Helga Zepp-LaRouche: Peace without Visions Does Not Work

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: I want to greet all of you Schiller friends, Schiller members, guests of the Schiller Institute. Despite the terrible condition of the world, I feel nevertheless that we with the Schiller Institute have done a decent job. If you look back, what was the aim when we founded the Schiller Institute 41 years ago? We set out two major tasks. One, to create a just new world economic order which would allow for the economic development especially of the developing countries. And second, to create a renaissance of culture by having a dialogue among the most advanced segments of universal culture over the centuries.

If you look back, some people may have thought that was a utopian goal that would never happen; others were more convinced that it was a vision which was a beautiful one which needed to be realized. I must say that if you look at only 41 years of our activities, we have come very close to reaching both goals, at least in large parts of the world.

The new world economic order is taking shape. As a matter of fact, you have today the BRICS+ countries, which is now 22 members and almost 40-50 more countries that have applied for membership in a new system not based on the neoliberal model of economy, but on win-win cooperation promoting the well-being of each other. And with that came the end of an epoch. What I mean by that is that 500 years of colonialism which started in Europe around 1500 definitely is ending. I do not think that this genie can ever be put back into the bottle, because the countries of the Global South are now in a process of realignment. They want to get rid of the chains of the institutions which promoted and continued neo-colonialism even after these countries had already gained independence. The idea is that they no longer want to be raw-materials-producing countries, but they want to develop the value chains in their own countries and reach the status of middle-level income very soon.

It is quite obvious that the reason they are capable of doing that, is because they have the cooperation of China. I will speak to that in a second, but the most immediate trigger of this gigantic tectonic change was a blowback to the attempt to establish a unipolar world. In 1984, the year the Schiller Institute was founded, it was also the year when Lyndon LaRouche, my late husband, made a very visionary prognosis; namely he forecast that if the Soviet Union would stick to the economic policies they had at that time, rejecting his offer of the Strategic Defense Initiative and moving into a completely new paradigm, that they would collapse within five years. As we know, this happened with first the revolutions in Eastern Europe, the peaceful revolution in East Germany, in particular; finally, the Berlin Wall came down. At that time, there was an incredible chance to create a new world economic order. We proposed at that point, first, the Productive Triangle which was the idea to unite the territory between Paris, Berlin, and Vienna, and then we extended later to the Eurasian Land-Bridge. But that beautiful vision was not picked up because of geopolitical aims, despite the fact that this was the chance that we called the stellar hour of mankind: the possibility to create a completely new peace order for the 21st century. Promises were given very clearly to Gorbachev and Shevardnadze not to extend NATO one inch to the East. There are now many archive documents which have been declassified, and everybody can read them and see that there was not one promise by Secretary of State Baker to Gorbachev, but many of them. Genscher, in a famous speech on January 31, 1990 in Tutzing at the Protestant Academy, promised that never would NATO move to the East, that never would NATO troops be on the territory of the former G.D.R. [East Germany]. So, there is no question that there were many—literally dozens and dozens—discussions, where the promise was made not to move NATO one inch to the East.

Despite the fact that these promises were made, you already had the neo-cons in Washington and their collaborators in London plotting to use this to create a unipolar world based on the Anglo-American special relationship. That is treason! And when people nowadays are saying we need NATO in Sweden, NATO in Finland, they say there is an “unprovoked war” by Russia in Ukraine and that is why you have to have all of this NATO expansion, it is not true. We have now the documents which absolutely prove that the Russians were cheated, they were lied to. In good faith, they reacted to these promises by allowing the German unification to take place in a very peaceful way, which is amazing, given the fact that was only 40+ years after the end of the Second World War, and given the part of Germany in causing this war and inflicting incredible suffering on Russia in what they call the Great Patriotic War. In light of all of that, it was extremely generous by, first, the Soviets and then by the Russians, to allow the peaceful unification of Germany. I think it’s important to restate that, because that was the beginning of the present crisis, at least the part we have in Europe.

Obviously, what happened was that the neo-cons immediately proceeded step by step to go for regime change, color revolution, expansion of NATO. In the beginning you could say the East European countries wanted to be part of the West. Even so, that is not exactly what happened, because many of the so-called leaders of these East European countries had before had careers in the United States and in Britain. They were chosen in exile to be the heads of these new governments, but that’s a different story. In any case, in the beginning, the Russians were very patient and allowed the first expansions of NATO—Poland, Czechoslovakia, even Romania, Bulgaria. But naturally when it came to Ukraine, it became like a reverse Cuban Missile Crisis. It already was before that with the installation of defensive missile systems in Poland and Romania, part of the Aegis systems, which the Russians all the time opposed, because they argued that these “defensive” systems could be changed into offensive systems in a few hours. So, they protested this, and said there is a red line they cannot allow to be crossed.

With the Maidan, which was a coup orchestrated by the Anglo-Americans, Victoria Nuland bragging that the State Department spent $5 billion on Ukraine alone; so they played a big role in it. I only want to touch upon it to remind you, because nowadays the Maidan is being characterized as a peaceful expression of the democratic will of the people. But we were so close to the situation that we can testify as eyewitnesses that it was a coup orchestrated by the West. Then in the beginning, the Minsk I and Minsk II accords would have been possible to solve the problem, by giving greater autonomy to the eastern part of Ukraine, by allowing the Russian-speaking people to have autonomous rights while being part of Ukraine. But as we now know, Merkel and Hollande lied: they never had the intention to implement the Minsk agreement. Merkel and Hollande both admitted that this was only done to gain time for the Ukrainian military to be trained to the level of NATO.

Obviously, this was part of the Brzezinski plan, that if you deprive Russia from having spheres of influence over Ukraine, Russia—according to Brzezinski—is no longer a world player, but just a regional power, or a gas station with tanks, which is completely insulting to Russia as well.

In the meantime, the NATO borders were extended more than 1000 km to the East, with the sixth expansion being Sweden and Finland. Naturally, you had the regime of brutal sanctions, I think 12 or 13 times by the EU alone, trying to ruin Russia: That was Baerbock and others’ slogan. The sanctions, including the weaponization of the dollar in stealing $300 billion of assets from Russia, $9 billion from Afghanistan, many other billions from other countries, like Venezuela and others, led to a situation where the developing countries, looking at all of that, realized all of a sudden that what is happening with Russia and Ukraine is very much like what happened with colonialism in respect to themselves. That is why the countries of the Global South never agreed to buy the NATO narrative about the “unprovoked war of aggression.” They always remained neutral, sticking to their position in the tradition of the Non-Aligned Movement. When this all exploded, the blowback was gigantic.

In the meantime, because of the rise of China, which in large part was the shift originated with Deng Xiaoping with the Reform and Opening Up policy, starting already in 1978. China had undertaken the biggest civilizational miracle in the history of mankind ever, because they lifted 850 million people out of poverty, bringing the middle class in China to presently about 400 million people. They even eliminated poverty in the far remote parts of the west of China, and other parts in the interior. Because of that, and because of Xi Jinping’s announcement in September of 2013 of the New Silk Road, which very much resembled what the Schiller Institute had promoted in 1990-91 with the Eurasian Land-Bridge. We had a big input with that, because we had many conferences, many discussions and seminars. In any case, China was the only country which responded to these ideas, and when Xi Jinping initiated the New Silk Road in 2013, that started an incredible transformation. For the first time, the countries of the Global South could ally with China and have their own development projects, many development corridors, industrial parks, development of agriculture. So, basically when the blowback occurred against the unipolar world, or the attempt by the Anglo-Americans to establish a unipolar world, there was already the seed of multipolarity in what became the BRICS+. So now you have a situation where the absolute majority of the world population—about 85%—are absolutely determined to create a new world economic order based on justice, based on the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, based on the United Nations Charter. So that process could be good and just develop, except that the forces of the old system, the neo-liberal system, don’t want this to happen, because they want to keep control over what they think is their rightful position to set the rules, to keep a unipolar world even if that no longer exists.

The next shock came with the election of President Trump in the United States. Because Trump being a victim of the unipolar faction, of the Deep State, in his first administration, completely changed the agenda, upended the table. He set out to normalize relations with Russia. That is not all just for humanitarian motives, as you can see. Trump has a different conception of U.S. strength—Make America Great Again. And that also applies to maybe occupying Greenland, if need be militarily; occupy Panama, if only through BlackRock owning the ports and taking them away from Chinese influence; maybe even attach Canada as the 51st state of the United States. So it’s not all nice, and it may not be what we want. We never said that we think that Trump is anywhere close to what we say, except for certain principles, like normalization with Russia, which we naturally support, because anybody should be happy that the two largest nuclear powers should have a decent relationship with each other.

But naturally, that was regarded as an absolutely mortal threat to the underpinning control of the special relationship between the United States and Great Britain. This special relationship is what carried the attempt to impose a unipolar world system; because this was finally the success of the British Empire, which they had never given up on from the very moment the American War of Independence declared the independence of the American Republic. The War of Independence was the first anti-colonial war in history, ever. This was emphasized by President Suharto and Prime Minister Nehru at the First Bandung Conference. They said, look, America, indeed, conducted the first anti-colonial war, ever. Now, the British for their part had never given up the fact that they lost, in their view, the most important colony: namely the United States. They always tried to reconquer it. First militarily through the War of 1812 and the Civil War, and finally they realized they could not win militarily, so they decided they had to corrupt the American establishment to adopt the model of the British Empire as the basis for the unipolar world, and then run the world together, based on this special relationship between Great Britain and the United States.

When Trump won the election, he knew perfectly well the British role in the sabotage of his first administration with Russiagate. So, he now set out to get back at them and eliminate the Deep State, by essentially appointing a number people like Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, like Kash Patel as head of the FBI, like the new head of the CIA and some others. And releasing the documents of the Kennedy assassination and Russiagate, and all of this is now subject to being investigated, and the culprits are looking potentially at jail sentences. Many of them have had their security clearances lifted already, so there is a state of war inside the U.S. administration.

Now comes along the not-so-nice side of the Trump administration, and that is that they have never broken with the Zionist lobby, with the Christian Zionists in the United States, and because of that, they have never broken with Israel. Israel, as we know, unfortunately, has been committing a war of genocide for over a year and a half against Gaza, and now also increasingly against the West Bank. This puts it at odds with anybody who is upholding the rule of law, if you mean anything by these words.

The British right now have launched a campaign to get the United States, and, naturally, Israel as well—and the British influence in Israel is really big, as was just emphasized by the former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove. They want to get the United States to make war against Iran. This is a very hot situation and very dangerous. If you look at it, the United States is right now gathering about seven B-2 stealth bombers in the Indian Ocean base of Diego Garcia. They are deploying refueling planes there. They are also sending altogether three aircraft carrier groups into the region. There is mounting talk that the United States should wage war against Iran. Some people are even demanding a “decapitating strike” against Iran, with the argument that maybe we don’t need to use nuclear weapons, because nuclear weapons are the only way to eliminate the nuclear facilities in Iran, because they are deep inside the mountains. You cannot even do it with normal bunker-buster bombs, so you need to use nuclear weapons if you really want to destroy these nuclear facilities. But there are some people, now, in Washington and elsewhere who are saying, “We don’t need to nuke Iran, we can decapitate Iran using the same method we used with the IDF against Hezbollah in Lebanon, or how we eliminated the Presidency of Assad in Syria, by just very quickly moving the HTS government in there.” And we can likewise have a decapitating strike against Iran, and then move in a regime which is pro-Israel and pro-U.S.

Unfortunately, it is not totally impossible that Trump may actually do that. But the real aim of it, if the British-Israeli combination succeeds to lure Trump into a war against Iran, is a decapitation strike against Trump, because this would completely ruin the Trump Presidency. It would probably cause the price of oil to go up to $100 or more per barrel, or even double that amount. This could trigger a crash of the financial system which is completely fragile and ready to blow anyhow. So, that is the immediate danger. And naturally the British have probably entrapped the new scandal against Trump. In the first administration it was Russiagate. Now, they have this so-called “Signal-gate” which is the really incompetent use by the entire National Security team of Trump to discuss very concretely the bombing against Yemen over a non-secure channel. How can you imagine that the heads of the FBI, CIA, National Director of Intelligence are so inexperienced of incompetent that they would allow this to happen? To allow a journalist, an editor of The Atlantic magazine, who used to be a prison guard for the IDF in Israel, to participate in these discussions? The minimum you can say is that it shows a severe weakness of this group. But naturally this is now being exploited to the hilt to try to oust exactly these people—Kash Patel, Tulsi Gabbard, and some others. This would blind Trump and do to him in the second administration what they were relatively successful in doing in the first one.

So, this is ongoing. It’s hot, hot, hot. It could come to a war in Iran, which would throw the world into a terrible crisis. We must do everything possible to discourage that.

But that is, unfortunately, not the only problem, because in the meantime, the Europeans—rather than being happy that there is a rapprochement between the United States and Russia, which is still going somewhere and there is still hope that this could succeed. They decided to sabotage it and prolong the war in Ukraine by creating a coalition of the willing and promising to send long-range weapons to Ukraine. This would manipulate Zelenskyy to sabotage the de facto potential of a peace agreement between the United States and Russia. And at the same time, they want to go for an unprecedented militarization of the European Union, of Germany. Ursula von der Leyen is intending to spend €800 billion for rearming Europe. She is really intending to do that. And in Germany, the new government used the trick of using a two-thirds majority of the previous, already-voted-out Parliament to change the Constitution to allow a loosening of the debt brake to create limitless money for the militarization of Germany. This is terrible! And the whole world is shocked that Germany only 80 years after the Second World War would engage again in a militarization and send tanks against the Russians. This is absolutely ruining the reputation of Germany in the whole world, but it is also potentially making Germany the target if it comes to a war involving Russia. In that case, nothing of Germany would be left; nor of any other country which would be part of this.

So, we are in an incredible situation. The mechanisms are known; this is exactly what Hjalmar Schacht did with the war machine of the Nazis. This is money creation outside of the regular budget; in the lead-up to World War II it was called Mefo bills. Now the mechanism is creating extra budgets and basically doing the same thing as was done 80 years ago.

So, if you look at this picture, the question naturally is, where is the way out? We have said from the very beginning—at least when the special military operation started in February 2022 in Ukraine—I immediately said this has now reached a point in world history where you cannot solve problems on a regional or national basis. You have to move the whole world into a completely New Paradigm. And the New Paradigm has to do exactly what the Peace of Westphalia did in 1648, when the war parties realized after 150 years of religious war that a continuation of that war would lead to nobody being left to enjoy the victory because everybody would be dead. Now, in the age of thermonuclear weapons, if any nuclear weapon ever is used, it is the logic of the difference between nuclear war and conventional war that all weapons will be used. And that, in all likelihood, will be the end of civilization, the end of mankind. That is why we absolutely have to appeal to reason and tell people we have to find a New Paradigm like the Peace of Westphalia; based on the interests of all parties. Because if you leave out even one country—let it be Russia, let it be China, North Korea, Iran—it will not work. You have to establish a new security and development architecture which includes the interests of every single country; the security interests, but also the development interests.

This is I wrote the Ten Principles which contain the most important principles for such an architecture, but especially what are the ideas about humanity, and why we can be hopeful that this can be realized. The Tenth Principle discusses the nature of man, and that is the absolute 100% conviction that man is good by nature. The human mind and the human character, the human soul, are infinitely perfectible; there is no limit to the perfection of the human mind and the human character. We can become infinitely good. The fact that there is still evil in the world is just a reflection of a lack of development; and that means you can overcome evil through development. That has to be put on the agenda immediately.

We have to have a conference organized by either the BRICS or by the UN General Assembly or some other body which we can choose, to start to discuss these issues and move the world in this direction. We are not the only ones who are thinking this way. This is why it’s not just a utopian wish. If you look at the policy of Xi Jinping, he has proposed three initiatives: The Global Security Initiative; the Global Development Initiative; and the Global Civilizational Initiative, which pertains to the issue of a dialogue of civilizations—exactly what the Schiller Institute set out to do at its founding. President Putin recently has said that he believes that because of the military victory on the battleground in Ukraine, there is now the chance to create a European and even a global security system. So, at least Russia, China, and many of the BRICS countries are already thinking in the direction of such a new security architecture. That is why I absolutely think we can convince the Europeans to go in this direction; to abandon the ill-conceived, terribly dangerous, and wicked NATO expansion strategy, and replace it with such a new architecture.

That is not visible right now, but it could happen much more quickly than people think, because the present policies of von der Leyen could lead to the splitting of the European Union. There are many European countries that do not want to go along with this, such as Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia, even in Romania and Bulgaria you have very strong tendencies in this direction to work with the BRICS. Georgia, even if it is not part of the EU, and Serbia likewise, but all of these countries want to have cooperation with the BRICS. Even Meloni does not want to be part of the coalition of the willing. So, the coalition of the willing is only France, Great Britain, Germany, Poland, the Baltics, and the Scandinavians. But that is just a tiny part of Europe, and the European Union could indeed split.

That is why I think we should initiate in every country where we are—and you should do likewise in Sweden—a serious debate about such a new security architecture and win people over to the solution that we need a new economic system which allows for the Global South countries to develop. I think that is something where we have a unique voice to bring these solutions also into the peace movement. It’s good that the peace movement is against war, but they are normally not really thinking about the complexity of the picture as I was portraying it. But the Schiller Institute, being in the spirit of Lyndon LaRouche and Schiller, we are absolutely the voice of reason which can bring this about.

That is where we are; so you have a lot to do, and I wish you a lot of success in bringing Sweden back to the camp of humanity and out of NATO.