They came from around the world. They came bearing gifts. Not gifts you could touch with your hands. But gifts that touched your soul. Gifts of beautiful music, and beautiful dance.
And the people came to hear them. And they kept coming, and they kept coming till none of the 120 seats were left. And after there was no more room for extra chairs, they stood in the aisles, and they stood in the lobby, and they sat behind the curtains. They were Danes, and they were diplomats, and other people, from many nations, maybe 200 in total.
The dialogue of cultures between the sponsors of the concert, itself, led to the great success — the Schiller Institute, the Russian-Danish Dialogue organization, the Russian House in Copenhagen, and the China Culture Center of the Chinese Embassy (about to open, which also provided intermission food). And the concert was held in the Russian Center for Science and Culture of the Russian Embassy.
Firstly, the people were told by Schiller Institute chairman Tom that we have a unique moment in world history, where the potential is there for the U.S. to join the new paradigm of economic development sweeping the world. Secondly, they were told by the spokeswoman for the Russian-Danish Dialogue, that a dialogue of culture can lead to peace in the world. They were also the interchanging hosts for the evening.
Then the procession of gift-givers began.
From Russia came children playing Russian folk songs on balalaikas, and a baritone who has sung on 200 stages, performed Mozart and Gounod, together with his pianist. From China came a very musical young science student who played many flutes, and sang a Chinese love song, a duet, with Feride. From Indonesia came a traditional dancer, who filled the room with her grace. From Ghana came two young men who sang and played a religious song, and a song about when we work together, we are stronger than when we stand alone.
And from Denmark and Sweden came three outstanding female opera singers, whose tones, and dramatic intensity moved the audience profoundly. Their offerings were songs and arias from Schubert, Verdi, Dvorák and Sibelius. An international bright star of a soprano who recently retired from the Royal Danish Opera; a fantastic mezzosoprano with roots in Hungary and Turkey, who is also a member of the Middle East Peace Orchestra; and a soprano, Leena, we have heard for many years blossoming into a truly magnificent artist. The first two were accompanied by an extremely talented young Danish woman pianist, and the later by our Benjamin.
He, and his mother Anika, poignantly played Beethoven’s Romance for violin and piano, continuing the legacy bequeathed by their ancestor from Hungary.
For the finale, the musicians sang Verdi’s song of freedom, “Va, pensiero,” with the addition of four members of the Schiller Institute’s future chorus. See the program at: www.schillerinstitut.dk/si/?p=17637
And the people were uplifted, with each presentation by itself, and with the succession of one piece of music, or dance, after the other, one country after another, traditional music in dialogue with Classical music, weaving a tapestry of sound, sight and delight.
And the people were asked to be in contact with us, and to consider joining the Schiller Institute’s chorus, some of whom wrote that they would.
A musical testament to the paradox of the unity and diversity mankind, expressed by human creativity, and a powerful statement of the dialogue of cultures was declaimed.
Presented by:
The Schiller Institute in Denmark
Russian-Danish Dialogue
The Russian House
The China Culture Center
Participating artists/Medvirkende:
Anika Telmányi Lylloff, violinist
Benjamin Telmányi Lylloff, pianist, Danmark
Christine Raft, pianist, Danmark (not shown in the video. She accompanied Idil Alpsoy and Gitta-Maria Sjöberg.)
Feride Istogu Gillesberg, sopran, albansk bosat i Danmark
Fred Kwaku, pianist, Ghana
Gitta-Maria Sjöberg, sopran, Sverige/Danmark. Sweden/Denmark (not shown in the video. She sang Rusalka’s Song to the Moon by Dvořák accompanied by Christine Raft )
Idil Alpsoy, sopran, Sverig/Danmark, Sweden, Denmark (not shown in the video. She sang songs from Sibelius’ Op.37 and 88, accompanied by Christine Raft.)
Isaac Kwaku, sanger, Ghana
Kai Gao, sanger, fløjtenist, Kina
Leena Malkki, sopran, Sverige
Sarah Noor Komarudin, danser, Indonesien
Valerij Likhachev, baryton, Rusland
Helga Zepp-LaRouche reiterated her call for an emergency summit between presidents Trump, Putin and Xi to diffuse tensions in the Middle East and create a comprehensive peace plan for the region. While the shock of the U.S. drone strike killing Iranian Gen. Soleimani put the world on the path towards a much greater conflict, it also provided a sobering moment which made unambiguously clear that a comprehensive peace plan must be the priority, and that can only happen with the collaboration between the U.S., Russia, and China.
Helga refers to Patrick Lawrence’s latest article in Consortium News where he calls the drone strike a “palace coup” by members of the State and Defense Departments. Read his full article here.
Moderated by the Schiller Institute’s Dennis Speed, the speakers included Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Bill Binney (former NSA technical director), Kirk Wiebe (former NSA senior intelligence analyst), and Michael Billington (EIR). Held at the Thalia Theater on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the dynamic between the speakers and the capacity audience of about 160, exemplified the historic moment. A typical New York audience, it consisted of Democrats, independents, Republicans, 9/11 truth seekers, Assange WikiLeaks networks, foreign press, etc. A third of the audience had never attended a LaRouche movement event before, and were brought through various networks as well as a week of daily distributions on the Upper West Side.
Transcripts below
Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the founder of the Schiller Institute, delivered the following remarks by pre-recorded audio, to the February 29, 2020 Schiller Institute event, “Rescuing the Republic from the Surveillance State.”
Hello! I’m Helga Zepp-LaRouche, and I’m the founder of the Schiller Institute. I am very happy to speak to you in this extremely important moment of history. The world is heading for what easily could become the worst crisis since the end of World War II. Unless we have a change in direction, there is very clearly the danger that the whole strategic situation could get completely out of control. What makes it so difficult, is that there are many interactive elements to this crisis.
Now, let me start with a very worrisome aspect. Despite the fact that President Trump clearly has the intention to improve relations with Russia and China, there are also very different tones coming out of some other parts of the U.S. administration. Recently, U.S. Secretary of Defense Esper was participating personally in a war game which was based on a scenario of a “limited nuclear war” between the United States and Russia in Europe, which included the use of so-called “low-yield nuclear weapons.”
Now recently the United States did deploy exactly such low-yield warheads on submarine-launched ballistic missiles on the Trident submarines, and that deployment of such “low-yield nuclear weapons” is very dangerously lowering the threshold of nuclear war.
This week there was a hearing in the Senate Armed Services Committee where U.S. Air Force Gen. Tod D. Wolters, who is also the commander of the U.S. European Command and the Supreme Allied Commander Europe — the so-called SACEUR — was asked by Senator Deb Fischer, “What are your views about adopting a so-called ‘no first use’ policy. Do you believe that this would strengthen deterrence?” General Walters said, “Senator, I’m a fan of flexible first-use policy.” Now, this is Dr. Strangelove in the position of the Supreme Commander of the U.S. forces in Europe. And this is occurring as the Defender 2020 NATO military exercise, which is the largest maneuver since the end of the Cold War, is moving tens of thousands of U.S. troops and others — like the Bundeswehr — to the Russian border for several months of maneuvers.
In light of all of this, the spread of the coronavirus, which, according to top health officials, is only a step away from a pandemic, naturally shows that we are on the verge of an uncontrollable situation. In Europe already, most international events and conferences have been cancelled, and the Lombardy region of Italy is now under quarantine; it has been named the Wuhan of Europe. People are being told by the media, by the TV, by the papers, to get food reserves for several weeks. Already now, the spread of the coronavirus has had a significant impact on the real economy.
In China, which has, according to the head of the WHO, set a new standard in the fight against such epidemics, because they put up the defense of life as the first priority and did outstanding measures to contain the spread of the virus. Nevertheless, their GDP in the first quarter will probably go down to 0% as distinct from the expected 6% [growth].
Now, China probably has the best chance to recover, but for the so-called West, it looks much more grim, because the international supply chains have been interrupted, and will be interrupted much more. This is now that the effects of so-called globalization are striking back. Globalization has led to an outsourcing of production into cheap labor markets such as the food production, which is now no longer under the sovereign control of countries, but under the control of international cartels. We no longer have food security in most countries.
The coronavirus, if it becomes a pandemic, or even if it spreads to more countries, is, in all likelihood, becoming the trigger for the financial meltdown. This is not the cause, but the trigger, because this financial system is already at the absolute limit. Since September of last year, the Federal Reserve has been pumping unbelievable amounts of money into the system in the form of the so-called repo loans. The other central banks — the ECB [European Central Bank], the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, and others — have pushed money into the system through quantitative easing, negative interest rates, and this is just absolutely now reaching an end point, an absolute boundary condition.
There is a way out.
On January 3rd, after the assassination of Iranian General Soleimani, and there was for about two days the danger of a very dangerous strategic confrontation, I issued à proposal for an immediate summit between the Presidents of the United States, Russia, and China, to introduce a new level of cooperation to overcome the danger of geopolitical confrontation. Now, in the meantime, President Putin has made a similar proposal that the governments of the five permanent UN Security Council countries should have such a summit. China and France have already accepted. And today, TASS reports, quoting a high-level U.S. official, that the United States would be very interested to have such a meeting on the level of the UN Security Council governments for a new arms control agreement.
Now, I think what we have to do is, we have to push the agenda of such a summit to occur immediately. Because I think any delay, given the dangers of the military situation and the dangers of the pandemic, the dangers of the financial system, any postponement is really not very meaningful. This summit must adopt what Lyndon LaRouche has proposed with his Four Laws: a global Glass-Steagall banking separation; the introduction of a national bank in every country; fixed exchange rates among these different nations, and clearly defined infrastructure and development plans which then can become, as a totality, a New Bretton Woods system; and then have an international crash program for reaching a new level in the productivity of the world economy by focusing on a crash program on fusion power, on optical biophysics and other life sciences, and international space cooperation.
Now, this is a moment of extraordinary danger, and we could lose human civilization. But if enough forces around the world join in our mobilization to bring this New Paradigm about, it could also be the beginning of a completely new epoch. There has been one man who proposed and prognosed all of these developments as early as August 1971. That is my late husband, Lyndon LaRouche, who, when Nixon basically abandoned the fixed exchange rate system, and decoupled the dollar from the gold standard, Lyndon LaRouche said, if this tendency is continued, it will lead either to the danger of a new fascism and depression, or a just, new world economic order will be implemented.
Now, he also worked out the solutions for what can be done, which we have published and will continue to publish much, much more.
Therefore, I think that the exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche, who was innocently put in jail by the same apparatus which was involved in Russiagate and the impeachment effort against President Trump, his exoneration will be key for the implementation of this program I just mentioned. To get mankind out of the present danger and into a new era, I think is absolutely linked to the exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche.
Therefore, I am appealing to all of you to join the fight for the exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche, and the implementation of his ideas. This is the very best thing you can do to secure the future.
DENNIS SPEED: Who is on this stage? And what has happened to the people on this stage? What happened to Lyndon LaRouche? What happened to you?
People like to talk about something they call the “deep state.” We don’t mind that, but we know that it is neither a state, nor is it deep. [laughter] We know, those of us that have been involved, from those early days of the ’70s in some cases, and later in other cases. That you’re talking about an imperial force, and it’s an imperial force that terrifies a lot of people, but it mainly terrifies them, because they refuse to submit themselves to rigorous thought in the service of bold action. That’s all the problem is.
The problem does not involve secret police and funny microchips, and weird drugs, and subliminal messages, and all those other things. It involves the inability to look into oneself, and admit that the actions taken by people like Martin Luther King, or the actions taken by people like Malcolm X, or the actions taken by JFK, are only characteristic of the actions that all of us must take, in the context of what we have been confronted with, ever since the 1960s, particularly coming out of the United States. It doesn’t originate in the United States, but it will only be resolved if people in the United States decide to act.
We’re starting today with someone who’s well known to most, and he and his associate who is with him, Kirk Wiebe, have been fighting for 20 years, to tell a story — they told the story; they told the story 20 years ago — but they’ve been fighting for 20 years to get other people to stand up. It’s important to say that there is a faction of the American military and military intelligence, which is patriotic. It’s a faction that intended to defend the United States, and it’s a faction that also intended to make certain kinds of engineering and technical, and even scientific breakthroughs, on behalf of utilizing technology for positive purposes.
William Binney, a former intelligence official at the National Security Agency for over a 30-year period, attempted to do that, and was prevented at a critical moment, prior to September 11th of 2001, from doing his job. The United States paid for that. And you can’t walk away from that crime.
But talking about that from the standpoint of whether the planes were real, or how the buildings came down, or all these other things, doesn’t cut it. You have to confront something else: You have to confront what’s happening to you, right now, apart from your partisan beliefs, your political affiliations, you have to confront the fact that something is happening to all of us, and it’s your responsibility to listen to the people that can tell you what that is, in such a fashion that you can then take the responsibility that many of us, all, want to take!
Bill has spoken to several audiences, including to one here, three years ago, at Symphony Space, and we’re happy to have him here with us today. So, without further need to say anything, I’d like you to join me in welcoming William Binney, NSA whistleblower. [Applause]
WILLIAM BINNEY: Thank you. As Dennis said, the government we had opted for bulk acquisition for two basic reasons, I think. One was set up by Dick Cheney, and he wanted to know everything about all his potential adversaries, politically or otherwise. So, that meant he had to have information about everybody. So, the bulk acquisition satisfied his need in that respect. But in the other respect, in the bureaucracies of the government, bureaucrats tend to like to get bigger and bigger budgets and bigger and bigger organizations, so that meant more and more money, and more and more influence. In order to do that, if you opt for this bulk acquisition on everybody so that you can satisfy Cheney’s needs, it also requires the Congress to give you much more money so you can build your bureaucracy. And those are, I think, the basic motivations to do this.
But they had known also from the very beginning that there was another solution that would actually do productive things, because when you took the bulk acquisition, that meant you couldn’t see the threats coming; there was just too much data. That’s why they haven’t been able to prevent any of the terrorist attacks that have occurred anywhere in the world. Because everybody has adopted this policy, and they can’t see the threats coming. This is documented internally in NSA records produced by Edward Snowden and also by MI5 and MI6 records, and some in GCHQ. They are saying, their analysts are telling them that there is too much data; you’ve buried us, you’ve overloaded us. We can’t see the threat coming.
Just for that reason alone, they shouldn’t be doing it, but the real point is, the solution existed all along, and we were developing that in the Thin Thread program. That basically had three tenets: one was a deductive approach; one an abductive approach; and one was an inductive approach. For the deductive approach, we simply looked at social organizations that stayed within one degree of the known bad guys, and used that data to pull out information, and only that information, from the data flow that we were looking at. We were looking at a number of terabytes a minute or so at the time, and we wanted to up that to about 20 terabytes a minute. That was our approach. That was the deductive side. So, that was the human behavior property that showed probable cause. If you’re contacting a terrorist, then you need to be looked at; that’s easy to justify in a warrant.
In the inductive approach, we used simply you’re looking at sites that are advocating pedophilia or sites that advocate terrorism or violence against the West, or bomb-making, or things like that. You could try to watch people who visit those sites so you can see their frequency of visit, and say that they are probably getting radicalized, or in the process of radicalization. Or, you have people who have cell phones in the mountains of Afghanistan, or satellite phones in the mountains of Afghanistan, or the jungles of Peru. And you say, they’re dope traffickers, or they’re terror potentials. And you look at those kinds of things. That’s kind of the inductive approach.
So far, those two approaches would have caught every terrorist attack in the world before, during, and after 9/11; every one. But did we do that? No, because that’s a focused, disciplined, professional attack on the data and against bad behavior by people indicating potential threats. The abduct approach is a little bit more abstract; it says you look a geographical distributions. If you have a network at one degree that is distributed in countries that are involved in terrorist advocation or something like that, you need to look at them to see if they’re terrorists or in any way affiliated with a terrorist attack or organization. Once you look at them, if they’re not, then you take them out, and you simply say they’re out. The rest data you simply let go right by.
Now what that does is, it gives everybody in the world privacy. And it respects the Constitutional and privacy rights of everybody in this country and every country in the world. Plus, it creates an extremely rich environment for analysts to succeed at preventing threats and potential adversarial attacks. That’s the whole point of why we did the Thin Thread program to begin with, because even back then our analysts were buried with data.
So the end result today is, we have a situation where — the key point here is NSA databasing of information. Because our country is the only country in the world that afford all the data storage that can store all the information they’re collecting. They’re collecting multiple petabytes a day. My estimate of the Utah storage facility alone was based on Cisco routers being put into it, and what they were estimating was 966 exabytes of data going into that data center a year by 2015. So, I figure they had to have at least five years of storage capacity, which meant five zettabytes, which is much less than a yottabyte, but still, it’s quite a bit. After that, we get a bunch of bytes, and a lot of bytes, and all that kind of stuff. So, it hadn’t been named above a yottabyte.
But the point is, NSA is the key element here, because it’s a storage facility for not just NSA, but all of the agencies of the United States government, all the Five Eyes, and the nine other countries that are participating with them in this worldwide collection of data and bulk acquisition of data on everybody on the planet. And all we would have to do is take our rules — deductive, inductive, and abductive — take those rules and run it and process the entire database that’s stored, and pull out only that which is relevant and purge the rest of it. At that point, there would be no data available for anybody in the US government or the British government or anywhere to use against their people. So it couldn’t be abused. So, that would fix the problem. That would mean that the FBI, the DEA, the DOJ, or anybody in the intelligence community, or in the Five Eyes, or any of the others, could not go into that database and find information on any one citizen, unless that citizen had probable cause, warrant-based evidence that they should be there. That’s the way to fix this whole problem and do it rather quickly. Because once you take that data out, no one has the ability to abuse it.
SPEED: Let me say that we’re going to have an extensive Q&A session, so anybody who has particular questions, you’ll be able to ask those questions. What Bill has just done is provide the solution; and that’s what we asked him to do.
We’re going to next hear from Kirk Wiebe. I don’t think a lot of people know much about Kirk, so I’ll just say the following: He and Bill, and another gentleman by the name of Ed Loomis, developed what is called the Thin Thread system, which was referred to just a minute ago by Bill. I’m going to let Kirk tell you a little bit; he has a very specific view about the relationship between intelligence and the Constitution. Kirk?
KIRK WIEBE: Hello. Thank you, Dennis, and thank you to the LaRouche organization for making this possible, and for inviting us to address these fine people before us.
A lot of people don’t realize it, but the National Security Agency — and I’m going to pick on them, because I worked there for a long time with Bill — has operated unconstitutionally for about 70% of the time it has existed on the planet. What do I mean by that? Well, the people in charge — namely, the Executive, namely the Legislative branches of government — have formed a cabal, a cartel, if you will, that has decided to mass surveil the world, stuff the information in a big database somewhere, and claim that they’re not violating your rights under the Constitution. Because they say, “Yeah, we collected it,” although they won’t overtly admit it, “But we haven’t looked at it. And if we haven’t looked at it, it hasn’t meant anything to an official in the government.”
Now, if we go back to the late 1700s, just before the outbreak of our famous Revolutionary War, King George of England, it’s documented, wanted to put a Redcoat — a British soldier — in the home of every colonial settler in the United States. And why do you think he wanted to do that? You know the answer. He wanted to know what they were thinking and doing. Let me suggest to you that, with all the electronic devices — if I asked any one of you, “How many electronic devices connected to the internet does your family have?” I know it’s more than one; probably four. What do you think, more? I agree. The point is this: Each of those is sources of information about you and those who you love the most. Every detail, every thought that’s communicated via those devices can be collected and put in a database. And when someone decides you’re important for some reason — it could be anything; somebody wants to blackmail you, somebody wants to scam you. The only difference between a good person and a bad person in government is what? What is it? Yeah, really, it’s opportunity. Do you have what we would call moral clarity? But beyond that, do you have a sense of what’s right and wrong in this nation? The founding document of which is the United States Constitution, and do you care?
Well, I would submit to you, we have in the news, events going on — namely, the attack using the weaponized sources of the intelligence community to subvert a duly elected President. If that’s not a warning, what do you think they could do to one of you? Or three of you? Or Bill and me? Or anyone else?
So, the threat is real. It has been abused, and it lies at the feet of people who are greedy for power. It didn’t start out that way; it started out nobly. But now, we’ve reached a point where people have decided they know better, they know best how to manage all of our lives. And it’s not just the NSA anymore. Google knows what you’re doing; Facebook knows what you’re doing; Instagram knows what you’re doing. It’s proliferating everywhere, and now we have the internet of things, where even your refrigerator can talk to the internet. It’s ridiculous; your whole lives are stuck in a database.
The point of it is, Bill has suggested that there’s a way to put the genie back in the box. But it’s going to be you, who makes it happen. Don’t expect some Senator, don’t expect some Congressman to do it. With the exception of CIA chief Pompeo inviting Bill to talk about the DNC data hack, no member of government has ever approached him or me, and said, “Would you come talk to a few Congressmen about what’s happened? Your ideas for fixing it.” No! Why? They like it the way it is. Your data is available to anyone in 16 agencies within the intelligence and law enforcement communities. That’s the threat, and only we can change it. Thank you.
SPEED: Thank you, Kirk. We’re going to hear now from Mike Billington, and Mike is going to tell you a bit about himself. He is, as is listed here in your program, Executive Intelligence Review Asia Editor. He’s author of a book called Reflections of an American Political Prisoner. Mike was offered — I say it and he has to say it — after two trials; one trial for which he served 2-3 years, he was offered a plea bargain, which would have meant that he would have simply time served. No time would have been additional. All he had to do was claim to be guilty of something of which he was not. A lot of his friends would have had a big problem. And Mike decided, “You know what? I don’t think I’m going to do that.” Despite the fact that his own attorney asked to be replaced, despite the fact that Mike said he would replace him, the judge in the case refused to do that; and Mike was given a 77-year sentence. He served eight years of it. Is that the price you have to pay for integrity in this country?
Now if it is, I will submit to all of you, as you listen to him, you think about whether or not that’s the kind of country you want to live in. Mike Billington.
MICHAEL BILLINGTON: Thanks, Dennis. If any of you have a sense that calling for the exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche is a pipe dream, or that Trump would never do this, I want you to put that out of your minds. And I’ll try to prove that.
This is a rare moment in history for many reasons. But one, which I will address, is that this is, in fact, the time that the exoneration of LaRouche is both possible, absolutely necessary, and will transform not just the nation, but the world, forever. And I want to try to convey that in as clear a way as I possibly can. Let’s start by looking at the fact that just last week, Donald Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of 11 people. Some of them were people who, like myself and my co-defendants, were innocent and were illegally and unjustly charged and tried and sent to prison. Others did commit crimes, but they were subjected to outrageous sentences, not just to silence them, but to terrorize other people. The fact that Trump did this, and that he also addressed quite publicly and at some length the issue of Roger Stone, and the fact that, as he said, “He will probably be exonerated one way or another,” means that this very much on Donald Trump’s mind. And I’ll mention that Roger Stone, who is someone who has quite publicly addressed Lyndon LaRouche as one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, has interviewed him, has spoken at our conferences, is very well known to the criminal network in the criminal justice system who have run the entire operation against Trump, against Roger Stone, and others. And I’ll come back to that.
One of the people released by Donald Trump was Rod Blagojevich. [shuffles papers] Somehow, I don’t have what I wanted to read to you. I will convey, in brief, some of what he said the day he came out, where he and his wife and his two daughters met outside the house. He addressed the fact, first of all, that there was no way to thank President Trump for freeing a man from a charge which he had not committed; there was no way to thank him. He said that Trump is a very firm leader, a very tough leader, but also has a huge heart. And that releasing Blagojevich was an act of kindness, which people had to recognize.
He then went on to say, to the people of Illinois who had elected him twice as Governor, he said, “I did not let you down. I would have let you down had I given into this; had I admitted guilt to something I didn’t do. If I had gone along to save myself this 14-year sentence” — of which he served 8 years. He then quoted from a Supreme Court Justice, Justice Breyer, who said that the idea that people in politics and the political world could be charged criminally for what they’re supposed to do as politicians is one of the greatest threats to America today. This is a Supreme Court Justice. And that in particular, he said, “Prosecutors armed with this potential is a grave danger to our system of government.” And Blagojevich said he learned that the hard way, as many of us did.
But I think it’s extremely important that you have people at that level directly addressing the broken criminal justice system that existed, he specifically said, since 1994 when this Crime Act was passed, which was a disaster. He described it as a racist and illegal act.
Lyndon LaRouche, long before that, was convicted and served 5 years of a 15-year sentence, from 1990-1995. He could have been exonerated by President Clinton; Clinton was considering it. Literally tens of thousands of leading citizens of this nation and from around the world wrote to Clinton, calling on him to pardon and exonerate Lyndon LaRouche; but he didn’t. He did make sure that LaRouche was released after the first parole potential, after five years. So, he served 5 years of that 15-year sentence. When he was released, he organized here in Virginia, a forum before a panel of very distinguished jurists and political leaders and others, testimony on the LaRouche case and on other cases of the misuse of the criminal justice system — in particular, the Fruehmenschen case, which was the official FBI doctrine that any black elected official was, by the fact that of being black, more prone to corruption and therefore legitimate to be investigated. In that hearing, I want to read some of what Lyn said himself in that testimony. He said — and this is long before the 1990s and 9/11 — this is back in the 1980s:
“We have, in my view, a system of injustice whose center is within the Department of Justice, especially the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. The problem lies not with one administration or another, though one administration or another may act more positively or more negatively. You have permanent civil service employees … who are coordinators of a nest of institutions in the Criminal Division, which show up repeatedly as leading or key associates of every legal atrocity which I’ve seen.
“In my case, when the time came that somebody wanted me out of the way, they were able to rely upon that permanent injustice in the permanent bureaucracy of government, to do the job. … Always there’s that agency inside the Justice Department, which works for a contract, like a hitman, when somebody with the right credentials and passwords walks in, and says, ‘we want to get this group of people,’ or”we want to get this person.’ And until we remove, from our system of government, the rotten, permanent bureaucracy which acts like contract assassins, using the authority of the justice system to perpetrate assassination, this country is not free, nor anyone in it.” [applause]
Odin Anderson, Lyn’s lawyer, then presented a series of documents which we had obtained through Freedom of Information from the FBI, and I’ll just briefly mention, it included the idea of putting out false leaflets under the LaRouche organization’s name, going back into the 1960s and 1970s. It included Henry Kissinger’s letter to the head of the FBI saying, can’t you get this guy? He’s being very obnoxious. A letter from the Director of the FBI to some of his subordinates, saying let’s investigate him. We don’t know where his money comes from; let’s investigate him as being funded by a foreign hostile force, which then calls into being Executive Order 12333, which basically says somebody financed by a foreign hostile force, you can throw the Constitution out and do whatever you want. And others of this sort. So, this was well documented.
Then, Ramsey Clark spoke. Ramsey Clark, I’m sure most of you know, was the Attorney General of the United States under President Johnson. He became our lawyer for the appeal, when we were first convicted in the Federal case. Here’s what he said, first of all, in a letter that he wrote to Janet Reno, then the Attorney General — the same position he had held. He says:
“This case [the LaRouche case], I believe, involves a broader range of deliberate and systemic misconduct and abuse of power over a longer period of time, in an effort to destroy a political movement and leader, than any other Federal prosecution in my time or to my knowledge. A tragic miscarriage of justice.”
In the testimony of the same hearings that Mr. LaRouche spoke in, he said:
“What was a complex and pervasive utilization of law enforcement, prosecution, media, and non-governmental organizations [NGOs — those ‘no-good organizations’] focussed on destroying an enemy, this case must be number one. The purpose can only be seen as destroying more than a political movement; more than a political figure. It is those too, but it is a fertile engine of ideas and a common purpose of thinking and studying and analyzing to solve problems regardless of the impact on the status quo or on vested interests. It was the deliberate purpose to destroy that at any cost.”
So, this is what the LaRouche case was, and was recognized increasingly by many people. That’s why they had to destroy him and try to poison his name in the media, to prevent these ideas from being placed at the accessibility of the American and world populations.
Clearly, it’s exactly this same network that went after Donald Trump. I don’t think I have to explain that; it’s pretty obvious.
In terms of my own case, I think to get at that, I want to say something else about Roger Stone. You probably all watched the raid; the great raid on Roger Stone’s house. A 66-year-old man with no criminal record, attacked at 5 a.m. or something like that; with, of course, CNN standing out there. Everybody watched this horrible criminal, being put in handcuffs and dragged off.
Well, I’m very familiar with that scene. On October 6, 1986, the day of what we call the Great Panty Raid in Leesburg, armed forces from many different law enforcement agencies raided our offices, surrounded Lyndon LaRouche’s house. And when my wife got up that morning and was taking the garbage down to the end of our lane, she saw a whole slew of armed men in police cars — and CNN — ready to come in; for some reason, not coming in immediately. So, we called our neighbors, John and Renée Sigerson, who happened to live near us at that time, and said, “Why don’t you come over while we wait ’til they come in and arrest me?” So, we were sitting there watching The Marriage of Figaro on a video, when these men finally decided to come running up the road with their guns drawn and surrounded the house. They pulled me out and put me in chains and took me off, and so forth. Why? And CNN. My wife came out and said, “Get the hell off my yard, you have no right to be here.”
This is something that was going on then, and is going on now. In my case, there was something of this deep state — so-called — directly involved. A fellow named Oliver North — some of you probably remember — who was, at that time, running through the Iran-Contra operation, a scam where we were arming terrorists in Nicaragua. And the planes unloading the guns that were being shipped down to them, just as we were shipping weapons to al-Qaeda in Libya and so forth, were coming back loaded up with cocaine. We exposed that; that this was drug-running operation, and that Oliver North — the good friend of Henry Kissinger and others — was running this scam. Then we found out that Ollie North was also running around raising huge amounts of money — stealing really, huge amounts of money from people. Telling them that this was to fight communism; it was to save America, and so forth. When in fact, it was financing arms-running and drug-running. One of the people they scammed was somebody who was a major contributor to us, and with whom I was in regular contact. Oliver North told her that you had bad people, who are trying to undermine your doing good things; therefore, you should let me tap your phone, which was done. They monitored our calls. This was not just to get me, but it was to be fully on top of what exactly we were doing as an organization at that time.
So, I think that’s the reason I was hit particularly hard with the indictments. I was indicted both in the Federal case and in the Virginia state case. The “Railroad” as we called it, went forth; we were all convicted. I won’t go through the ugly details, but it’s worth reading. And I got three years in the Federal case. And then, as Dennis explained, I was told in the state case, where I was charged with crimes that could have been 90 years, that I simply had to lie, and — pffft! — I could go home.
So, that didn’t happen. And as a result, I got a 77-year sentence. Many of the people I met in prison, when I said I had a 77-year sentence, said, “how many bodies do ya got?” [laughter] So, I did not [lie to get out of prison], and I want to read something that Dennis actually read at a previous event and which really struck me, from Martin Luther King. He said, “You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be. And one day some great opportunity stands before you and calls you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid…. You refuse to do it because you want to live longer…. You’re afraid because you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized and will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab you, or shoot at you, or bomb your house, so you refuse to take that stand.
“Well, you may go on and live until you are 90, but you will be just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.”
And I can assure you, that my life is proof of that fact: Because I did have to spend a total of 10 years in prison. But I can honestly say, these were the best years of my life — [applause] my only problem with my fellow inmates was my trying to convince them that this was the only chance they had in life, where they didn’t have to work, they didn’t have to support a family, they should learn, they should read, they should not waste away, feeling sorry for themselves. But I was given, really, the assignment of China — I mean, 77 years, you’ve got a 5,000 years of history to study, you need 77 years to take that on. [laughter]
But it became a real passion. It was something we needed to do. My co-defendant, Will Wertz, was at the time, translating Nicholas of Cusa, who was the relatively unknown great mind of the European Renaissance era; and I was then reading Confucius and Mencius and another relatively unknown but magnificent figure called Zhu Xi during the Song dynasty in the 12th century, and saw the comparison between what I was reading of Cusa, and what I was reading of these Chinese philosophers, and was able to pull together a sense of the way in which the great Christian Renaissance of Europe, and the Confucian Renaissance, where Zhu Xi, like Cusa, was restoring the Platonic tradition and the Confucian tradition which had been lost, over the dark ages in both Europe and China. So this it was a profound chance for me to really make great discoveries, which enriched my life, and through my work, hopefully, enriched the world, and made those who put me in prison very sorry that they’d given me the opportunity, to do that.
And, then, lastly, I’ll say, there was one particularly profound experience: At one point another of my co-defendants, Paul Gallagher and I were in the same prison, and we formed a Classical chorus. So we had a chorus of people — of criminals, some fairly serious criminals, child molesters, murderers — but people who, with one exception had never participated in any kind of Classical music, were totally unfamiliar with Classical music, and had never tried to sing. But we had been trained in some bel canto methods, and we began to train them. We sang Bach, and we sang Schubert, and we sang Negro spirituals. And in particular, we sang Beethoven. Now, this is the Year of Beethoven, our theme is to “Think Like Beethoven.” Many of you may have seen Helga Zepp-LaRouche, two weeks ago, gave a forum here in New York, from Germany, on Fidelio, the great opera by Beethoven: In which the woman, Leonora, dresses as a boy, “Fidelio” to work for the warden of a prison where she believes her husband is being held illegally, and secretly, by a tyrant. And through this story, she eventually frees her husband, and this is a very powerful story, and you can imagine why Helga loves this story, with Lyn having been in prison at this time.
And I had a similar experience: My late wife, at that time, traveled the world meeting with presidents and world courts, and so forth, addressing this injustice to Lyndon LaRouche.
And one scene in this great opera is called the “Prisoners’ Chorus,” where Leonora/Fidelio succeeds in getting the warden to let the prisoners out for just a moment, to get some fresh air. And they come out, and sing this male chorus, called, “O welche Lust,” “Oh, what joy,” to breathe fresh air again. And they think about freedom, freedom, freedom — Freiheit, Freiheit. But then, they remember that they’re being watched, and they sort of skulk back into their cells.
We sang this at the prison, and that, in particular — the whole thing — but that in particular, that Beethoven principle, had a profound effect on everyone of those people. And I’ve told this story before, and I tend to choke up when I say it: But every one of them, at some point afterward, came up to me, to try to express that they had never known of this kind of beauty in the world — and, let alone, that they could participate in the creation of that kind of beauty. So, when Lyndon LaRouche launched the Manhattan Project here in New York, with the intention of creating a vast chorus that would sing both the Classical repertoire and the Negro spirituals, because there were not just popular music, or gospels, these were songs that were about the fight for freedom, and had a Classical nature, in that sense — I understood exactly what he meant: That this was the way in which we can build the necessary movement for a true Renaissance.
So the Schiller Institute’s motto has always been, the Schiller motto, that the path to truth is through beauty. And that this is an example of why building this chorus — there was a Musikabend last night, and I understand that those people who went and participated in the music, who are being recruited to our political ideas, but it’s through participating in this kind of great culture, which we’ve lost, in America, with the ugliness that now passes for “culture,” that this is the way we create the potential to reverse the decay in the collapse of the civilization that we’re living in, and actually creating the New Paradigm that Helga addressed.
So, I think this is why, if we make this possible that LaRouche is exonerated by a President Donald Trump, who wants to achieve what he says, in terms of bringing the world together around these powerful ideas of development, of science, of cooperation, and great culture, that all of these ideas of this brilliant man, these beautiful ideas, will be made available to everyone, which has been denied them for these last 40 or 50 years, which is the great crime of the persecution of Lyndon LaRouche, that these ideas were prevented from being known and uplifting the population.
So this is where we stand, and I think this is why we have this kind of a fight, to expose and destroy, whether you call it deep state or British intelligence, destroy those who have purposely set out to destroy both the culture as well as the economy and the participation of our citizens in this kind of commitment, to what, in fact, can and must be, a New Paradigm. Thank you. [applause]
The recent interactions between Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Donald Trump, particularly their latest phone conversation, are very positive signs of the potential to develop a new type of bilateral relations, a German expert said Friday.
“President Trump’s letter and subsequent phone call with President Xi Jinping are very positive signs that he indeed wants to develop a constructive relationship with China,” Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Germany-based think tank Schiller Institute, said in an exclusive interview with Xinhua.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Founder and Chairwoman of the Schiller Institute (via live video hookup); Dr. Patrick Ho, Chairman, China Energy Fund Committee; Former Secretary for Home Affairs of the Government of Hong Kong
On Wednesday, January 1, 2020, the Virginia Schiller Institute Community Chorus and friends, hosted their largest ever New Year’s Concert featuring timeless choral pieces from Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Verdi, and Dvorak.
Our concerts are becoming a growing institution in the area, not just for audience members, but for local musicians who like performing with us. A talented violinist, who is a regular on the “classical music scene” in DC/Northern Virginia, remarked that he always appreciates the openness of our audiences, seeing “normal” people genuinely appreciating the beauty of the pieces, as opposed to the “professional audiences” he so often performs for, who are more concerned with “being seen” at such events, than letting the music move them.
The audience was full and diverse. Choral directors from churches across the area came to hear the concert, political contacts of the Schiller Institute attended, including an Ambassador and his family from a Southeast Asian country, music students, and others who ventured out to find something different than watch football on New Year’s Day!
The program of the event is below. Audience members were given the text and translations for each of the pieces to follow along.
Beethoven, Die Ehre Gottes aus der Natur Haydn, Die Himmel Erzälen, from The Creation Brahms, Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen, from German Requiem Bach, Quia Respexit, Omnes generationes Handel, Ombra mai fu, tenor, Reginald Bouknight Puccini, Recondita armonia, from Tosca, tenor, Reginald Bouknight Mozart, In uomini, in soldati, from Così fan tutte, mezzo, Pamela Butler Beethoven, Harp String Quartet, op. 74 (1809), I. Poco adagio – Allegro
Intermission
Mendelssohn, Neujarhslied Beethoven, Serenade, op. 25 (1796), VI. Adagio – Allegro vivace e disinvolta Kreisler, Praeludium and Allegro (1905) Mozart, Laudate Pueri, from Solemn Vespers Verdi, Va Pensiero, from Nabucco Dvorak/Fisher, Goin’ Home Hall Johnson, Lord, I Don’t Feel No Ways Tired Handel, Worth is the Lamb, Amen, from The Messiah Joy to the World, Everyone sing!
The fact that these were seemingly “ordinary” people from the community performing these masterful pieces in a local church was not lost on the audience. In fact, it seemed to enrich the event for people, many who then asked themselves, “well, maybe I could sing?”
The other remarkable part of the this and other concerts the Schiller Institute hosts, was articulated best by our director, Mike Billington in remarks he made on a LaRouchePAC Fireside Chat broadcast,
“It was a concert of Beethoven, Brahms, and other great Classical choruses, with some wonderful professionals, who volunteer their time to come and play with us, because they love to work with us because of our commitment to the idea of the aesthetic education of the population. The fact that this many people from all walks of life showed up in Leesburg, Virginia to watch a Schiller Institute Community Chorus concert, I think in itself reflects the transformation that’s taken place in the United States; and the potential of the LaRouche message — the slanders and the attacks that characterized the treatment of LaRouche over these years, including his incarceration, is no longer believed.”
“Sublime” is the only fitting word to describe Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s deep and beautiful presentation and the atmosphere she created in the audience of 60 participants (full room capacity) at the Schiller Institute/EIR seminar held in Stockholm on January 11th, under the title “Donald Trump and the New International Paradigm.” Her speech moved the audience to address the fundamental epistemological, deeper meaning of the New Silk Road, and the meaning of the development of mankind in the universe. This deeper meaning even touched the diplomats present. An ambassador from an important Asian country started to discuss exactly the need to address these broader cultural and human implications, during the question period.
Hussein Askary (EIR)
In all, there were seventeen diplomats present, among them seven ambassadors. Four European countries were represented, nine from Asia, and four from Africa. Among the other participants, there were contacts from different Swedish associations working for friendship with Russia, Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, and the Baltic Sea area, and another group working to leave the EU.
The Chairman of the Schiller Institute in Sweden, Hussein Askary, moderated, and welcomed the participants. Helga Zepp-LaRouche then gave the keynote address, in which she evaluated the ongoing struggle to turn around the election of Donald Trump by the outgoing neoconservatives and mainstream media. She pointed to the broad reaction to the neoliberal-instigated disaster as the real basis for the election of Trump, as well as other such reactions around the world, and said that is the place to look for the reason why Trump was elected, and not any hacking of computers. As the audience members were mainly new people, she presented the history of the Schiller Institute, which is also the history of the New Silk Road policy. She described how the economy evolves from one platform to another, and pointed to the Chinese policy for pushing for the next platform of the economy with Moon-based industrial development, for the further development of mankind as a non-Earth-bound species. The Chinese motivations for their worldwide policy came up in the discussion period, in the context of Africa. Helga then stressed, with her background of long study of China’s history and Confucian thought, that her conclusion is that China is really pursuing a “win-win” policy based on the Confucian notion of pursuit of wisdom and harmony. She stressed the need for a Classical renaissance for the New Paradigm to succeed, and that this is something we cannot leave to Trump.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche: Good day, ladies and gentlemen. We are indeed in very, very fascinating times. And I think there is much reason to be hopeful. I know that for the last sixteen years, most people in the United States and Europe thought there is no great future. But I think that there are accumulations of strategic realignments which have shaped up over the last three years, but especially in the last year, where one can actually see that the potential for a completely new kind of relation among nations is on the horizon, and that we may actually have the chance to bring a peaceful world.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche at the Stockholm event (EIR)
Now, obviously, in the system of globalization as we have known it, especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union, that system is completely unhinged and this is cause for a lot of freaked-out reactions by those people who were the beneficiaries of that system of globalization, but I will hopefully be able to develop that this is a temporary phenomenon, and it will be replaced by some more optimistic developments.
What we see right now is a completely new paradigm emerging, a system which is based on the development of all, a “win-win” potential to cooperate among nations, and obviously the idea for what was the axiomatic basis of the globalization system since 1991 to insist on a unipolar world, is failing, or has failed already. And with that, a system which tried to maintain this unipolar world with the policy of regime change, of color revolution, or humanitarian intervention, or so-called humanitarian intervention to defend democracy and human rights, obviously has led the world to a terrible condition, but this is now coming to an end.
So obviously, the statement by Francis Fukuyama at the end of the Soviet Union that this was the “end of history” and that there would be now only democracy, was really premature; because you have a complete backlash right now, which takes different forms in different in different parts of the world against this system of globalization, and in the Asian countries it takes the form of more and more countries joining with the New Silk Road perspective offered by China, the offer to work together in a “win-win” cooperation with the Belt and Road Initiative which is now already involving more than 100 nations and international organizations; and is already engaged in the largest infrastructure project in the history of mankind.
This new paradigm economic system already involves 4.4 billion people; it is already, in terms of spending, in terms of buying power in today’s dollars, twelve times as big as the Marshall Plan was after the Second World War, and is open for every country to join, including Sweden, including the United States, and including every other country on the planet. And I will talk about that in a little while.
And in the trans-Atlantic sector you have a different kind of anti-globalization revolt, which is still ongoing; it’s not yet settled how this will turn out. It started in a visible form with the vote of the British population in June last year for the Brexit, which was the first real upset; everybody was taken totally unawares, except a few insiders. This anti-globalization revolt was obviously continued with the election of President Donald Trump in the United States; it was continued with the “no” to the Italian referendum organized by Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, to change the Constitution. And what’s common to all of these developments, Brexit, Trump, the “no” to the referendum in Italy, is they are caused by a fundamental feeling of injustice of ever-larger parts of the population which were victims of that system, which increasingly made the rich richer, made more billionaires richer, but destroyed increasingly the middle range of society, and made the poor poorer. It is my deepest conviction that that revolt will continue until the causes of this injustice are removed, and it will continue—it will hold the measuring rod to President Trump, whether he will fulfill his election promises; and if he does not do that, I believe the same people would turn against Trump as they turned against Hillary.
What Is the Future of the Euro?
So that means that the future of the European Union and the euro is very doubtful. We have elections coming this year in France in April. This election, as of now, is completely up in the air. There is no firm prediction possible. You have a very tumultuous situation in Italy, where a coup was just attempted by Beppe Grillo and Verhofstadt in the European Parliament, which failed. They were trying to get the Five Star Party into the liberal group ALDE in the European Parliament, which was rejected by the liberal group, so it failed. Then you will have elections in Holland, and in September in Germany, where the star of Mrs. Merkel is also no longer as shiny as it may have been a while ago.
So we are looking at dramatic changes.
Now, let me start with the Trump election. In my whole political life, which is now becoming quite long, several decades—I have never in my whole political life, seen such hysteria on the side of the neocons, on the side of the mainstream politicians, and on the side of the liberal media, as concerning Trump. Now, admittedly, Trump does not fulfill the behavior code of Baron von Knigge, who was a German in the 18th century who developed the code for good diplomatic behavior. But what caused Trump’s victory, is that he simply promised to end the political paradigm which was the basis of eight years of George W. Bush and eight years of Barack Obama, which was a direct continuation of the Bush-Cheney policy.
Barack Obama and George W. Bush
And it was a good thing, because it was very clear that if Hillary Clinton had won the election in the United States, that all the policies she was pursuing—including a no-fly zone over Syria, and an extremely bellicose policy towards Russia and China—would have meant that we would have been on the direct course to World War III. If you have any doubts about that I’m perfectly happy to answer questions about that, in the question and answer period.
So the fact that Hillary did not win the election was extremely important for the maintenance of world peace. And I think that of all the promises that Trump made so far, the fact that he said that he will normalize the relationship between the United States and Russia, is, in my view the most important step. Because if the relationship between the United States and Russia is decent, and is based on trust and cooperation, I think there is a basis to solve all other problems in the world. And if that relationship were adversarial, world peace would be in extreme danger.
So from my standpoint, there is reason to believe that this will happen. The Russian reaction has been very moderate, but optimistic that this may happen. If you look at the appointments, you have several cabinet members and other people in high posts who are also for improving the relationship with Russia, such as Tillerson who is supposed to become Secretary of State, and General Flynn, who is a conservative military man but also for normalization with Russia, and many others, so I think this is a good sign.
Now, if you look at the reaction of the neocon/neoliberal faction on both sides of the Atlantic to this election of Trump, you can only describe it as completely hysterical. The Washington Post today has an article, “How To Remove Trump from Office,” calling him a liar, just about every derogatory term you can possibly imagine, just on and on: unbelievable! The reaction in Germany was—von der Leyen, the Defense Minister, on the morning after the election said she was “deeply shocked,” this was “terrible,” this was a catastrophe, and it keeps going like that. So they have not recovered.And then naturally, you have the reports by the different U.S. intelligence services, Clapper, Brennan, Comey from the FBI—they all put out the claim that that it was Russian hacking of the emails of the DNC and Podesta which stole the election, because they allegedly shifted the view of the Americans to vote for Trump.
Now, I think this is ridiculous. Not only have many cyber experts, in Europe but also in the United States, already said that all the signs are that it was not a hacking but an insider leak got this information out. This is more and more likely, and there’s absolutely zero proof that it was Russian hacking. Naturally, what is being covered up with this story, is what was the “hacking” about? It was “hacking” of emails that proved that Hillary Clinton manipulated the election against Bernie Sanders! That is not being talked about any more; but I would say, look there, and there are many people who recognize it. For example, a very important French intelligence person, Eric Denécé, who is a top-level think tanker in France, said: Well, it is quite clear why they put out this story, because the neocons had to expect the great cleanup, and many of them would lose their positions, and this is why they all agreed on this story and changed the narrative.
Neoliberal Injustice
The real narrative is that it was the injustice of the neoliberal system of globalization which simply violated the interests of the majority of the people, especially in the “Rust Belt.” Hillary Clinton in the election campaign was so arrogant that she didn’t even go to Ohio or some of the other states which were formerly industrialized, where you have to see that the United States—contrary to what mostly is reported in the Western media in Europe—the United States is in a state of economic collapse. It has for the first time a falling life-expectancy; there is one indicator which shows whether a society is doing well or badly, and that is whether the life-expectancy increases or falls. In the United States it’s falling for the first time for both men and women. In the period of the sixteen years of Bush-Cheney and Obama, which you can take as one package, the suicide rate has quadrupled in all age brackets; the reasons being alcoholism, drug addiction, hopelessness, and depression because of unemployment. There are about 94 million Americans who are of working age who are not even counted in the statistics, because they have given up all hope of ever finding a job again. If you have recently travelled in the United States, the United States is really in a terrible condition; the infrastructure is in a horrible condition, and people are just not happy.
So the vote, therefore, the narrative—that was the reason why Hillary was voted out, because she was perceived as the direct continuation of these sixteen years, and so the attempt to change that narrative by saying it was “Russian hacking” is pretty obvious.
Now, however, we have nine days left, until the new President comes in. And this is not a period of relaxation, because again, in an unprecedented way, the old team of Obama is trying to create conditions for the incoming President Trump to force him to continue on the pathway of Obama. For example, just a couple of days ago, they started a deployment of U.S. and NATO troops to the Russian border in the Baltics, in Poland, and in Romania, through the German city of Bremerhaven, where 6,000 troops landed with heavy military equipment; for example: U.S. Abrams tanks, Paladin artillery, Bradley fighting vehicles, 2,800 pieces of military hardware, 50 Black Hawk helicopters. This involving 1,800 personnel, with 400 troops to be attached to the 24 Apache helicopters.
Now, obviously, the deployment of this is supposed to be a provocation against Russia, and it’s supposed to make it very difficult for Trump to start to improve relations.
A second area where you can see this effort to pin Trump down, is the question of the THAAD missiles in Korea, where now North Korea has claimed to be able to be able to launch their ICBMs anywhere, any time; and according to Chinese experts, the United States is entirely to blame for the fact that North Korea is behaving this way.
In South Korea, outgoing President Park Geun-hye, who may be impeached soon—actually in days or weeks—has agreed to accept a special task force of 1,000-2,000 which is supposed to eliminate the Pyongyang command under conditions of war, including Kim Jong-un; and obviously this is aggravating the situation, because given the history of such things, one is not sure when is the moment for such action.
Thirdly you can see it with the deployment of the U.S. aircraft carrier group USS Carl Vinson to the Western Pacific, in the vicinity of China. This aircraft carrier is of the nuclear-powered Nimitz class, and it will arrive exactly on 20th of January, the day Trump takes office. Global Times, the official Chinese newspaper, said that this deployment is set to disrupt potential talks between China and other countries in the region; naturally, it’s also supposed to put a sour note into U.S.-China relations.
There are other efforts to change and determine the narrative in the post-Obama period. Ash Carter, the U.S. Secretary of Defense, just gave a press conference where he said that it was only the United States which has fought ISIS in Syria. Now, it takes some nerve to say that, because everybody in the whole world knows that without President Putin’s decision to militarily intervene in Syria starting in September 2015, and the tremendous support of the Russian Aerospace Forces for the fighting of the Syrian troops, the present military situation in Syria would have never developed. And it was to the contrary, the very dubious behavior of the United States supporting various kinds of terrorist groups which prolonged this process and slowed it down.
But also in the attempt to pin down the narrative, it was John Kerry who, a week or so ago, gave a speech saying that it was the British Parliament which prevented a U.S. military intervention in Syria. Now—I mean, all of these people must think that the whole world has a very short memory, because I remember very vividly that it was Gen. Michael Flynn, in his capacity as head of the DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency], who had put out a public statement that it was the intention of the Obama administration to build up a caliphate in the region, in order to have regime-change against Assad, and he was then fired by [DNI] Clapper. And it is of a certain irony that, just last Friday, when Trump met with Clapper, Brennan and Comey in Trump Tower, where these three gentlemen wanted to impress Trump with their story about the Russian hacking,—the other person who was with Trump was General Flynn, who is now in the driver’s seat as the incoming National Security Advisor. In any case, you can expect the truth not be suppressed forever. And as a matter of fact, it was in the moment shortly before the U.S. military intervention in 2013, when the U.S. military action was prepared to occur Sunday evening; we had gotten that from well-informed circles in Washington,—and then at the very last minute, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, went to Obama and said: “You should not start a war where you don’t know how it ends. And if you don’t ask the Congress, you will be impeached, or you run the risk of being impeached.” And only because of that, did Obama go to ask the U.S. Congress. The U.S. Congress voted no, and the U.S. military intervention was prevented.
So this was quite different. And you know this attempt to fix the narrative will not be successful.
The Trump Administration
Now, I cannot tell you what this Trump administration is going to be. I think I mentioned the one point I’m pretty confident about: I think we will see probably only by February or even into March who will be actually in his cabinet, who will get approved by the Senate. But there are other interesting elements. For example: Trump had promised in the election campaign to invest $1 trillion into the renewal of the infrastructure in the United States. That is very good, as I said, because the United States urgently needs repair. It will, however, only function if at the same time, another promise by Trump, namely, what he promised in October in North Carolina, that he would implement the 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act, is also carried out, because the trans-Atlantic financial system remains on the verge of bankruptcy. You could have a repetition of the 2008 financial crash at any moment; and only if you have a Glass-Steagall law in the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt—what Roosevelt did in 1933 by separation of the banks, by getting rid of the criminal element of the banking system, and then replacing it by a credit policy in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton—can you remedy this situation. Otherwise, you cannot finance $1 trillion in infrastructure.
But one step in a positive direction is the fact that for example the former deputy foreign minister of China, and chairwoman of the Foreign Affairs committee of the National People’s Congress, Mme. Fu Ying, made a speech in New York, about six weeks ago, where she said that indeed the Trump infrastructure program can be a bridge to the New Silk Road program of China. And that is quite the case: Just yesterday, Trump met with Jack Ma, who is the chief executive of Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce firm, and Jack Ma said that he can help Trump to create a million jobs in the United States by initiating a platform for U.S. small businessmen to sell to Chinese consumers over the next five years, and vice versa, how the Chinese can invest in the United States. Trump afterwards said this was a great meeting, we will do great things together; and Jack Ma said that Trump was a very smart man and they got along very well.
So this is very good, because the Schiller Institute in 2015 published a report calling for the United States to join the New Silk Road, which is a whole approach including how you have to have a fast train system for the United States. As you know, China has built 20,000 km of high-speed train systems. This high-speed network has doubled in only three years, and is expected to nearly double again by 2025, and reach 45,000 km in 2030. And the United States has none.
So the United States urgently needs a fast train system connecting the East Coast, the West Coast and the Midwest. Build some new science cities in the South, and get rid of the drought in the Southwest, California and the other states. So there are many, many things which urgently need to be done.
The Schiller Institute
Okay. Now, let me make a few remarks about the Schiller Institute, given the fact that many of you may not know much about us. And I want to underline the fact that we are not commentators on this whole question, but that we are responsible for many of the ideas which are now coming into effect.
The Schiller Institute was created by me in 1984. At that time we had the intermediate-range missile crisis, which brought the world to the verge of World War III; if you remember, we had the Pershing 2, and the Russians the SS-20, both on permanent alert, where there was a very short warning time, and the relationship between Europe and the United States was really in a terrible condition.
So I created the Schiller Institute with the idea that you needed an institute, a think-tank to put the relations among nations on a completely different basis. One of the most important aspects of the work was to work towards the establishment of a just, new world economic order, in the tradition of the Non-Aligned Movement. And there, my husband, in 1975, had proposed to replace the IMF with an International Development Bank, which would organize large credits for technology transfer from the industrialized countries to the developing sector, to overcome underdevelopment.
That proposal went into the Colombo Resolution of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1976 in Sri Lanka. So we had the idea that that policy had to come back on the agenda, that we had to create economic development in the southern hemisphere, so that every human being on this planet could have dignified potential for their lives, to develop all the potentialities embedded in them.
But from the beginning, we said that such a new world economic order can only function if it’s combined with a Classical Renaissance—that we have to reject the popular culture associated with modern globalization, because it is depraved and degenerate. And that we had to go back to the revival, a Renaissance, of the best traditions of every culture, and have a dialogue among them. For example, in Germany, obviously you would emphasize the German Classical culture of Schiller, Beethoven, and all of Classical music; in China, you would emphasize Confucius; in India you would emphasize the Vedic writings, Tagore, and so forth. So you would go and revive in every country simply what they have contributed to universal history, and make that known.
Now, the present Chinese policy of “win-win cooperation,” is exactly an echo of what we had proposed since 1984, to replace geopolitics with an approach for the common aims of mankind. In 1984, my husband, Mr. LaRouche, also uniquely predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union. He said if the Soviet Union stuck to its then-prevailing policies of the Ogarkov Plan, that it would collapse in five years. Now, there was nobody else who was saying the Soviet Union would collapse; it was completely unthinkable—but we observed the economic problems. And on Oct. 12, 1988, my husband and I held a press conference in Berlin, in the Bristol Kempinski Hotel, where we said that Germany will soon be unified—nobody believed that either at the time—and Germany should adopt the development of Poland as a model for the transformation of the Comecon through high technology.
Now, in 1989 therefore, when the Berlin Wall came down, we were the only ones who were not surprised. As a matter of fact, we immediately published a report, on how a unified Germany should develop Poland, and we called this program, the “Productive Triangle Paris-Berlin-Vienna,” which is an area the size of Japan. It had the highest concentration of industry, and the idea was to build development corridors from that Productive Triangle to Poland, Warsaw, Kiev, and the Balkans, and transform the Comecon that way. It was before the D.D.R. [East Germany] collapsed; and if that had been picked up, maybe the Soviet Union and the Comecon would not have collapsed.
But because you had Bush, Thatcher and Mitterrand, they did not like this at all. So in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, we immediately proposed to expand this program of the Productive Triangle into the Eurasian Land-Bridge: The idea that you would connect the population and industrial centers of Europe with those of Asia, through development corridors. The Iron Curtain was no longer there, so it was the natural thing to have infrastructure corridors to develop the landlocked areas of Eurasia.
Now we proposed this at the time to all the countries of Eurasia, and the only country which responded positively was China. So in 1996, they organized a very big conference in Beijing, called “The Development of the Regions along the Eurasian Land-Bridge,” and I was one of the speakers. And China at that point declared the development of the Eurasian Land-Bridge to be the long-term perspective of China through the year 2010.
As you know, then came the 1997-1998 Asia crisis and the Russian GKO crisis, so this whole development became interrupted. But that did not stop us from holding conferences about this proposal on five continents, in all U.S. cities, all European cities; and even in Latin America, in Sao Paolo and Rio; in New Delhi, and even in some African countries and Australia. We kept organizing for the idea that the natural next phase of the evolution of mankind would be the infrastructure connections of the entire planet.
Obviously, what also happened in 1999 was the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in the United States, which unleashed unregulated speculation, leading to the present bubble.
China Re-Adopts the New Silk Road
Now, in September 2013, when Xi Jinping in Kazakhstan announced the New Silk Road, we simply took all the different studies we had made during those twenty-four years, and published them, and we called it The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge. This is a comprehensive proposal which has the yellow line there in the middle between China and Central Asia; this was the initial One Belt, One Road proposal by China, and we added simply—they also had the Maritime Silk Road—but we had a whole infrastructure program for Africa, for the South of Europe, the Balkans, with many corridors, including a Bering Strait Tunnel connecting the Eurasian infrastructure with the American system, with highways and high-speed trains all the way to Chile and Argentina. And eventually, when all of this is built, you will go by maglev train from the southern tip of South America to the Cape of Good Hope in Africa.
We published this proposal; and the actual book you can find at the book table, including an early report about this, from 1997. The first report we published in German, in 1991. This is not just about connection of infrastructure, but it has all the scientific conceptions of Mr. LaRouche’s notion of physical economy.
Mr. LaRouche is probably the only economist in the West who deserves that name, because all the neo-liberal economists have been so wrong in their predictions that they should probably take another job. Mr. LaRouche has given us his own scientific method, and in this report you will find such extremely important conceptions as the connection between energy-flux density in the production process, with the relative potential population density, which can be maintained with that energy-flux density, and there are other such important conceptions.
So this report was immediately published in China; the Chinese translated it into Chinese. We presented it in China in 2015. It was recommended by all the people who presented it, to all Chinese scholars, as the standard text on the Silk Road; and it has been sent to all major faculties and universities in China.
It was also published in Arabic, as you will hear from Hussein Askary. And it is now coming out shortly in Korean, in German, and we have requests for it to come out in other languages also.
So, while we were publishing these reports, the New Silk Road promoted by China has taken on a breathtaking dynamic. It has a few different names—first they called it “One Belt, One Road”; now they call it the “Belt and Road Initiative”; I always call it the “New Marshall Plan Silk Road,” so that people get an idea.
New Development Corridors Spring Up
In the meantime, many of these proposals are in different phases of realization. There is the Maritime Silk Road, as you see on the maps. And China is building six overland economic corridors—as I said, it involves 70 nations, and over 30 international large organizations, 4.4 billion people, and trillions in investments. And as I said, already now it’s 12 times bigger than the Marshall Plan was.
There is the original One Belt, One Road, connecting China and Central and West Asia through an economic corridor. In June 2015, China and the five Central Asian governments agreed to build that, and additional routes are being planned to go into Afghanistan. One is already going into Iran; when President Xi was in Iran last year, he promised—or they both promised—that they would extend this New Silk Road beyond Iran into Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Turkey.
There is the new Eurasian Land-Bridge which connects China with Western Europe, and it has already shortened the transport time for cargo, to two to three weeks from China, to different cities—from Chengdu, Chongqing, and Yiwu, to Duisburg, Lyon, Rotterdam, and Hamburg, from five weeks via ocean. Already by mid-2016, there were over 2,000 rail shipments from China to Europe, and it is picking up speed. All the cities in Europe that are termini, such as Madrid, Lyon, Duisburg, they’re all happy; they realize that they have tremendous benefits from it.
There is the China-Mongolia-Russia corridor. In June 2016, the three presidents signed a trilateral economic partnership, at the 11th Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting; and this corridor alone involves 32 projects.
There is the China-Pakistan economic corridor, which is creating 700,000 new jobs in Pakistan. It will produce 10,400 MW of power capacity, and the investment of $46 billion by the Chinese in this corridor equals all the foreign investment since 1970 in Pakistan.
There is the China-Myanmar-Bangladesh corridor. This is creating an express highway between India and China for the first time, and it goes through Bangladesh and Myanmar. This corridor will be 1.65 million square kilometers; it will encompass 440 million people.
There is the China-Indochina Peninsula corridor. This will be a highway/rail and high-speed transport system connecting the ten largest cities of the region.
In Africa, we have the Djibouti-Ethiopia route. Because, as we know, Europe has been in large part destabilized by the refugee crisis, and there is a very big incentive, one would think, for Europeans to help develop Africa. But so far it is not coming from Europe, it’s coming from China, India and Japan.
So, the Djibouti-Ethiopia railway just opened yesterday, so this is extremely good news. It opened yesterday, from Djibouti to Addis Ababa, 750 km, and it was built by China; it employed about 20,000 Ethiopians and 5,000 Djiboutians, and it will be connected to the standard gauge railway in Kenya, which again, created 30,000 jobs. And this will obviously, among other things, transform the port of Mombasa, and it will take cargo and passengers to the Ugandan border in one-tenth of the time it takes by road. A professor from the University of Nairobi School of Diplomacy, Prof. Gerishon Ikiara said, and I agree, that this whole program will “radically transform African participation in global trade in the next two decades and will catalyze the industrial transformation of Africa.”
Now, there is another extremely important project, which is the Transaqua project. There is a Memorandum of Understanding between the Lake Chad Basin Commission and the Chinese engineering firm PowerChina. Now PowerChina is the company which built the Three Gorges Dam and several other large projects, so they really know what they’re doing; and they agreed in this contract to do a feasibility study for the Transaqua project.
This is the largest infrastructure project ever entertained in Africa. It was developed in the late 1970s by the Italian firm Bonifica, and there, in particular, by Dr. Marcello Vichi. Mr. LaRouche has promoted this project since he got news of it, because it was a perfect way of solving many problems at the same time. As you know, Lake Chad is shrinking; it is presently only about less than 10% of its original size, and it affects the life of the entire people, 40 million people, in the Chad Basin. And naturally, it is already having drought effects and so forth.
The concept is simply to transfer water from the Congo River, using the unused discharge of the Congo River water going into the ocean. Now, the Congo River is the second largest river in the world, and it discharges 41,000 cubic meters/second into the ocean—unused. And the idea is to take only 3-4% of that water and bring it into Lake Chad. There was a big campaign trying to convince the people in the different states along the Congo River that it’s stealing their water, and so forth, but that was really an effort by the Greenies, and it has no substance to it whatsoever.
First of all, the idea is not to take the water from the Congo River, but from the west bank tributaries at an altitude that allows one to bring water by gravity into the Chad/Central African Republic watershed, which is at an elevation of 500 meters, and then pour it into the Chari River, which is a tributary of Lake Chad. So this way you would create a 2,400 km long waterway which would eventually bring 100 billion cubic meters of water per year into Lake Chad, and also create navigable infrastructure.
Obviously, the Democratic Republic of Congo would be also a big beneficiary, because it would obtain access to a navigable waterway, electricity production, regulation of rivers and so forth.
PowerChina is now financing a feasibility study for a first phase of the project which would involve building a series of dams in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of Congo, and the Central African Republic. It would also potentially generate 15-25 billion kilowatt-hours of hydroelectricity through the mass movement of water by gravity; it would potentially create a series of irrigated areas for crops and livestock, of an area of 50-70,000 sq km in the Sahel zone in Chad, in the northeast of Nigeria, in the north of Cameroon, and in Niger. It would also make possible an expanded economic zone, creating a new economic platform for agriculture, industry, transportation, and electricity for twelve African nations.
So PowerChina has put up $1.8 million for the first phase of the feasibility study, and if the construction starts, this is a big project, so it’s not expected to be finished overnight, but it will take generations: But it will create livelihoods for 40 million people in the basin. And this is just one project, but there are many others. For example, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi is just on a five-nation tour through Africa, and was already in Madagascar and Tanzania, and is going to Zambia, Nigeria, and Republic of Congo, and he’s inviting all African nations to join the Belt and Road Initiative.
We have proposed an expanded program of railways and nuclear power, just transforming the entire African continent.
In Latin America
There are development plans for Latin America, high-speed railway routes in Latin America, which the Schiller Institute has proposed. In 1982, when Mr. LaRouche was working with President Jose Lopez Portillo of Mexico on these projects, he called it “Operation Juarez,” to refer back to the best traditions of Mexican-American cooperation. And these are all projects which are obvious. If you look at a map of Africa or Latin America, you don’t see that kind of infrastructure! If you see some railway, you see it as a small line from a mine to the port to exploit the raw materials, but you don’t have infrastructure. And we had this idea, which Alexander von Humboldt, by the way, proposed in 19th Century, so it’s not that revolutionary; it’s sort of obvious.
EIRNS
The Chinese have made various proposals since the BRICS summit in Brazil in July 2014. There is a northern route of the Brazil-Peru transcontinental rail line. This was already agreed upon between the governments of Brazil and China a year ago; but then they had the coup in Brazil, Dilma Rousseff was impeached, so this came to a halt; also the new government in Peru is very reluctant. But there’s a big movement: I just addressed a conference of economists in the Amazon region two months ago, and there’s a whole movement, also associated with the Fujimori party, who absolutely want to fight for that rail line because it is the step to the future.
There are three additional lines. One line would include Bolivia in this rail line, and there are three additional lines through Argentina and Chile; China also wants to build three tunnels between Chile and Argentina to connect the Pacific and the Atlantic.
This is the Nicaragua Canal, which is in the early stages of completion, also built by China. This will increase the speed of global shipping between Belem and Shanghai, and cut the time of the current route across the Atlantic and around Africa by 10%.
So I can only mention the most important projects. There are many, many others. For example, China and Ecuador are building a science city in Ecuador. President Correa, during the recent state visit of President Xi Jinping, said that the collaboration between Ecuador and China will mean that Ecuador soon will be on the same level as all industrialized countries. They have the idea of overcoming poverty forever. The science city is going to do work in the most advanced fields of science.
Bolivia, which used to be a coca producing country, is now cooperating on space projects with China, with Russia, with India. So there is a completely new mood!
A Completely New Mood
I talked with many Africans—there was a big conference in Hamburg just a couple of months ago, where the Africans said that there is a completely new mood in Africa, there is a new paradigm: China, Japan, India are all investing, and the Europeans, if they don’t shape up, will become marginal and irrelevant. So there is a completely new optimism caused by this dynamic.
Now, just on the diplomatic level, this process of integration is going absolutely rapidly, especially since September of last year, when you had on Sept. 2-3, the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, where the integration of the Eurasian Economic Union and the Belt and Road Initiative was on the table. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe participated in that conference, and Japan is now massively investing in the Far East of Russia, in terms of energy cooperation. Putin was just in Japan, on a state visit; Abe will go on a state visit to Russia this year. They’re talking about settling the conflict concerning the Northern Islands, the Kuril Islands. They’re talking about a peace treaty between Russia and Japan, and obviously there is a complete strategic realignment going on. President Duterte changed the role of the Philippines from being the aircraft carrier for the United States in the South China Sea, to now collaborating with China on economic cooperation, and also with Russia. The same, by the way, goes for Turkey, which is now shifting and working with Russia, Iran and Syria, to bring peace to the region.
So there is a complete strategic realignment going on, and the Western media and Western politicians have just not got it yet. But this is very, very interesting.
So then this momentum continued. From Vladivostok, immediately afterwards, on Sept. 4-5, to the G20 Summit in Hangzhou, where China took real leadership in saying the future recovery of the world economy must be based on innovation and Xi made very clear that this innovation must be shared with the developing countries, so as not to hold up or hinder their development.
So, it’s a completely new paradigm, and I’ll say something about that in a second.
Then you continue to the ASEAN meeting in Laos, the BRICS meeting in Goa, India, in October, the APEC meeting in Lima in November, and it involves all of these organizations and is spreading very fast.
Why doesn’t Europe join this? Look, Europe is in bad shape. The EU is collapsing, the people in Italy by now hate the European Central Bank, they hate Merkel, they hate Schäuble, they hold Merkel responsible for the suffering of the population in Italy, which is now reaching dimensions like Greece; Greece was destroyed—one-third of the Greek economy was destroyed by the austerity policy of the Troika. And you know, there’s nothing left of the idea of unity in Europe. There are borders being built, the Schengen policy is dead; look at the Eastern European countries—the Eastern European and Central European countries are reorienting towards China! The 16+1 are the Central and East European Countries; they have extensive infrastructure cooperation with China. China is building up Piraeus port in Greece; they’re building a fast railway between Budapest and Belgrade, and many other projects.
The Problem in Europe
But the problem with Europe, is that at least the European EU bureaucracy and some governments, like the German government, are are still on the old paradigm, the geopolitical paradigm of globalization, of neoliberal policies, and they don’t understand that by what China has proposed, and what is now the basis of a very close and determined strategic partnership between Russia and China—they have put on the agenda a different model: To overcome geopolitics by a “win-win” strategy. Now, most people, at least in Europe and in the United States, have a very hard time understanding that. They cannot imagine that governments are for the common good, because we have not experienced that for such a long time. The common idea of all the think-tanks, or most think-tanks, is “China must have ulterior motives”; “China is just trying to replace Anglo-American imperialism, with a Chinese imperialism.” But that is not true! I mean, I’m not naive: I have studied this extensively. I was in China for the first time in 1971, in the middle of the Cultural Revolution. I have seen China as it was then, I travelled to Beijing, Tianjin, Qingdao, Shanghai, and to the countryside, and so I know what an enormous transformation China has made in this period.
I went back to China in 1996, after 25 years; already then it was breathtaking. But if you look, the Chinese economic model has raised 700 million people from extreme poverty to a decent living standard; China is now committed to developing the interior region as part of their building of the New Silk Road, to eliminate poverty from China totally by the year 2020—and there are only 4% left in poverty right now.
Now, China is offering their Chinese economic model to all participating countries in this New Silk Road conception, and it is in the interest of Sweden. It would be in the interest of Germany, because Germany is still—despite the Green insanity which has deformed many brains—is still a productive country. The German Mittelstand (small and medium industry) is still producing, I think, the third largest number of patents in the world. It is their natural interest to find cooperation not only in bilateral cooperation, but in investments in third countries. It would be in the best interest of Germany: if Germany is freaked out about the refugees, which really has meant a complete destabilization of the country, then why is Germany not cooperating with Russia, China, India, and Iran, in the reconstruction of the Middle East? Now the Syrian government has started to rebuild Aleppo, at least to rebuild the hospitals and the schools. The Schiller Institute proposed in 2012, a comprehensive proposal for the development of the entire Middle East, from Afghanistan to the Mediterranean, from the Caucasus to the Gulf States, and it would be in the absolute self-interest of Germany because—sure you have to destroy ISIS and the terrorists with military means—but then you have to create conditions where young people in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen, have a reason to become doctors, scientists, and teachers, so that they have a future, in that way you drive out terrorism forever!
And if all the big neighbors would cooperate—Russia, China, India, Iran, Egypt, Turkey, Italy, France, Germany, and Sweden—you could change this region in no time! And you will hear about that soon from Hussein.
The same for Africa. The only minister in Germany who is reasonable is Development Minister Gerd Müller, because he travels all the time to Africa and he says there will be the need for many millions of jobs for the young people of Africa in the next years; if we don’t create these jobs, many, many millions of people will flee from hunger and war and epidemics.
So would it not be in their self-interest that all the European nations join hands with the Chinese Silk Road initiative, and help to reconstruct and build up the economies of Southwest Asia and Africa? I think that that mission would also really help to overcome the disunity of Europe, because you will not solve that problem by looking at your navel; but you will solve that problem by a joint mission for the greater good of mankind.
So, I think that this is all possible. It can happen this year, it can start this year, because China has committed itself to have two big summits this year—one summit will involve all the heads of state of the Belt and Road Initiative, and it can be the year of consolidation of the new paradigm.
Now there are a couple of elements which are also important for this new paradigm, because we are not just talking about infrastructure and overcoming poverty. The next phase of the evolution of man is not just to bring infrastructure to all continents on this planet, but to continue that infrastructure into nearby space around us. This was formulated in this way for the first time by the great German-American space scientist and rocket scientist Krafft Ehricke, who made fundamental contributions to the Apollo project. He had the beautiful vision that if you look at the evolution over a longer period of time, life developed from the oceans with the help of photosynthesis; then you had the development of ever higher species, species with a higher metabolism, higher energy-flux density in their metabolism.
Eventually man arrived. Man first settled at the oceans and the rivers; then with the help of infrastructure, man developed the interior regions of the continents; and we are now with the World Land-Bridge picture—this will be, when it is built, the completion of that phase of the evolution of mankind, by simply bringing infrastructure into all the landlocked areas of the world, and with the help of new methods to create water, with modern technologies, we will create new, fresh water. For example, if you have peaceful nuclear energy, you can desalinate huge amounts of ocean water; through the ionization of moisture in the atmosphere, you can create new water to solve the problem of desertification. Right now all the deserts are growing; with these new technologies you can reverse that, make the deserts green, and just make this planet livable for all human beings!
But this is not the end: Mankind is not an Earth-bound species. Mankind is the only species which is capable of creative discovery, and the collaboration of all nations for space exploration and space research is the next phase of our evolution. Now China has a very ambitious space program. It landed the Yutu rover on the Moon in 2014. Next year it will go to the far side of the Moon, and eventually bring back helium-3 from the far side of the Moon, which will be an important fuel for fusion power economy on Earth. Right now, we are very close to making breakthroughs on fusion power. The Chinese EAST program [Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak] has reached 50 million degrees in plasma for 60 seconds under high confinement. And just a couple of days ago, the plasma configuration in the stellarator in Greifswald, Germany, was proven accurate to one part in 100,000. But it means that in a few years, we can have fusion power! And that will create energy security, raw materials security, on Earth.
The Next Platforms for Civilization
We’re looking at a completely new phase of civilization, and the far side of the Moon is very important because it will not have radio-frequency noise, as you have on the Earth-facing side of the Moon; this far side is shielded from a lot of this radio-frequency noise, so it will be possible to put up much better radio-telescopes, and so you will be able to look into Solar system, into the Galaxy, into other galaxies much, much farther than so far.
I don’t know if any of you have seen the latest pictures from the Hubble telescope: If you have not done that, please, go home and take the time to look at these pictures from the Hubble telescope. I saw them, and I was completely excited, because now we know that there are—at least—two trillion galaxies! Now, I have a good imagination, but I cannot imagine that. It’s just too big. And when you see the pictures which have already been taken, you have galaxies which look like the Milky Way; then you have totally different nebulas; you have all kinds of formations. And not one galaxy is like the other. Just imagine how big the Universe is!
And we know very, very little! But man is the only species which can know! No donkey will ever know about the great galaxies or—no dog will ever be able to breed rabbits to have a better breakfast. They all want a better breakfast, but they don’t know how to do it. Man is capable of overcoming every limitation, and the mind of man is a physical force in the Universe. We’re not outside of the Universe, but what our mind invents or discovers, is part of the Universe. And that is a very exciting thing.
And there is lots to be found out about what is the origin and essence of life. What governs the laws of the Universe? What is the role of the mind in the Universe? I mean, these are all extremely exciting questions, and they all prove that man is not an Earth-bound species. So there is no need to be a Greenie, because we can apply man’s knowledge to expand our role in the Universe. Even the European Space Agency is now talking about a “Village on the Moon.”
Krafft Ehricke had said that building an industrial center on the Moon will be important as a stepping stone for further travel in space. And you now see the shaping up of new economic platforms. Mr. LaRouche has developed this notion of an economic platform to signify a period of economic development which is governed by certain laws, like for example, the development of the steam engine created a new platform; the development of the railway created a new platform; fission is creating a new platform. And the platform is always governed by the most advanced technologies of that time.
You can already see that in the infrastructural development of nearby space, the first platform is simply that man is able to reach Earth orbit! That’s not self-evident. If you had told man in the Middle Ages that you will get on a spaceship and go into orbit, he would have said you’re crazy!
Now we can already see we have manned space travel, and we can now connect to where the Apollo project stopped after the assassination of Kennedy, 40 years ago; but now China, India, Russia, they are all continuing that process. India also has an extremely ambitious space project.
And so, the first economic platform will be simply to leave the planet Earth and to go into orbit; the second economic platform of space research will be to have an industrial base on the Moon, and to eventually start to produce raw materials from space. Because you will, as this continues, not always transport materials from the Earth for your space travel, but once you have fusion as a propulsion fuel where the speed will become much greater, you will be able to take materials from asteroids and from other planets, for your production and your requirements in space. And then longer space travel between planets as the third platform, which is already visible.
This is very exciting, and once you start to think about it, it shows that mankind is really capable of magnificent achievements, and that we should really overcome geopolitics. Geopolitics is like a little, nasty two-year-old boy who is not yet educated, and who knows nothing better than to kick his brother in the knee. That’s about the level of geopolitics.What Xi Jinping always talks about is that we have to form a “community of destiny for the common future of mankind,” and that is exactly what the Schiller Institute set out to do in 1984, when we said we have to fight for the common aims of mankind. And these common aims of mankind must come first, and no nation should be allowed to have a national interest or the interest of a group of nations, if it violates these higher common aims of mankind. And the areas of working together include a crash program for fusion, space cooperation, and breakthroughs in fundamental science.
All of this however must be combined with a Classical Renaissance, a dialogue of cultures on the highest level, and we have already very successfully practiced that at Schiller Institute conferences, where we had European Classical music: Bach, Beethoven, Verdi, Schubert, and Schumann; Chinese Classical music; Indian poetry. We will have this coming Saturday in New York, a beautiful event on dialogue of civilizations, of cultures, where we will have a Chinese professor talking about literati painting. You know, in Chinese painting, you have poetry, calligraphy and painting, in one. And for Westerners, it’s a complete revelation, because this does not exist in European painting. People get completely excited, because they discover that there are beautiful things to discover in other cultures! And once you study and know these other cultures, xenophobia and racism disappear! Because you realize that it’s beautiful that there are many cultures, because there are universal principles to be discovered in music. One musician will immediately understand another musician because it’s a universal language. Scientists speak a universal language; they understand each other.
And so the future of civilization will be a dialogue between Plato, Schiller, Confucius, Tagore, and many other great poets and scientists of the past. So, if you give every child access to these things, which is also in reach, I can see that we will have a new era, a new civilization of mankind. And I would invite all of you to not just look at it, but be part of it.
by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institute
Immediate Emergency Summit Among Presidents of US, Russia and China to Save World Peace and Define Cooperation Among the Countries Who defeated Fascism 75 Years Ago!
With the assassination on Jan. 3 of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, Commander of the Revolutionary Guards Quds Brigade and a national hero in Iran, as well as Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy commander of the Popular Mobilization Forces of Iraq, through a drone attack near the Baghdad International Airport, the world is confronted with the danger of an escalation of retaliations and counter-retaliations, which could not only lead to a war in the entire southwest Asian region, but beyond.
The Pentagon issued a statement, accompanying President Trump’s signing of the attack order, that Soleimani “was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region.” The statement claims that General Soleimani and his Quds Force were responsible for the death of hundreds of Americans and wounding of thousands more, and that the strike was aimed at deterring future Iranian attack plans.
As the spokeswoman of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, pointed out, it was the UN Security Council’s purview to make a legal assessment of attacks on countries’ embassies, and that Washington had not requested an extraordinary UN Security Council meeting on the issue. Obviously the Pentagon did not see a need to do that, since the 2001 AUMF makes it legal for the US military to attack any armed group deemed to be a terrorist threat. The official designation as “terrorist” of the IRGC in April 2019 by the US State Department—a move which was strongly supported by then National Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—made it “legal” for the US Armed Forces to attack individuals associated with the IRGC under any circumstances that may occur. At that point Col. Pat Lang wrote in his blog:
“The neocon nitwits (Pompeo, Bolton, Hannah, etc.) may think that Iran’s reaction to this declaration of war will be submission to their will, but IMO [in my opinion] that is very unlikely. IMO it is more likely that the IRGC will absorb the new reality and will prepare for war with the US.”
Unfortunately, with the assassination of Soleimani, Col. Lang’s warning that the Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) designation could lead to a war with Iran has come closer to coming true. So, while Bolton is out of the administration, his confrontational policies have created a very dangerous heritage—a set up for war—for Trump. And, no surprise, Bolton said in a twitter posting this morning: “Congratulations to all involved in eliminating Qassem Soleimani. Long in the making, this was a decisive blow against Iran’s malign Quds Force activities worldwide. Hope this is the first step to regime change in Tehran.”
As would be expected, Iran’s Supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, promised “harsh revenge,” and large crowds assembled in various Iranian cities screaming death threats to Trump and expressing their hatred for Americans. Whatever the views of other forces in the West and in southwest Asia are of Soleimani, it is a fact that he has probably done more than anyone to contribute to the defeat of ISIS, Daesh, al Nusra, al Qaida etc., and represents a national hero in the eyes of the Iranians. As is also to be expected, various Iranian proxies in the region have immediately promised revenge actions, while the Iraqi Government has announced it will introduce legislation in the Iraqi parliament on Jan. 4 to end the legal basis for the American military presence in Iraq.
Given the extreme complexity of the history of southwest Asia in terms of ethnic and religious strife, the century-old manipulations by (primarily) the British Empire with the Great Game against Russia, and with the entanglement in this region of all the world’s nuclear powers, there is no question but that this present escalation has the potential of getting completely out of control, no matter what the forces involved in the coup against President Trump may think. If there is anything one can learn from military history, it is the recognition that wars almost never go as planned. If people would have known how World War I and II evolved, they would not have started them. Before any further escalation between the US, Iran and their proxies occurs, all peace loving people in the world should support an immediate summit among the Presidents of the US, Russia and China, now, in the spirit of the Meeting at the Elbe.
It is clear, that among the three presidents, President Trump—who promised to end the endless wars and has already taken several steps in that direction—and Presidents Putin and Xi, there is the intention and the capability to outflank the maneuvers of the war-mongers and to establish a higher level of cooperation. That potential is the reason that the coup—Russiagate and now the Impeachment—is being orchestrated against Trump. It is now the time for those three outstanding leaders to fulfill the potential that historical providence has bestowed upon them.
In 1999, Lyndon LaRouche warned in a national television broadcast “Storm Over Asia” that the western-backed jihadist mercenary forces unleashed in the 1970s, were created as part of a global strategy to undermine the major powers of China, India and Russia. These mercenary wars, if not stopped, LaRouche warned, would leave these major powers no other option but to defend themselves against these mercenaries and their sponsors, potentially leading to a World War III scenario.
Over twenty years old, this keystone presentation by Mr. LaRouche is still fundamental for understanding the present geopolitical dynamics shaping the planet today.
Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer. He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector.
Mike Billington is a long-time associate of Mr. LaRouche. This excerpt from a recent discussion provides the history of British sponsorship or terror in Southwest Asia.
Larry C. Johnson is a former analyst at the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
Below is an excerpt from the latest memo from the Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of former military and intelligence officers founded by former CIA analyst Ray McGovern. The letter excerpted below is posted on Consortium News.
VIPS MEMO: Doubling Down Into Yet Another ‘March of Folly,’ This Time on Iran
January 3, 2020
MEMORANDUM FOR: The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
SUBJECT: Doubling Down Into Another “March of Folly”?
“The drone assassination in Iraq of Iranian Quds Force commander General Qassem Soleimani evokes memory of the assassination of Austrian Archduke Ferdinand in June 1914, which led to World War I. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was quick to warn of “severe revenge.” That Iran will retaliate at a time and place of its choosing is a near certainty. And escalation into World War III is no longer just a remote possibility, particularly given the multitude of vulnerable targets offered by our large military footprint in the region and in nearby waters.
“What your advisers may have avoided telling you is that Iran has not been isolated. Quite the contrary. One short week ago, for example, Iran launched its first joint naval exercises with Russia and China in the Gulf of Oman, in an unprecedented challenge to the U.S. in the region.”
It is essential, Helga Zepp LaRouche said today in her Schiller Institute webcast, to address, without panic, the looming danger of a possible pandemic of Corona Virus, coming as we face a potential financial crash and a continuing danger of war. In addressing these dangers, don’t fall for the line that the Corona Virus might cause a financial crash; while it could be a trigger, in reality, the danger of a pandemic outbreak has been made possible by the destructive neo-liberal economic policies which were brought in with the paradigm shift of 1971.
Just as Lyndon LaRouche forecast that shift, and the damages it could inflict on mankind, he consistently presented an alternative. Today, that requires a mobilization to use an emergency summit to introduce a New Bretton Woods, backed by a 4 Power agreement; and his Four Laws, which represent a “precondition” to realize a successful transition to a New Paradigm. In reviewing the challenges ahead, she called on Schiller Institute members and supporters to act to stop the locust swarms in east Africa and southwest Asia, which threaten to produce “food insecurity” for 30 million people—meaning starvation conditions—as this is the test of moral fitness for survival.
This means defeating the racist, colonial mindset which still dominates the West, along with the anti-Russia, anti-China frenzy, pushed by the same networks which are responsible for the “endless wars” that President Trump is working to end.
The name of the German weekly magazine “Der Spiegel” actually means in English, “The Mirror.” And indeed what you see this week on the cover page of the print version of Der Spiegel—a person with a gas mask, goggles, earphones and a hoody—is the mirror image of the ugly face of the racism of its editors. The caption “Corona-virus Made in China” should actually be “The ugly face of the racist monster Spiegel.”
This piece of yellow trash journalism was so bad that the Chinese embassy in Germany issued a formal complaint on their website. The notorious Jylllands-Posten of Denmark had an equally disgusting so-called cartoon putting the corona virus on the Chinese flag. Various American so-called mainstream media use the abominable racist term “The Yellow Peril.” What all of these portrayals demonstrate is the ugly reality of an obviously deep-seated racism under a very thin varnish of “western values.”
The reality of the matter is, that the Director General of the WHO, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus,has praised China repeatedly for the excellent handling of the epidemic, noting that China has set a new standard of dealing with such problems. That the Chinese government had published a full genome-mapping of the new variants within days of the outbreak made it easier for scientists in other countries to start working on possible vaccines, but also that China has made significant breakthroughs in the biological sciences over the past 15-20 years. Other health officials stated that the response of the Wuhan regional government and the dissemination of information was “state of the art“ and that an extremely impressive quantity of new information contained in their daily updates had been published since December 31st/January 1st.
To call any virus a “Chinese” virus is as silly as to say that it is someone’s fault if he catches the flu or gets sick in general. It can happen anywhere in the world and it can happen to every person on the planet. The lesson from this recent case of the reaction to the outbreak of the coronavirus is that it shows who in the international community is capable of responding to dangers that threaten all of humanity, and who is a troglodyte, and who is not.
If Europe and the US want to be credible in talking about “human rights” and “western values” then they should join hands with China and cooperate on the fight to defeat the coronavirus. The coronavirus and the fact that every year 100,000s of people get killed by the influenza shows how urgent it is to make new breakthroughs in the fundamental understanding of living processes to overcome what are today, life threatening diseases. Europe and the US should also cooperate with the most future oriented vision on the international agenda, namely the extension of the BRI into south west Asia and Africa and the international cooperation in the Space Silk Road.
For sure we should reflect on the actuality of the judgment of Gottfried Leibniz who said:
“In any case it seems that the situation of our present conditions in light of the growing moral decadence is such that it almost seems necessary that Chinese missionaries are sent to us, who could teach us the application and practices of natural theology….I therefore believe, that if a wise man would be elected not to judge about the beauty of goddesses, but about the excellence of peoples, he would give the golden apple to the Chinese.”
I think Leibniz was a lot wiser than Der Spiegel, Jyllands-Posten and New York Times.
In the meantime, many of these proposals are in different phases of realization. There is the Maritime Silk Road, as you see on the maps. And China is building six overland economic corridors—as I said, it involves 70 nations, and over 30 international large organizations, 4.4 billion people, and trillions in investments. And as I said, already now it’s 12 times bigger than the Marshall Plan was.
There is the new Eurasian Land-Bridge which connects China with Western Europe, and it has already shortened the transport time for cargo, to two to three weeks from China, to different cities—from Chengdu, Chongqing, and Yiwu, to Duisburg, Lyon, Rotterdam, and Hamburg, from five weeks via ocean. Already by mid-2016, there were over 2,000 rail shipments from China to Europe, and it is picking up speed. All the cities in Europe that are termini, such as Madrid, Lyon, Duisburg, they’re all happy; they realize that they have tremendous benefits from it.
There is the China-Mongolia-Russia corridor. In June 2016, the three presidents signed a trilateral economic partnership, at the 11th Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting; and this corridor alone involves 32 projects.
So, the Djibouti-Ethiopia railway just opened yesterday, so this is extremely good news. It opened yesterday, from Djibouti to Addis Ababa, 750 km, and it was built by China; it employed about 20,000 Ethiopians and 5,000 Djiboutians, and it will be connected to the standard gauge railway in Kenya, which again, created 30,000 jobs. And this will obviously, among other things, transform the port of Mombasa, and it will take cargo and passengers to the Ugandan border in one-tenth of the time it takes by road. A professor from the University of Nairobi School of Diplomacy, Prof. Gerishon Ikiara said, and I agree, that this whole program will “radically transform African participation in global trade in the next two decades and will catalyze the industrial transformation of Africa.”
I don’t know if any of you have seen the latest pictures from the Hubble telescope: If you have not done that, please, go home and take the time to look at these pictures from the Hubble telescope. I saw them, and I was completely excited, because now we know that there are—at least—two trillion galaxies! Now, I have a good imagination, but I cannot imagine that. It’s just too big. And when you see the pictures which have already been taken, you have galaxies which look like the Milky Way; then you have totally different nebulas; you have all kinds of formations. And not one galaxy is like the other. Just imagine how big the Universe is!
