Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Helga Zepp LaRouche characterized the global recognition of the importance of man’s first steps on the Moon fifty years ago as a welcome wake up call, one which can restore the optimism attacked by Green Ideology for the last fifty years. Many nations now have vibrant space programs. Looking into space, and recognizing the reality that there is a huge universe there to explore, is itself a “beautiful refutation of Green ideology.” The Schiller Institute conference in New York was a major breakthrough, as this reality was the basis of impassioned discussion about the potential man opens up, when he takes up the mission of the Extraterrestrial Imperative, as defined by the space visionary, Krafft Ehricke.

Contrast this, with the stupidity of those pushing for confrontation and war against China, or the obvious British drive for war with Iran. These examples of lunacy make evident that the loyalty of the financial oligarchy is to the collapsing system, not the well-being of the human population.

Our viewers should help us bring this message to everyone—no one should accept the degeneracy imposed by those who benefit from preserving a collapsing system. Join with the Schiller Institute, to bring about the transition to the New Paradigm!

TRANSCRIPT

HARLEY SCHLANGER:  I’m Harley Schlanger from the Schiller Institute. Welcome to our weekly webcast with our President and founder, Helga Zepp-LaRouche.  Today is July 21, 2019: We’re one day after the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing in 1969, which was recognized as an international event then; and then again, yesterday, there was an unleashing of optimism around the world, as Helga had predicted last week on this program.  Helga, how do you see the effect of the celebrations that took place worldwide yesterday?

HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE:  I think it was like Dornröschen has been kissed out of a 50-year sleep.  The German is the same as the English Sleeping Beauty, the fairy tale where Dornröschen sleeps and is finally kissed by a prince and wakes up.

So after maybe some 50 years, or 40-years plus hiatus, abandoning the optimism which was associated with the landing on the Moon on July 20th, 1969, this came back in full force.  I think the inspiration which comes from the fact that man has been capable, and will be capable of leaving the planet Earth, escaping completely the gravity of the Earth and then going to other heavenly bodies, and now there’s a full spectrum of countries having very ambitious Moon and Mars programs, I think yesterday was really an outbreak of optimism around the world.

Now, in 1969, there were 500 million people who watched live the landing of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.  And Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins, who was the third astronaut, who did not step on the Moon, but was in orbit of the Moon at that time; so Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins, and the family of Neil Armstrong met with President Donald Trump, and also they gave many interviews. It’s very important that Buzz Aldrin called for an international alliance for space, for the United States, Russia, China, India, Japan, ESA (the Europeans), all working together, and I think this is the spirit which absolutely must prevail because obviously the challenges to colonize the Moon, industrialize the Moon as a stepping stone Mars missions, which is now on the agenda in the United States, in China, in India:  That all requires and it would just make so much more sense for all these countries to cooperate as most of them have done on the ISS. So, I think yesterday was really a phenomenal day, and hopefully that optimism will not go away.

SCHLANGER: One of the important things you were just referring to, is that the discussion included the fact that, while in the 1960s, a lot of the Moon mission was initially a space race between East and West, there’s now much more discussion about cooperation, and this does fit in with what we saw coming out of the Osaka G20 meeting, doesn’t it?

ZEPP-LAROUCHE:  Yes.  You had Dmitry Rogozin, who is the head of Roscosmos, he sent a message of congratulation to NASA chief Jim Bridenstine, praising the three  original astronauts and all their great predecessors and followers, for having pushed out the boundaries of what man can do, of having dared to enter the unknown, praising this as a unique human quality.  Then, yesterday, you had the taking off from Baikonur, three astronauts, an American, a Russia, and an Italian, going to the ISS.  You had the activation of the Chang’e-4 lunar mission on the far side of the Moon.  The Indian Chandrayaan-2 which is supposed to go to the South Pole of the Moon, has just been pushed back a little bit because of some technical problems, but it will land on the Moon in September.  Also the father of the Chinese space program Ouyang Ziyuan announced that China will launch in 2020 its next Mars mission which is supposed to investigate if terraforming on Mars is possible for long-term habitation of the human species is possible on Mars.  So I think there is a flurry, a complete explosion of activities.

And for me it is the most beautiful refutation of this insane, Green ideology which is all based on the idea that we are in an Earthbound system where the resources are limited.  And the fact that man can go to the Moon, mine helium-3 for the second generation of thermonuclear fusion power, just as one example, it proves that the incredibly huge universe — the Hubble Telescope has now identified that we have, at least, 2 trillion galaxies. Now, that blows my mind:  I keep trying to imagine what that looks like, 2 trillion galaxies.  I already have a hard time imagining one Solar System, let alone one galaxy:  But 2 trillion galaxies?

And if you think that we are just at the beginning of breakthroughs to understand that Einstein’s General Relativity Theory was absolutely correct, because, recently, the existence of gravitational waves was confirmed.  The international cooperation among eight countries could make imaging of the black hole.  So when we start to go into interstellar space travel, and already when we go to Mars this will be an issue, we will have to deal with these relativistic issues, because we’re leaving 1-gravity zone, going into another one.  And all of this brings absolutely exciting, new challenges.  And it all proves the Greenies absolutely have no idea what they’re talking about, and they’re just an evil ideology, but they don’t correspond to the laws of the universe, and that is a good thing.

SCHLANGER: I remember, as a young man in the ’60s, the optimism that was unleashed by the space program then.  And it was really not just about space, but it was about curing disease, greening the desert, feeding the world, and obviously, the period from the shutdown of the Apollo mission to the present has been dominated by this Green ideology, and that’s why youth are so pessimistic.  Do you think this discussion of the 50th anniversary can shake people out of that pessimism then?

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Well, if anything can, this is it.  It is interesting that the Harris polling agencies, one of the major polling agencies in the U.S., they took a poll asking pupils in the 5th to 10th grades, in the U.S., in the U.K., and in China, the famous question: What do you want to become when you are a grownup?  And it is interesting: In China, 56% of these pupils said they want to become an astronaut; the second largest number was teachers; and then the last issue what people in China wanted to become, is a blogger or a YouTube personality, only 11% wanted to do that.  In the United States and in the U.K., it was exactly the reverse: I think something like 30% wanted to become YouTube personalities or bloggers, and then teacher was number two, the same way, and then the third was a professional athlete, and astronauts being very, very far behind.  Obviously that poll was done, not being impacted by these celebrations of the 50-year-old Apollo program, but I think it show a trend in China, of 56% of all children want to become astronauts!

That is really because it is very much in the culture, to go to space. China has also built now a Mars artificial dome in the Gobi Desert, and another Mars simulation station near the Tibet-Qinghai plateau, which is 4,200 meters high, so the air is always very clear, and they are building their 30 new telescopes. So I think the Chinese are very clearly on a good trajectory.

And it’s important that this is not about a “race,” who is first on the Moon or on Mars, but I think it is the challenge of humanity to come its true identity that we are not Earthlings — this was always said by my husband, Lyndon LaRouche: The good thing about space is that it proves we are not Earthlings, but we are a spacefaring species, and the very idea that we can conquer any problem which poses itself through scientific and technological breakthroughs, it’s nowhere better demonstrated than in the space research and travel.  So I think it is what makes us more human, it brings forward a better quality of personality in us, and it is what the great German rocket and space pioneer Krafft Ehricke, who was very key in the Apollo project; he developed the Atlas rocket, he was the director of the Centaur project, and he developed the most beautiful visions already in the ’50s and ’60s about the industrialization of the Moon as a stepping stone for permanent base on Mars.  And he called all of this, that it is the identity of man as [i]Homo sapiens extraterrestris[/i].  And I think that implies that we are really in the beginning of a completely new era of civilization.

SCHLANGER:  Not that this would compete with the Harris poll, but I can tell you my two children, the 7 year old and the 5 year old who have been watching this, both announced, one wants to be an astronaut and the other one wants to build rockets.  So I think this is catching.

Now, in this context, the Schiller Institute had a major conference yesterday to discuss this:  Why don’t you give people a little report on that, because I think all of our viewers should look at this.

ZEPP-LAROUCHE:  It’s a major breakthrough because it did bring a very important combination of people together celebrating this event.  This was in New York:  We had a live video link with a young woman from NASA from the big exhibition on the National Mall in Washington — Andrea Jones — and she gave a live report about what was going on there.  There were 150,000 people in the days before already watching this.  And she transmitted a tremendous excitement about Moon, the new interest in the entire space program is receiving from especially young people.

Then we had the daughter of Krafft Ehricke, Krista Ehricke, who gave a very beautiful account, how it was to live as a daughter with that great genius Krafft Ehricke.  We had other presentations which were extremely uplifting, such as the science attaché of the UN Consulate General of China.  He gave a very human idea of how U.S.-Chinese cooperation in space would look like, and he presented an official video about the Chinese space program. Then we had some other speakers, Ben Deniston from the Schiller Institute, and various other speakers, who spoke about Alexander Hamilton as a predecessor in the financing of all of this.  And then we had a very lively discussion.

So I would invite people to look at this program which is up already and it’s very inspiring. And you should help to spread the news about this, because people need this kind of optimistic perspective.

SCHLANGER:  In talking about China, one of the interesting things, if you take a step back and look at what they’re doing with the space program, with infrastructure, as well as with banking and with credit policy, they are moving very much along what we’ve been speaking about as needed for the United States, with the Four Laws of your husband.  This goes right along with the idea of how you lift a nation out of poverty.  And at the same time the Chinese are doing this, they’re being slandered in the press, and by thinktanks and by government officials.  How do we break that?  How do we change that, so people actually see what they’re doing?

ZEPP-LAROUCHE:  Some of these things are really quite outrageous.  There was just a three-day conference in Washington, addressed by Pompeo, and Pence, on the so-called freedom of religion, and they trotted the Falun Gong, which is in all likelihood sponsored by the extreme right-wing people like Bannon in the United States, slandering China.  And then they naturally talked about the Uighurs in Xinjiang.  And it’s very good that just recently 36 countries wrote an official open letter debunking all these slanders, saying what the Chinese are doing in Xinjiang is actually a very effective way of overcoming terrorism, not with bombs and not with military means, like the U.S. has been trying to do in vain, in the Middle East in these last 20 years or so, but by economic development, by giving people an economic perspective.  And this is obviously a much superior method.

But this kind of painting China as the enemy is really stupid!  It’s very dangerous.  There is a new article in the [i]New York Times[/i] just today, a “new Red scare.”  In a certain sense, this is really very dangerous geopolitics, making an enemy out of somebody who is neither an enemy nor wants to be an enemy.  And obviously, it is [i]the[/i] key strategic question of the next period: Can two large economies like the United States and China, which have different social systems, can they co-exist or not?  If not, then how can you prevent the rise of a country which has 1.4 billion people, and which has clear success story of the last 40 years of reform and opening-up, and obviously is very much ahead already of the West in some areas, like the famous 5G network? Like who is on the far side of the Moon?  It’s the Chinese, not the West.  Who has the fastest, best high-speed train system, connecting almost all major cities, 26,000 km?  The United States has not one single track!

So, for the two systems to say they cannot coexist like this new article in the [i]New York Times[/i] reports that Steven Bannon is making that point, saying “one wins, one loses” — now that means catastrophe. Both these countries have nuclear weapons and if you try to contain China by military means, or by economic warfare or go for regime change, it just can lead to a complete catastrophe. So I think this is very dangerous and therefore, the kind of cooperation which is visible, at least between the U.S., Russia and the Europeans on the ISS should include China.  China is advanced on the far side of the Moon, so they have offered cooperation, so who can steal from whom in this case?

So, I think it is really important that we think in terms of a new paradigm overcoming geopolitics, because in the age of thermonuclear weapons, any kind of confrontation or thinking that war is a means of conflict resolution can only lead to a calamity for all of humanity. So it should really be regarded as outdated and overcome.

SCHLANGER:  Some of the same networks that are engaged in this—I think you’re absolutely right, this stupid anti-China campaign, are still pushing for war with Iran.  We saw that the British ambassador was making clear that this is the British plan for the U.S. to go to war with Iran.  What’s happened in the last couple of days?  And it is the same network, isn’t it, that’s anti-China is also pushing this Iran fight?

ZEPP-LAROUCHE:  The whole thing didn’t start, but it was escalated by the British seizing the Iranian tanker off the Strait of Gibraltar.  Then supposedly the Iranians reacted by seizing a British tanker—it’s not so clear, because it’s being denied by the Iranians all the time, but almost every day you have a new escalation, and more troops are being sent to the Middle East.  And the whole Middle East is a complete powderkeg in any case.  So I think this is one of the Achilles’ heels.  And again, a war against Iran could lead to a big war.  I think that has been clear to anybody for a very long time.  And the British, especially Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, he says that Great Britain does not want to use “military options,” but you know, it’s nevertheless a very dangerous situation.  And I think even the Europeans are trying to cool it, the continental Europeans, that is.  But it’s a flashpoint that deserves great attention. And  it just shows you, until we have established a new set of relations, like the collaboration in the New Silk Road, these things will keep coming back, because the old order is not filling up by free will, and watch the emergence of Asia rising. Because it’s not just China which is rising, it’s all of Asia. And we need a new paradigm.

SCHLANGER:  Robert Ashley, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, came out the other day and said that Iran does not want a war, and it seems to me that there are many in the military who are aware of that.  But it’s the non-military types who love war, like Bolton, who are pushing it.

Helga, one of the other events, was the acceptance of the compromise slate for the European Union: Von der Leyen, the German Defense Minister is now the head of the European Commission.  Does this have any  bearing on what’s going on in the bigger strategic picture, or is this just more of a slide into chaos for the European Union?

ZEPP-LAROUCHE:  Well, as the result of wheeling and dealing, which really shows that very few people in Europe really have principles any more, she became the head of the European Union Commission.  And her speech in Strasbourg was really an incredible speech. She started off with an attack on China, on Russia.  She’s known from her being a defense minister, that she is a very hardliner against Russia, but she’s also clearly against China, so this forebodes not well, as long as this EU construct exists in the present form.

Otherwise, she went for a complete Green New Deal: She promised Europe would be the first continent to be CO2 emission free by 2050, that to reduce emissions by 2030 by 40% was not enough; it had to be 50% or 55%.  Well, she also said she would make a law—it’s not her job to make laws, in any case—to basically put all of this climate protection into legislation. So this is all very bad, because, if you have an EU legislation and echoed by the so-called “climate cabinet” of the German government in Berlin, who will make legislation which will channel credits entirely into the Green, into the climate protection area, I think this means the end of Germany as an industrial nation.

And this is why I have written an appeal to German Mittelstand, trade unions, teachers, parents, and thinking people, that this policy must be absolutely opposed.  Because, this is an operation, it is an effort to implement the Morgenthau Plan against Germany, belatedly.  And if these policies that Von der Leyen stands for, and unfortunately also Merkel and the whole German government at this point, if they would be continued to be implemented, it would lead to a disaster for Germany.  Young people will emigrate, because there’s no future here, the older people will have less health care which cannot be paid; that’s why, for example, you have to think what the Bertelsmann foundation is advocating, and they’re saying that the 1,400 hospitals in Germany have to be reduced to 600! And they’re saying it’s for better health care—this is a complete fraud.  If you want to have better health care, you can make better diagnostic equipment into the smaller hospitals, but not dismantle them.  That’s just a complete assault on the living standards.

So I think we are in for hard times in Germany and in Europe, because of this Green policy, but it must be repeated.  I think it’s also a strategic danger, because when Asia is rising with high technology, and Europe is on a course of self-destruction, there is no good solution.  Out of this crisis can come chaos and maybe even war.

SCHLANGER:  It’s interesting to note that the Morgenthau Plan, which was for the  full deindustrialization of Germany after World War II, was one that was going to be imposed by the victors of the war against the losers.  Now, we have the government of Germany imposing it on its own people:  Doesn’t this say something about the psychology of the old paradigm?

ZEPP-LAROUCHE:  Well, as we have discussed this many times: This is not really an issue of nations against nations, but it’s the issue of an international oligarchy, which has a loyalty to that system, more than to its people. And I think that’s what we see.  It’s like the Holy Alliance in the 19th century, where the oligarchy was also more loyal to their system of  oligarchy than to their respective countries, and I think that’s exactly what we see right now.

But that system is clearly is collapsing, but the danger is that it can bring in unbelievable danger to the respective people.

SCHLANGER: Well, it seems very clear:  You issued a call to action.  We had the Schiller conference on the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing, so there’s a program there for  people to go out and organize with.  How should people take this as their daily opportunity to do something, not just to feel better for themselves, but for the future, for their children and grandchildren?

ZEPP-LAROUCHE:  First of all, join the Schiller institute. I think it’s important to become a member, to support our activities, also with donations, which we obviously need, because we are not sponsored by Wall Street, or the City of London, as you can imagine.  So we need your support, and activation.  If you are in the German-speaking realm, help to distribute the appeal I wrote, because I think there is right now a danger of really destroying the industrial base of Europe.

And as I said, this contains the danger—let me just be very frank:  If you look at what Obama said in South Africa some years ago, he said: There are all these youth in Africa, but if everybody wants to have a car, if everybody wants air-conditioning, and a big house, then the planet will boil over.  So here you have it: What this Green ideology does, it is the last effort of the financial sector to get people to invest in Green technologies; the Green New Deal will bring a profit to a few, the speculators who will become richer.  But in the real terms, it means that millions, if not hundreds of millions of people if not more, will have no access to enough food, clean water, energy, education, and a safe life for themselves: So the Green ideology is really about genocide and population reduction, and in my appeal, I mention a famous quote from Lord Russell from 1951, in [i]The Impact of Science on Society[/i], an article he wrote at that time and published, in which he said, in politics, the most important would be mass psychology, how to get the patient, when he is young—meaning you have to get to children under the age of 10—to convince them that “snow is black.”  And that method has been used to manipulate the population.

And I think the beautiful thing is that with the whole space program, this is the biggest antidote to the idea of an Earthbound system, and the idea that you can to Mars with solar energy, you can forget!  So, I think we are in a very interesting tension between the backward oriented, population-reductionist mafia, the Green Lobby; and the optimistic, future-oriented science lobby, and I would invite you to help us get a real debate!  Let’s discuss the origins of climate change; let’s discuss what is the scientific basis for dealing with all problems, including changes in the climate, which have been taking place for millions of years.  And I think that that is a debate we urgently need. So contact us, become a member, help to distribute the appeal, and get active with us.

SCHLANGER:  Well, there are your marching orders, and I think they’re very straightforward.  The new paradigm is there for us to seize and to implement.

Helga, anything else you want to add?

ZEPP-LAROUCHE:  No.  I think it’s a very optimistic period, because as I said, the Dornröschen sleep is over.  A lot of people are absolutely optimistic, looking into the future of mankind with an absolute determination that mankind is the only creative species known in the universe so far.  We may discover other ones; we have done that yet, but we are on the verge of making huge breakthroughs in fundamental science, and that  is always a reason for optimism.

SCHLANGER:  OK, we’ll end it with that Helga, and we’ll see you next week.

ZEPP-LAROUCHE:  I hope so, next week.