General updates

March 2014

The Schiller Institute has issued the following appeal for circulation and signature among scientific and artistic layers. If you feel addressed by this appeal, please sign it and send it in to the address below.

This appeal in PDF format, fits 1 letter-size sheet on both sides

Never since the beginning of human civilization has the danger been as great, that we will cause our own extinction as a species. Since November 21, a coup, long prepared by Western hands, has been activated in Ukraine, culminating on February 22 in an open putsch, forcing the legally elected President Yanukovych from office, and putting Rada (parliament) Chairman “Yats,” the darling of U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, in power as Prime Minister. Throughout the country since then, armed bands of stormtroopers, comprised of right-wing radical, anti-semitic, anti-Russian elements, have been terrorizing elected officials and the population at large.

Photographs and videos are now circulating worldwide, documenting the brutality of these groups, who, with flags, symbols, and martial songs, flaunt their adherence to the Nazi tradition of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera and his Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). And yet, the official line of the United States and the European Union continues to be that these are simply individuals who want to escape from Russian oppression and to join a free and democratic Europe.

Even western think tanks have admitted that without a friendly Ukraine at its doorstep, Russia cannot defend itself. The entire assortment of military doctrines, ranging from the stationing of U.S. missile defense systems in Eastern Europe, to the Prompt Global Strike doctrine, to the AirSea Battle doctrine in the Pacific, are all doctrines that no longer proceed from the old NATO doctrine of MAD—Mutual and Assured Destruction—but rather proceed from the utopia idea that in our nuclear age, a first-strike strategy can succeed in winning wars.

The first phase of such a planned war, is the creation of an enemy image. The intended adversary must first be demonized by means of an orchestrated media campaign—a tactic made famous by Dr. Goebbels and later refined by the British intelligence service. “To out-Goebbels Goebbels” has been the credo, then as now: People must be made to believe that snow is black. Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the policy of “regime change” has been on the agenda for any government that refuses to knuckle under to the imperial order of globalization; and in every case, the Big Lie has been liberally applied.

Remember those Kuwaiti babies, brutally torn from their incubators by Saddam Hussein’s troops? or Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, which in 45 minutes could wipe out any location on Earth? or the great democratic sentiments of the anti-Qaddafi rebels in Libya? or the alleged proofs of Assad’s use of poison gas? And now? Today it’s President Putin who is the man-eating dictator, who throws poor, helpless oligarchs and blaspheming punk rock singers into prison—acts which, of course, completely justify nuclear confrontation. With an unprecedented campaign of lies, individuals and entire peoples are denounced, dissension sown, and the population indoctrinated and made confused with such persistence, that they finally adopt this enemy image as their own, take up the old Cold War rhetoric, and advocate hot war.

And, what then? If it does come to this threatened thermonuclear exchange with Russia and China, the majority of humankind is exterminated within approximately one and a half hours, and the dead will be the fortunate ones in comparison to those who will only perish some days later.

But mankind’s nature is not what we would be led to believe by the morally degenerate attitude of most national governments today, or by the stupefied state of the masses. Humanity is the only species which, by exercising its creative capacities, is capable of repeatedly pressing forward to attain deeper understanding of the laws of the physical universe, and of utilizing that knowledge for the improvement of humanity’s conditions of life. Human beings are also the only living creatures who can have a vision of the future, and who can shape that vision into a material power of ideas which creates that future.

It is precisely because we scientists and artists understand universal principles in science and art, and develop them further—in other words, that we seek the Truth—that in this dark hour of human history, we call upon the world public to fight to preserve peace, and, in this age of thermonuclear weapons, to abolish, once and for all, the very idea of resolving conflicts through warfare, and to drive out of office those politicians who, with their ideology of geopolitical confrontation, are putting the very existence of humanity at risk.

As the discoveries and compositions of Nicholas of Cusa, Leibniz, Einstein, Planck, and Vernadsky, of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, of Dante, Shakespeare, and Schiller, of Brunelleschi and Rembrandt demonstrate, to name only a few, their creations are an expression of the immortality of the human soul, and of the potential immortality of the human species. We, the living, have the awesome duty to make our life’s work contribute to ensuring that the creativity of those great minds of the past, provide a foretaste of the potential for limitless possibilities with which the human species is endowed. The kind of international cooperation for the common aims of mankind which all scientists and artists have experienced at countless conferences, joint research projects, concert tours, and lively cultural exchanges, must provide the inspiration for solving all political, economic, and even military problems. As Nicholas of Cusa already wrote back in the 15th Century, peoples can only arrive at mutual understanding when they all bring forth their own scientists, artists, and philosophers.

For the sake of our love for humanity, as our expression of gratitude to all generations whose accomplishments have contributed to our present level of development, and as our sacred commitment to the immortal identity of the human species, we call upon the world’s people to put an end to the threat of our collective annihilation.

Signed: _____________________________

Please include your affiliation and contact information with your signature, and mail this to the address below.
Schiller Institute
Appeal to Artists and Scientists
PO Box 20244
Washington, DC., 20041-0244

Speech by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

On the Agenda: Common Aims Of Mankind

Helga Zepp-LaRouche gave this speech to a Chinese think-tank on Feb. 19.

EIRNS/Mike Billington Helga Zepp-LaRouche in China, Feb. 23, 2014.

I am very happy to be here in China, because when I was here in ’71, China was quite different then. And then I came back in ’96; there had been gigantic development. And having had the advantage of being here at a time when the Cultural Revolution was still a dominant factor, and then seeing how the development had occurred, I think I can appreciate a bit more than most people, what a gigantic leap China has really made.

And now I’m coming back here in a happy mood, on the one side, because I see that President Xi Jinping has adopted the New Silk Road, which is exactly what we have been proposing since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Now, the not-so-nice aspect of this present trip is, naturally, the fact that we are at a very dangerous moment, and I would like to speak a little bit more about the war danger, at the beginning, and then in the second part of my presentation, to talk about where I see solutions. But I think the recent developments in Ukraine in just the last two days, where the violence has completely exploded, demonstrates that we are potentially in a terrible crisis. Because, contrary to what Western media have been saying about what is going on in Ukraine, reality is quite different.

As you know, the recent escalation started when President Yanukovych did not sign the EU Association Agreement at the last EU summit in November, and then suddenly, these demonstrations erupted, and the Western media portrayed it as if this would be the disappointment of the freedom-loving Ukrainian people, who want to join Europe, and do not want to be under the dictatorship of Putin, and Yanukovych.

The reality is quite different. President Putin said that what had been activated was something which had been prepared for the presidential election of 2015, but has been activated earlier. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov also pointed to the fascist character of these demonstrators, and if you look at the pictures from today and yesterday—people throwing Molotov cocktails against the police, occupying ministries and other buildings—these are not peaceful demonstrators (see this week’s cover story).

We know that what led to the Orange Revolution in 2004 was the result of 2,200 NGOs, which were deployed in Ukraine alone, financed and developed by such organizations as the National Endowment of Democracy, the IRI (International Republican Institute), the National Democratic Institute, which had groomed activists, who were selected on the basis of their anti-Russian profile. And many of these people were not ideologically motivated; they just got money. They were paid to do a job.

Naturally, the situation in Ukraine is complicated by the fact that the Western part of the population is traditionally more Catholic- and European-leaning, and the Eastern part is more Russian- and Orthodox-leaning; but that alone would not account for this present conflict.

What is different between the 2004 Orange Revolution and now, is the fact that we have the emergence of hardcore Nazi networks. The most well-known one is the Svoboda party of Oleh Tyahnybok, but there are also other groups like the Right Sector, who all are referring to the Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, who helped the invasion of Ukraine by the Nazis in the ’40s. These are people who are hardcore Nazis. They have a party logo which is almost identical with the swastika; they’re singing the old Nazi songs. And I think that the only way to characterize this, is that this is a full-fledged Nazi coup, trying to create civil war in the country for a pretext, for later perhaps to intervene.

Now, if you look at the territorial position of Ukraine, it reaches far into the territory of Russia. Kiev at one point was the capital of Russia, and if Ukraine would come under the influence of NATO and the EU, Russia would not be defensible. This has even been the estimate of American think-tanks like Stratfor, because the distance between the Ukrainian border and Moscow is only 480 kilometers, and it is a flat stretch of land, which is very difficult to defend.

So, last week, the Russian Izborsk Club [see EIR, Feb. 21, 2014], which is a group of very influential intellectuals in which such people as Sergei Glazyev are members, and also Gen. Leonid Ivashov—had put out a memorandum appealing to the Russian government, to Western people, but also to the Chinese government, to understand the nature of what is going on. And they say that the aim of this is to drive the Russian population out of the Eastern part of Ukraine into Russia, to create a flood of immigrants; to then forcibly deny the Russian Black Sea Fleet access to the ports of Sevastopol and Odessa, which, strategically, would also cut off Russia from access to the Mediterranean and the Aegean. And then, basically, establish NATO bases in Ukraine, and place Ukraine under the influence of NATO.

Build-Up for Nuclear War

We think that the situation is even worse than that. Because first of all, you cannot see the effort for eastward expansion in respect to Ukraine apart from the eastward expansion of NATO, which has been going on since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the present situation, where you have the U.S. missile defense system set up in Poland and Romania. Just last week, NATO sent an Aegis destroyer to Spain, to the base at Rota. And the Russian government had made very clear, in a conference two years ago, where the Chief of the General Staff Gen. Nikolai Makarov had shown video animations that they naturally see as indicating that the U.S. missile defense system is not directed against Iranian missiles, but that the physical location of the system at the Russian border means it’s directed against Russia. And nobody has any doubt about that.

Now, this U.S. missile defense system is based on a first-strike conception, aimed to take out the second-strike capability of the Russian nuclear forces. And that has been stated by the Russian Chief of the General Staff; that they cannot accept the system to be built at stages 3 and 4, because there comes a point when Russia would become indefensible, and therefore, General Makarov even said, it may force Russia to go for a first strike, and it may come to the exchange of nuclear weapons in Central Europe [see EIR, May 18, 2012].

The additional aspect is the Prompt Global Strike doctrine, which is also a utopian conception which assumes that you can use traditional ICBMs, put non-nuclear warheads on them, conventional weapons, and then take out the weaponry—which again, is a first-strike conception.

Then, if you look at the world situation: the deployment of the Patriot missiles in Turkey, which were supposedly positioned with respect to Syria, but is really part of a forward deployment of NATO. Then you have to see, since the Asia Pivot policy of the U.S. Administration, the Air-Sea Battle doctrine is again a first-strike doctrine, which has even been admitted by American military analysts, with several articles discussing this problem. It is based on the illusion that it can take out the second-strike and other capabilities of any opponent, which in this case would naturally be China. The critics of this doctrine have noted that it is a doctrine which is, by its nature, causing a spiraling danger of a first strike, and a nuclear showdown.

China has also, like Russia, made clear that it will not accept that. In October, there was, on one Monday, simultaneously, the publication of maps in all Chinese media showing that China has 70 strategic submarines which are located in the Pacific, which could launch a second strike, if China were be attacked, at the [U.S.] West Coast, and that the radioactive fallout would go all the way to Chicago. And that you would have a second strike through the North Pole, attacking the East Coast.

This has been stated very clearly, and also the fact that China has these strategic submarines in places which are not necessarily easy to detect. Therefore, the utopian character of all of this is that, if you think about the number of nuclear warheads worldwide, that they’re placed in so many different places—in submarines, in strategic bombers, in hidden places—then the idea that you can win a first strike without the danger of mankind’s extinction, is complete insanity and a criminal kind of thinking.

The Financial Detonator

Now, that this is all related to the collapse of the trans-Atlantic financial system, is really obvious. Some of these things have developed since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, we proposed a Eurasian Land-Bridge, as a peace order for the 21st Century, and if that had been implemented, we would not be at this moment. But unfortunately, at the moment of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the neo-cons in the United States emerged in the old Bush Administration, and they decided that now was the time to go for a world empire. They wrote the New American Century doctrine, and one of the authors was Robert Kagan.

Now it happens to be that Robert Kagan is the husband of Victoria Nuland, who, as was revealed in her discussion with U.S. Ambassador in Kiev Geoffrey Pyatt, was shown to be meddling in the internal affairs of Ukraine. The scandal was not her vulgar language; that’s her problem, how she behaves. The real scandal was that it was a complete admission that the United States government is fine-tuning, step by step, an intervention into who should be the government in Ukraine—which is a complete violation of the UN charter, of international law, of everything. But it is not surprising if you know that she is married to this neo-con, who has promoted this for a long time.

This has been in place for a very long time, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but what is advancing, and triggering, and speeding up this present development, is the condition of the trans-Atlantic financial system, which is about to blow out.

If you take it back to the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, there was a general recognition by many people in the G8 and G20 countries, that the international financial system was disintegrating, and there was a tremendous panic. For a very short period of time, people were willing to consider reforms to rein in the speculation, to re-regulate the banking system, which had been deregulated since the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999, but that shock lasted only a couple of days. And then the Too-Big-To-Fail banks, and the international financial institutions, reasserted their control of the governments, and two months later, at the G20 meeting in Washington, on the 15th of November, basically decided to deal with this problem in a different way—not through any reforms, but by just pumping money, quantitative easing, and using taxpayers’ money to make bailouts of banks.

In the five and a half years since the outbreak of the Lehman Brothers crisis, they have pumped in, in the United States, probably somewhere between—it’s very difficult to say, because there’s not total transparency—$25 and $30 trillion, through a combination of rescue packages and quantitative easing. And this money has accumulated in the system as a gigantic bubble. It exists in the form of derivative contracts, which now have gone up, according to our best estimate, to $1.4 quadrillion. A gigantic bubble.

And naturally, eventually, like in Germany in 1923, when you print too much money, if it be paper money or virtual money in the form of electronic money, eventually this creates hyperinflation. In 1923, in Germany, when the Reichsbank printed money to pay the war debt, and to pay the Versailles Treaty payments to the Allies, you could not see the inflation for four years. But then, when the French troops occupied the Rhineland, production stopped, and in half a year, the hyperinflation exploded, so that people were buying a piece of bread for 1 Reichsmark, then 100, then 100,000, then a million, then a billion, and at the end, they went with wheelbarrows to the baker before 12 o’clock, because at 12 o’clock the price was increased. Then by November, the whole thing ended, because it had become absurd.

This is now not only happening in one country, like it did in Germany, but it’s happening in the entire Eurozone, and in the dollar zone—which is obviously not only the United States.

Therefore, there was a debate for a very long time in the Federal Reserve, that there should be a reduction of the liquidity pumping of $85 billion per month, to $75 billion, to $65 billion; but there was a worry that you cannot really do that, because if you start to “taper,” then the danger is of a reverse leverage of this bubble, and that you could cause a new explosion of the system.

The Bank of International Settlements published, about two weeks ago, a very strong, stern warning, saying that the tapering should not occur, because it could lead to a complete blowout of the system. And that is exactly what is happening now: a collapse on the emerging markets. The currencies of Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, Hungary, and others have taken a downward turn in the last period. And that is just the beginning.

The other problem is naturally that the Eurozone is in a terrible crisis. And I know that people in China have the idea that Europe is doing better, but I can tell you it is not doing better. Officially they are saying there is an improvement, and small growth of 0.5% or some such remarkable magnitude. But the reality is that, if you look at the figures, what is happening in Greece, in Italy, in Spain, in Portugal—the policy of the Troika, which has been the most brutal austerity imaginable—has led to these economies dying, and the population is dying.

The death rate in all of these countries is going up, and the birth rate is going down. Half of the pensioners in Greece are starving. The suicide rate is going up in all of these countries. Millions of people have no health care. The youth unemployment in Greece is 65%. In Spain it’s over 60%, and that, despite the fact that there has been a tremendous brain drain, because the young and educated people have left Greece and Spain, because they have no opportunities anymore. So the policy of the Troika is to destroy these countries, and, in our view, they’re doing it deliberately.

It’s not just incompetence, which is present also, but there is an intention behind it, to turn Europe into a feudal entity.

Now, the fact that this system is about to blow is the reason for the war danger. In a certain sense, it’s very difficult to explain. On the one side, there is an automatism. We are dealing with an empire, a global empire, where all these moves have been installed, and now there is a certain automatism, which is very, very dangerous.

The Obama Issue

This is the reason why my husband has been making the point—and you may think that this sounds very dramatic, but I can only report to you what he is saying—that the only way to stop World War III is the impeachment of Obama.

Many people had illusions about Obama. They thought he was the big Messiah. He promised change, he promised, “Yes, we can.” You remember all these nice slogans from the 2008 campaign. He even got the Nobel Peace Prize before he did anything. But I think many people, both internationally and domestically, have lost their illusions. And he’s committed several impeachable offenses. One of them is that he conducted war against Libya, without the approval of the Congress. He lied. He said this is just a humanitarian intervention, we will not put boots on the ground. But he did put boots to the ground; there were thousands of secret service agents and special forces on the ground, and whether they had boots or not, doesn’t really make a difference.

Then, immediately after the brutal assassination of Qaddafi, Mr. LaRouche said, the only way to explain what is happening is that we are on the course towards a Third World War. The real policy was regime change.

We came very close to that in the case of Syria. Because in Syria, it was not that the Assad government was shooting peaceful demonstrators which caused the escalation: It was part of the regime-change policy from the very beginning. And a lot of the rebels—al-Qaeda, al-Nusra, and other such terrorist groups—were sponsored, on the one side, from the CIA station in Benghazi, Libya, which is now an issue of discussion in the Benghazi hearings in the U.S. Congress; but the main sponsor was Saudi Arabia, in particular the head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Bandar, who has been financing and running these terrorist networks in Syria.

So, at a certain point, the U.S. military attack was about to happen. On the Friday night before the attack was to start, we got information from well-placed contacts in the United States, that the U.S. military attack was supposed to occur in the night between Sunday and Monday. And then on Saturday, about noontime, we got another report saying that Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey had made a last-minute intervention at the White House, telling Obama that he could not start a war where you do not know how to end it. This, and the fact that the American population was against this war, and that Congress was against this war, changed the opinion of Obama, so that he then asked the Congress for a vote on the matter, and it became clear that the votes were not there, and the agreement with the Russians on the chemical weapons gave Obama a way out. This is how, at least for the time being, the military intervention was stopped. Had Congress voted, they would have voted no.

But, as you can see with the developments in Ukraine, this has not changed the general character of the problem.

The impeachment of Obama is now being considered by more and more Congressmen, who have made up a list of the many impeachable crimes. For example, that Obama is disregarding the separation of powers by making recess appointments. In his recent State of the Union Address, he said, I will not go to the Congress if the Congress has a different opinion—I don’t care. That has caused a lot of people to say, this has to be stopped.

Obviously, people are also afraid to take that step, but there is a growing momentum for such an impeachment. In the light of the escalation toward thermonuclear war, it is absolutely essential that the United States return to its character as a constitutional republic. Obviously, this is a matter for the Americans to decide.

Stop Monster Globalization

But I think the other necessary thing to do, is to stop the casino economy. Because what is driving this present crazy development of globalization, is the fact that globalization has become a monster, where people, entire continents, are sacrificed. The rich are becoming richer. Recently there was a study published by Oxfam, which stated that 85 individuals in the world own as much as 3.5 billion people. And that means in practice, that Africa, for example, is a dying continent. This globalization has consequences: It is not just a moral issue; it means people are dying.

For example, you have, right now, every week, thousands of people getting into tiny boats, trying to flee across the Mediterranean from Africa to what they perceive as a safe haven in Europe. Half of them are drowning. And this is well known. But they take the risk nevertheless, because the war, the hunger, the disease in Africa is such that they prefer to take a 50% chance that they will survive rather than stay where they are. I wrote a poem about this problem, about Lampedusa—that’s the island in Italy where people flee to. It is a synonym for a completely morally bankrupt system. If you cannot treat people in such a way that this is eliminated, civilization is lost.

It would be so easy to stop this. We have all the technologies to make Africa a growing continent, to eliminate poverty in half a year! If the whole world would say that we will stop hunger in Africa, we will build ports, railways, agriculture, irrigation, this could be stopped in half a year, maybe even less. And for me, this is a big moral issue: that this world order must not stay the way it is.

This is what we propose for the United States as a recovery program today, which would mean to re-implement Glass-Steagall, and we have organized in the last two to three years about 80 Congressmen, 11 Senators, and legislatures in about 28 states out of the 50, where resolutions for Glass-Steagall have been introduced and/or passed. And I can actually say that there is growing ferment from the lower level of mayors, of city councils, of state legislatures, because they feel the brunt of the collapse, much more even than the Congress.

We have organized in Europe important forces for Glass-Steagall. In Italy, we have several laws before the parliament, and in other countries we have mayors supporting it, and legislation being discussed.

So, if this happens, if Glass-Steagall could be implemented, it will end the investment bubble; because if the investment banks no longer have access to the assets of the commercial banks, and no longer have rescue packages from the taxpayers, they would have to bring their books in order, and declare insolvency.

Then, however, we would need to have a new credit mechanism, which also existed at one time in American history, in the form of the American System of Economy, introduced first by Alexander Hamilton, who was the first Treasury Secretary of the United States, and who created a national bank, and the idea that the only institution which has the power and right to create credit, is the sovereign government, and not the private banks.

This was then repeated by Lincoln, by Franklin D. Roosevelt, and it was done also by Germany after 1945, which created the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau, based on Roosevelt’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation, to give credit lines for well-defined projects.

Now in the case of the reconstruction of Germany after the Second World War, this led to what became famous as the German Economic Miracle, because Germany, which was a complete rubblefield at the end of the Second World War, through that method of state credit financing reconstruction, became, in a few years, the economic miracle which was admired by the whole world.

Programs for Global Development

So, what we propose, therefore, in this crisis which is now upon us, that we overcome it by establishing a Glass-Steagall system, and by the creation of credit by the sovereign governments in each nation. And then we can agree on what we used to call the Eurasian Land-Bridge, and which we proposed, as I said, in the first place, when the Soviet Union disintegrated, in order to combine the industrial and population centers of Europe with those of Asia, through development corridors.

World Land-Bridge View full size

When we made this proposal, we looked at the map and the geographic conditions of the Eurasian continent, and it turned out that the best geographical locations for such corridors, were the Trans-Siberian Railroad; the old Silk Road; and other lines, like from Kazakstan all the way to India, to Indonesia; another line from Iran to Turkey, and from there to Europe. But in the meantime, since we proposed this for the first time really in 1989, and then worked on it in ’91, and in the 23 years since, we have completed this program into something which we now call the World Land-Bridge, which is the idea to have several infrastructure projects which would get the world economy out of this crisis.

For the United States, we have proposed something which is called NAWAPA, the North American Water and Power Alliance, which will be the biggest water-management project that ever existed in history. It’s based on the idea of taking the water which now flows unutilized in Canada and Alaska into the Arctic, to take these waters through a system of canals and river systems, and pumping stations, along the Rocky Mountains, all the way to Mexico. And if you ever have been in the United States, travelling by air from the West Coast to the East Coast, you see that California is green, then comes a strip of desert states, and then you have the Rocky Mountains, passing to the Plains of the Midwest, and further to the green East Coast. And this program would turn these desert states into the most lush agricultural and forested areas, because it’s also an intervention into the biosphere.

Because if you start irrigation in a desert area, you have the possibility to plant vegetation. This vegetation then evaporates water, creating clouds, and the clouds bring rain. Then, you have a cycle of water recycling, and only after three or four such cycles, this water ends back up in the ocean, but you have improved the biosphere through what Vladimir Vernadsky called the noetic capability of man. You create new weather systems, you improve your entire environment.

For Mexico, this is vital, because they have now great starvation. They have deserts with a terrible situation—this would improve it.

Then our idea is, you combine this NAWAPA project, which would immediately create 6 million jobs; it would help to overcome the depression in the United States. You combine that, then, with the building of a tunnel under the Bering Strait, which is this short strip between Alaska and Siberia. This is a project which has been put on the agenda by President Putin, since he became President again, and they have decided to build that, no matter what the intention on the U.S. side may be.

The next connection is to develop the Arctic region of Siberia. The region of Eastern Siberia is the richest area of raw materials. You find there all the raw materials, all the elements, which are in Mendeleyev’s Periodic Table, but naturally, they’re under permafrost conditions, so you cannot just go there and mine them, because if it’s minus 50°C, it’s not so pleasant to work there. So, therefore, you need to develop cosmodromes, new cities which are suitable for human beings to live there; and that, in a certain sense, is also very good, because you need to develop these kinds of technologies as a test for space colonization. If you build such cosmodromes in Siberia, this is exactly what you will need when you colonize the Moon, or later, other planets. So, it’s a step in the next evolution of civilization.

And then, naturally, we want to connect this with the Eurasian Land-Bridge, which we proposed in great detail in many reports, and extend that to Southern Europe, because Southern Europe needs an urgent development plan, to include the Near East and the Middle East/Southwest Asia.

The New Silk Road

Now, this is another problem we have to solve, because right now the region from Afghanistan, Pakistan, all the way to the Caucasus, to the Mediterranean, Syria, to Northern Africa, Central Africa, is a region which is completely destabilized. We have terrorist networks, which have spread, ever since the Trilateral Commission decided to build up the mujahideen in the 1980s in Afghanistan, against the Soviet Union. This terrorist network has grown and spread. In Chechnya, in Dagestan, in Pakistan, in Northern Africa. And it’s a real problem, because it is now being financed by the drug trade from Afghanistan, which has increased 40-fold since NATO moved into Afghanistan 12 years ago.

The good news is, that with the adoption of the New Silk Road policy by President Xi Jinping, this is now on the agenda. This is, in our view, the best development which could have occurred, because you need to put an alternative on the table. The New Silk road which connects China to Central Asia, could potentially be extended into Central Europe and Eastern Europe, as this was presented by Prime Minister Li Keqiang when he visited Romania and met with 15 heads of state. There, he proposed that China build a high-speed-train system in Eastern Europe, and this is what the EU is not doing. They cancelled all transport corridors which had already been agreed upon by the EU Transport Ministers in a meeting in 1994 in Crete, but then, because of the stupid austerity policy, all of these were canceled.

Russian Presidential Press and Information Office Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin, in Moscow, March 22, 2013. Russians are enthusiastic about the prospect of working with China to develop Central Asia.

I know that there was a concern by China as to how Russia would react to China’s developing Central Asia, and also building infrastructure in Central and Eastern Europe. And I’m very happy to tell you that my recent communication from our best contacts in Russia, have indicated that they think that that is the best way for China and Russia to cooperate, on these projects. And they have said that the developments in Ukraine have made very clear, that there needs to be a change in policy. And developments in Sochi had the same effect. What they mean by that is not the Olympic Games, but the fact that the investment in the Sochi region transformed an entire region, through infrastructure and other developments, as a model of what can be done everywhere else.

EIRNS/Bill Jones Zepp-LaRouche at a maglev station in China during her recent visit.

So, therefore, we are optimistic that there are solutions, because we can extend this Eurasian Land-Bridge into Africa, into Latin America, and have a World Land-Bridge, where you can travel in a very short period of time—maybe in 20 years, with a maglev train, like the one you have between Pudong and Shanghai—from Chile, all the way across the Bering Strait, to the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, or through the maritime Silk Road into Indonesia, and that we have a completely different conception of foreign relations, and how people can be together.

An End to War as Policy

Now, we have to do a couple more things. If we want to get out of this crisis, we must consciously take the next step in the evolution of civilization. We need to say good-bye to certain accepted axioms, like the idea of solving conflict through war. Because in the time of thermonuclear weapons, to have the idea that you can solve conflict through war, means you risk the extinction of civilization. If it ever would come to nuclear war, within one and a half hours, all of mankind could be dead, and extinct. And since that is not acceptable, we have to say good-bye to the idea of geopolitical thinking.

We should not think, “this is German interest,” “this is Chinese interest,” “this is American interest,” but we must consciously define the next higher level of reason, where the common aims of mankind are what motivates us all. And the common aims of mankind are many. For example, to make thermonuclear weapons obsolete, which was already the idea in 1983, when President Reagan adopted the Strategic Defense Initiative, which was a proposal by my husband, which he had developed, and about which he had back-channel discussions for one year with the Soviet Union, with their representatives in the United States, which was in agreement with the National Security Council of the United States. And for one year, this was discussed, and at one point, the answer came from Moscow, no, we don’t want that.

Nevertheless, President Reagan in March 1983, made it official policy of the United States, and even offered to the Soviet Union to apply the technologies based on new physical principles, which would result from such a program, in the civilian sector, where Russia had the most bottlenecks.

Now, this was a completely different conception than what is generally thought, and had nothing to do with a “Star Wars” scenario, which the Western media tried to make of the SDI proposal. Rather it was a grand design to get rid of nuclear weapons through technologies based on new physical principles, and then have, out of this increase in productivity in the civilian economy, a gigantic technology transfer to the Third World. The idea was to dissolve the blocs, to dissolve NATO, and to dissolve the Warsaw Pact, and really reorganize world affairs. And we were very close to that.

There was a disruption, because the Soviet government and the Bush faction in the Reagan Administration moved to sabotage it. But getting rid of thermonuclear weapons is an absolute necessity, because they imply the possibility of mankind’s extinction.

There are other problems to solve jointly, like getting a joint fight against terrorism. The fight against drug traffic. Drug traffic is a big problem for Russia. [Russian anti-drug chief] Victor Ivanov has declared the drug traffic to be the national security issue number one, because every year 100,000 people are dying from the drug traffic.

Then there are other problems, like the defense of the planet Earth against asteroids, comets, and meteors. One year ago, in Chelyabinsk, the meteorite, asteroid shower, occurred. This was not on the radar screen of the U.S. NASA, ESA, nor of the Russian government, and it showed how vulnerable our planet is to the impact of such objects, which right now, we have no technological possibility to defend against. We must work together internationally to develop the technology to divert such objects once their orbit shows that they’re heading in the direction of the planet.

We have to improve our prognosis of earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, which after Fukushima, the Russian, Italian, and other scientists have focussed on, and I have heard from our friends in Russia that they are making big progress in their ability to forecast earthquakes and tsunamis.

Space Exploration and the Fusion Economy

There are other things to be accomplished. The other most promising development, apart from the announcement of the New Silk Road, was the Chinese landing on the Moon, where the Jade Rabbit started to operate, with the idea that this would be a step in the direction of mining helium-3 on the Moon, as a fuel for a future fusion economy on Earth.

CNTV China’s Chang’e-3 lander on the Moon, December 2013. The landing is a step in the direction of mining helium-3, as a fuel for a fusion economy on Earth.

EIRNS Zepp-LaRouche talks with Xu Dazhe, the head of the Chinese Space Agency, during a forum in Washington in January 2013.

This is the absolute next step, because in the evolution of mankind, we have to go from lower to higher energy-flux densities. Because, as Mr. LaRouche, who developed the idea of physical economy, has pointed out, as compared to monetarism, the increase of energy-flux density in the production process is the law of the universe. With each energy-flux density level, you have a corresponding relative population density. And therefore, we are strongly opposed to solar and wind energy, which can fill minor functions here and there, but which cannot serve as the basis of an industrial society, because if you would transform the entire energy production to these low-energy-flux-density levels, it would only support a population of 1 billion people. But we have presently already 7 billion. And we urgently need to go to the fourth generation of nuclear fission reactors which are inherently safe, the pebble-bed reactors, high-temperature reactors, and to a nuclear fusion economy, and beyond.

So, therefore, one of the next joint cooperation tasks for civilization must be the joint development of a crash program for fusion power, collaborative space colonization, and in general, to move the identity of mankind to a different level. We are not beasts. Mr. LaRouche has made a very big emphasis on the fact that the human species, unlike all other living species on the planet, is the only species which has creativity, which has cognitive powers, which can, again and again, improve the conditions of life for all citizens, and especially, we can shape the future. We are not victims of simply continuing the past, but we are the only living creatures capable of having a vision of what the future should be, and capable of moving to get the future implemented through our own action.

A Cultural Renaissance

So, therefore, we are emphatic that we must combine economic program with a cultural renaissance; that we cannot stay in popular culture, because with globalization, the culture has become, particularly in Europe and the United States, decadent and degenerate. If you look at the youth culture in Europe and in the United States, I can tell you it is satanic. Many of the pop varieties are openly bestial and satanic. And it has bred a culture of violence, where in the United States now, you have school shootings every second month. You have meaningless murder on the streets, for no good reason, because people are just crazy.

We are approaching a Dark Age, like in the 14th Century, when the Black Death was raging, and people became completely crazy. You had self-flagellants, you had witchhunts, you had a real collapse of civilization. And if you compare what is happening in the culture today in Europe and in the United States, you see we are already in a Dark Age.

How many people in Europe know and love Classical music culture? They are rapidly becoming a minority. And therefore, we need to do the same thing which was done in the transformation from the 14th to the 15th centuries, when the Golden Italian Renaissance was consciously created by a few people, who went back to the great Greek tradition of the Classics, of Plato, of the tragedians, and by reviving Plato and Dante, they created the Golden Renaissance of Italy. And we must do the same thing today.

EIRNS/Bill Jones Helga Zepp-LaRouche in China. She proposed a Dialogue of Cultures, where each country would draw on its best traditions from the past: “We have to build a new Renaissance, and create a civilization on this planet which is really worthy for man to live.”

We have proposed for a long time, a Dialogue of Cultures, where each country would go back to its best tradition, which in the case of Germany, would mean to revive the German Classical culture of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schiller—even Goethe has a little place—and also in science, we have to go back to Nicholas of Cusa, Leibniz, Gauss, Riemann, Einstein, Planck, Vernadsky. In the case of China, you have such a rich culture of 5,000 years. There were many periods which contributed much to world culture, and I think one was really the Song dynasty, where a lot of beautiful things were happening in art and culture.

We have to revive that, and out of this revival, we have to build a new Renaissance, and create a civilization on this planet which is really worthy for man to live.

These are, in short, our ideas, and we are really fighting to implement them; not just to have a nice vision, but to make it happen.