide, alcoholism and drug addiction. On the other hand, there was just a poll made in Germany among 42 firms which were taken over by Chinese investors. In all cases, the management and the employees said that it was a positive thing that the Chinese took over, instead of speculators or hedge funds. I think some of these changes that come with more Chinese investment and influence would be beneficial. I would even go so far to agree with Leibniz, who said already in the 17th century that because of the superior morality of the Chinese, one should import Chinese missionaries to teach morality to the Europeans.

Q: So, you are optimistic that the acceptance of the Belt and Road initiative is growing in Europe eventually?

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: We have found that all people who do business in China or who have travelled to China or who are married with a Chinese person, are all positive, and they know that what China is doing is a historic transformation of humanity. The Belt and Road initiative is not just about economics; it’s not just about infrastructure from A to B, but it is really a new paradigm. And what I mean by new paradigm is a new way of understanding what is the role of humanity. We are the only creative species who can invent new technologies and sciences and change the mode of our existence. It’s not the nature of man to be greedy, to chase for stock market gains and try to exploit and dominate others. It’s the nature of man to develop our own potential to the fullest so that we can contribute to the development of the human species. And the new paradigm will be that more and more people, as time goes by, will be able to realize their true potential as human beings.

https://gbtimes.com/interview-with-helga-zepp-larouche-on-chinas-new-silk-road-and-europe

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