The LaRouche Organization Webcast with Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Thursday, May 13, 2021

HARLEY SCHLANGER: Hello, I’m Harley Schlanger and welcome to our weekly dialogue with Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the founder and President of the Schiller Institute. The Schiller Institute just had an extraordinary conference last Saturday, May 8, which you can look at by going to the Schiller Institute website. What I find most interesting, Helga, is that virtually every topic, every subject we discussed, every crisis that we talked about has continued to be in the front of the news, the front of the strategic situation. They’re continuing to deepen. And the recognition is growing that a new approach is needed to solve them, which, of course, was the topic of the conference, “The Moral Collapse of the Trans-Atlantic World Cries Out for a New Paradigm.” What’s your sense of the importance of how this conference unfolded and what we were able to accomplish?

HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE: On the strategic level, I think there was a very important useful discussion about the immediacy of the danger of a nuclear war: I mean, a nuclear war can happen either by design, and unfortunately, there were a lot of strategic studies and proposals by different think tanks, discussion in the Atlantic Council, the RAND Corp., various other such places, but it can also occur because the overall level of tension between the United States, the British, the EU, and Russia and China on the other side is becoming so high, that any one of many hotspots could, by accident or some temper by some subordinate person, get out of control and lead to a whole chain of escalation. And we should not forget that we have right now the largest maneuver going on since the end of the Cold War, along the whole border of Russia, involving many countries in Eastern Europe, and this is very dangerous. Because if you look at the scenarios which are exercised in these maneuvers, it’s the movement of a large amount of troops to the Russian border; it has a submaneuver, denying Russia access to the sea through the Black Sea or the Baltic Sea. All of these maneuvers assume that Russia is the enemy, that we are rehearsing World War III. And if you put yourselves in the shoes of Russia, it really looks as if these people are determined to continue the color revolution. The situation around Ukraine is extremely dangerous. The demand of Ukraine to join NATO which is one of the red lines Putin has been talking about in his recent speech.

So I think the overall situation is so explosive that I think if people don’t change course, you know, people were talking about “sleepwalking into World War I,” but this time it involves nuclear weapons, and there are some crazy people, including in some of these think tanks who say, “we have to prepare for a possible nuclear war,” for example, I think the RAND Corp. had a study, “War with China: Thinking the Unthinkable”, in 2016, and we talked already about it, but I think it needs to be emphasized, again.

The head of the U.S. Strategic Command, Adm. Charles Richard, who keeps briefing the Congress and Senate about these matters, also said that he instructed the Pentagon to change the category of likelihood of nuclear war, from not likely to very likely.

This was all discussed at the conference, and that is why, because we also have a pandemic out of control, a financial crash looming, a world hunger, that we reiterated our demand in supporting Putin in his call to conduct an urgent summit of the P-5 permanent members of the UN Security Council, because you have a platform where the most important countries talk to each other and find out solutions based on cooperation and not some confrontation. So there are little hopeful signs. There was a discussion between Lavrov and Blinken—they will meet at the end of the month on May 20 around an Arctic Summit in Iceland, and hopefully they will prepare a summit between Biden and Putin. But I think this P-5 formula is very important, because it should involve China, Russia and the United States, at a minimum; and if one could win India in some other constellation, it would also be good.

So I think that summit is on agenda. And naturally, the other thing we also discussed also remains: that unilateral sanctions, which are illegal from the standpoint of international law in any case, only those sanctions which are agreed upon by the UN Security Council are legitimate, and there are presently sanctions against about 30 countries, including Syria, Yemen, Iran, Venezuela; some of these countries are suffering death as a result of many people, like in the case of Syria, where according to Cardinal Zenari, 90% and more of the Syrian population are below the extreme poverty line. And therefore, the continuation of the sanctions for sure will cause death, and therefore we call on all people who watch this program that you should help our campaign to raise the public consciousness that these sanctions should be stopped. The U.S. Congress must reverse Caesar sanctions, and we have to have a completely different approach to the situation.

SCHLANGER: And Helga, is it your assessment that the use of sanctions is essentially regime change by another name? That is, the argument that sanctions are necessary because countries are not coinciding with the so-called “rules-based order,” but how can they argue that these sanctions are not as deadly, in some cases more deadly, than war?

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Well, they’re more deadly because there are no rules in it. If People are being denied medicine and food and other important necessities—it hits the poorest part of the population, the old people, the children, the sick, and the idea behind it, is that eventually the pressure will become so great that people will rise up and get rid of the regime. But, really, it is a form of brutal war, and it should be outlawed. I think people have to get a real sense of outrage, that these things should not be—I mean, the idea that it’s better than to have a military intervention—what an argument is that? I mean, you’re targetting the weak, the children, the elderly! I think it should really stop.

SCHLANGER: Then there was the G7 Foreign Ministers meeting which discussed the question of Russia and China, that these were the longest sessions. And there’s war talk going on around China at the United Nations Security Council: Where is this heading?

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: This is also, you have right now an absolute low of relations between the EU and China, the U.S. and China, the U.S. and Russia, also the EU and Russia. This is terrible. So as a result of a complete campaign of lies about what is happening in Xinjiang—we had discussed this many times, but let me just briefly repeat it: The problem with Xinjiang was, starting with Brzezinski in 1975, when he developed the idea of using the “Islamic card” against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, so Western intelligence organizations trained the mujahideen in a radical form of Islam for the fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. When the Soviet Union was basically defeated, and eventually the defeat in Afghanistan was a contributing factor for the dissolution of the Soviet Union, these mujahideen did not stay in Afghanistan, but they spread all over the region: To Chechnya, to Pakistan, to Xinjiang, to the whole region. And they were, indeed, terrorists, and we know, subsequently, that many times it was revealed that the United States continued to work with al Qaeda, with ISIS; this is what General Flynn had made a point about, and it was revealed many times.

The idea was basically to keep a destabilizing aspect on Xinjiang for China. So, China, after a series of terrorist activities more than 10 years ago, did the only reasonable thing, to defeat terrorism: They started to educate the people by giving them training possibilities, they brought in infrastructure and industrial development in one of the previously poorest areas of China, and they started to integrate people! There is no truth to the fact that they tried to reduce the population of Uighurs, because the Uighurs had much larger and higher birth rates than the Han Chinese who were also living in Xinjiang.

There was an effort to blame China—I mean, is it better to bomb the terrorists as the Western countries have done many times? In any case, this story was fabricated, and no matter how many diplomats from other countries would go there, including two members of Schiller Institute, who travelled to Xinjiang on different occasions, all come back and report that this is absolutely a lie; nevertheless, just in order to keep the Cold War against China going, there was a UN Security Council meeting called for by the U.S., Britain, and I think Germany, and it has no effect other than completely ruining the relations between those countries and China. And it’s a complete outrage! The use of lies has become, unfortunately, such a normal thing in international politics today that it’s extremely worrisome.

SCHLANGER: On the question of Xinjiang in China, it’s clear that the Chinese are responding diplomatically, and becoming a little more aggressive in their response. But how do you get this message across that this represents a lie? I mean, people have to understand that they’re being lied to, to prepare them for war.

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: I think there are a lot of documentaries being prepared by quite different people, and I think that people, rather than repeat something which clearly is a prejudice, they should study the history of the region, and also look at the result. And then, also, you can always go to Xinjiang, travel there: There has been an open invitation by China for foreigners to come and see. So I have told people, especially Americans: Already more than 12 years ago, I made a presentation, in which I said, why Americans should go there, and I made a presentation about the countries on the old Silk Road, and Xinjiang is obviously one part. So plan your next vacation to go to Xinjiang.

SCHLANGER: And if you can’t afford to go to Xinjiang, watch Lyndon LaRouche’s documentary “Storm over Asia,” where it exposes exactly what you are talking about with Brzezinski and the British geopolitical plan.

Now, the second panel of the conference, I want to come back to that, was on the coincidence of opposites and how to address the global crises, the COVID pandemic, the growing food shortages; and we see, of course, in India, a desperate situation. Shouldn’t this make clear to people why we need a modern world health system in every nation?

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: What we discussed in the second panel, and I’m happy to report that the Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites, which is a long name, but it’s also a complicated process which we have to bring into unity: This is a notion coming from Nicholas of Cusa from 15th century. I’m very happy to report that we have made big progress, we have now concrete pilot projects under way: Medical and food supply, small but as a symbolic nature—more than a symbolic nature—but we want to send to Mozambique, this will be a shipment and we will try to expand it; also hopefully in the future to other countries. But it’s clear this is a private effort and cannot replace the action of governments. But we want to demonstrate through such a concrete action, how to bring medicine and food to a country in dire need, that everybody can do something; and the idea that “there is nothing we can do about it,” that that is a wrong concept. And therefore, I invite people to join with this Committee.

Now, you mentioned India: I think all the many people who have been doubting that the pandemic is real, who think it’s just a trick, please, look at India! I have very close friends in India, and I’m in regular phone contact with them, and what they are reporting is an absolute Hell! You have right now, officially, 250,000 people who have died, but everybody knows this is probably five or ten times higher, for the simple reason that in this figure of 250,000 are only the people who have died in hospital. The people who don’t make it to a hospital, who die at home, who die in a faraway place in the countryside, they’re not counted. So what we’re looking at in India right now, is 1.5-2.5 million people who have died already!

And the problem is that a new variant has developed which is very aggressive. Health experts say this is of global concern, simply because the transmission rate is much, much higher than with other strains, and obviously for a country which has, for many parts, no developed hygienic systems, right now there is there is a rate of 75% of the country has 10-20% testing positive.

Now, this is out of control and the experts basically say the only way you can hope to get this under control is to lock down 75% of the country for six to eight weeks! Now, can you imagine what that would do in a country where you have a very large informal economy, which means people have no wages, they live from hand to mouth every day, and if you have a lockdown, naturally that collapses. I think this is a huge political crisis and it is already spreading to the neighboring countries, to Nepal, to Bangladesh, Thailand. The Indian strain has been founded in six Latin American countries already.

This is why what we discussed again at this conference, and please watch this second panel, is, we have to fight to really get a changed attitude. It is not enough now to say, we have to produce vaccines; first of all, the vaccine production is very slow, and fortunately, the Biden administration said they want to lift the patents, but the production of these vaccines is very complicated, and you cannot in the middle of the desert you cannot just build a vaccine factory: You need the skills, you need the industrial environment to do that.

In any case, even if you could vaccinate everybody very quickly, which right now we cannot, the problem is much deeper: You need a change in the attitude towards the underdevelopment of the developing countries. And what we have been saying from the beginning of this pandemic is, we need to have a modern health system in every single country: In every country, you would need to do what they did in Wuhan, to build hospitals of 1,000 beds each in a week; equip them with modern medical machinery, have highly skilled doctors and nurses, and then obviously, you need clean water, electricity, infrastructure. To use the building of such modern health systems in every country as the beginning to industrialize the world.

That is at odds with the people who want to impose the Great Reset and the Green Deal, because there was already in 2019, an absolutely scandalous but very revealing article in the British medical journal The Lancet, in which some professors from Harvard basically said, one of the biggest contributors of climate pollution is modern hospitals, surgery, anesthesia, ICU, these account for 4.5% of all CO₂ emissions. And therefore, they say, blatantly openly, we cannot have the 5 billion people in the world who presently don’t have access to this kind of modern healthcare, also have the same standard as in the Western countries, because otherwise the planet would explode. Now, what they’re openly saying is—I don’t know if you want to call this “apartheid”—but it’s incredible! These people are openly advertising to keep the life expectancy in poor countries, we don’t care, let them die. I mean, this is so unbelievably brutal, it makes clear to you that these people are trying to impose a world dictatorship, an eco-fascism, whereby only the powerful elite decide who can live and who will die.

Now, we have, as we’ve discussed many times in this program, we have worked out a plan for a world health system in every country, and we will make a huge effort to put this on the agenda in the upcoming Global Health Summit conference on May 21st in Rome, because we think that that meeting should not conclude without having basically agreed that what we propose is the only way. Because if you only have increased vaccinations and some nice words, this is not enough: We need an absolute, fundamental change. So if you agree with that, please join our efforts and help us in this mobilization.

SCHLANGER: Helga, another area, where people are threatened is on the economy, and on the inflation front, because there are already people who as a result of the COVID lockdowns and the job losses, people facing losing their homes, losing their healthcare, losing jobs. And we’re now seeing a growing inflation, even though the government is denying it, they’re saying “well, we need a little inflation,” but it’s not a “little inflation,” it’s taking off. This, again, goes back to the program of Lyndon LaRouche for the Four Laws. But what can you say about the inflation situation?

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: It’s the accumulated effect of pumping money by the trillions and trillions, basically since 2008, and again in the recent period, all the so-called “stimulus” programs which did not into really go into real economy investments, but kept the speculative bubble going for the most part. Now, various central banks are reporting commodity price inflation which will soon hit the consumer price inflation, and once you reach inflation becoming visible like that, you have to think about what happened in Weimar Germany in 1923, when the Reichsbank also started to print money. And that inflation was also not visible for a very long time, but then, when the French occupied the Rhineland, and production came to a halt, it started to explode, and it ended with a complete expropriation of the life’s work of the people. And that is what is on the horizon. And people say a “transitory hyperinflation,” was the formulation used by the Fed: Now, that’s ridiculous. “Transitory hyperinflation” is like being a “little big pregnant”: It just leads to the result that pregnancy does, and hyperinflation leads to hyperinflation.

So what we need right now, more urgently than ever, is Lyndon LaRouche’s, my late husband’s program: a global Glass-Steagall, a national bank, a credit system, and a crash program to increase the productivity of the economy through investment in fusion and space cooperation. So we have a program which would be easy to implement, relatively easier, and in any case easier than the consequences if it is not being done, which is chaos and the danger of war.

SCHLANGER: Now, also the previous Schiller conference in March 20-21, had a major emphasis in the first panel on culture and how we need a cultural renaissance as a key element in changing the way people think. There was an event that just took place, with a concert, showing the video of a concert with Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam performing the Beethoven Violin Concerto. And I know that you and many other people were very moved by this. What can you tell us about that?

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: I would urge our viewers to absolutely watch this concert! I think it’s the most important cultural intervention from the United States—not for the United States—for the world. Because not only—Mr. Farrakhan is a minister, so he’s not a professional musician—but the excellence with which he formed the violin part in this concerto is absolutely incredible, because he made the violin “sing.” He made it sing in the most beautiful, lovable way you can imagine. And I actually had tears in my eyes at a certain point, because he got the music so much to the heart, that I compared then, also with some other performances, which maybe some Menuhin and Oistrakh and so forth, they may have been technically more perfect, but I think it was absolutely on a world-class level. And what is even as important—I don’t want to say more important, because it comes as a unity—he said he did that—this was a performance from 2002—but he got it out now for his own 88th birthday, and Beethoven’s 250th birthday, but especially to give young people, and especially young black people some way to elevate themselves on the highest level. And the way he described it, he said that when he was young, as a boy, he learned the violin, but in these times there was no way to have a musical career for a black person, so he stopped for many years. But, then he took it up again when he was 60, when he first played Mendelssohn. But then, when he was 68, in one year he learned how to play this extremely difficult piece. And it was a complete surprise.

And he said, this is also a method, you study intensively, 8, 10 hours a day, and once you have learned that, you can apply that in any other field. And in a certain sense, it was the absolute counter against this cancel culture, and the idiotic policy of Oxford that they want to cancel Mozart and Beethoven. It was just the most beautiful polemic, apart from the elevation. And naturally, neither the Black Lives Matter people, nor the anti-Black Lives Matter people, will discuss this beautiful Farrakhan performance because it puts them to shame. And they don’t know how to deal with beauty, because they’re dead souls, so many of them have become that.

I think the example which Farrakhan gave for the young generation in the whole world, I think this was incredible, and you should really watch it, because you will have the most joyous time for a long time.

SCHLANGER: It sounds as though what he did was to take to heart the idea in his discussion of it, of the coincidence of opposites, and how to challenge people who have these false profiles of various people that are used, with identity politics and so on.

So Helga, thank you very much for joining us. Again, I think you’ve made the point that people should go to Schiller Institute site and watch the conference from last weekend, both panels, as well as the Farrakhan concert. And we’ll see you again next week.

ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Till next week.