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This transcript appears in the March 15, 2019 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

[Print version of this transcript]

ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

Italy Joins with China in Battle for
New Paradigm—Geopoliticians Flip!

White House/Shealah Craighead
President Donald Trump and Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte at the G7 Summit in Charlevoix, Canada on June 9, 2018.

This is the edited transcript of the Schiller Institute’s March 8, 2019 New Paradigm interview with Helga Zepp-LaRouche by Harley Schlanger. A video of the webcast is available.

Harley Schlanger: Hello, I’m Harley Schlanger of the Schiller Institute. Welcome to our strategic webcast for today, March 7, 2019, with our President and founder, Helga Zepp-LaRouche.

Italy and China

As is almost always the case these days, Helga, things are happening at a rapid pace. The contrast between the two paradigms is being fought out on virtually every continent, but perhaps the most interesting and immediate, is the fight going on now around Italy. And there are some very significant developments with Italy and China, Italy and the European Union, internal developments in Italy—so why don’t we start there?

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: Yes, this is very significant, because Italy is the one European country, or—I shouldn’t say “one,” but one of the major industrial countries of Europe which has, with the new government, developed a very, very productive relationship with China. They have a very good relationship with President Donald Trump. When Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte was at the G7, he totally agreed with Trump that the G7 should be expanded to be the G8, with the addition of Russia. They also demand that the sanctions against Russia be removed. And they have a very interesting and positive attitude toward overcoming the refugee crisis by joining hands with China in the industrialization of Africa.

The Italian government is very different from what the Western media portray it to be—a surprise, actually—and now, President Xi Jinping is scheduled to come to Italy on a state visit March 22-23. It has been leaked that a memorandum of understanding is in preparation between the Italian and Chinese governments, to be signed between Xi Jinping and Conte during Xi’s visit, for full cooperation with the Belt and Road Initiative.

Now, you would think that this is a positive thing. But as the furor of the mainstream media demonstrates, this is regarded as a threat. The Financial Times yesterday was apoplectic. They highlighted the comments of Garrett Marquis, a spokesman for the U.S. National Security Council, from the Bolton wing of the administration, who said, “We are skeptical that the Italian government’s endorsement will bring any sustained economic benefits to the Italian people, and it may end up harming Italy’s global reputation in the long run.” The person in the Economic Development Ministry responsible for the formulation of this memorandum, Michele Geraci, countered that, and said, what is wrong that Italy will try to increase the export of Italian goods into fastest growing market, which is the Chinese market?

LPAC-TV
Michele Geraci, Undersecretary of the Italian Ministry of Economic Development in Washington, D.C. in December 2018.

This was one response. And the EU Commission also came out and said that this is totally against the EU policy, that it’s the EU which sets the standards, and Italy must comply. Actually, Germany and France right now are the key blocking countries. You have a situation in great flux: Already 13 EU countries have signed memoranda of understanding or some such protocol, including Poland, Czechia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Portugal, Malta, the three Baltic states, and with Italy, now, it would be, as I said, one of the major industrial countries of Europe.

There is a great benefit to all sides participating. All the ports of Italy—Trieste, Genoa, Palermo—are all absolutely to be part of the Maritime Silk Road, and Mr. Geraci pointed to the fact that all Italian ports are close to Africa, without being in Africa, implying that this will make the development of Africa easier by integrating them into the New Silk Road perspective.

So you would think this would cause great positive excitement, but as you can see, there is a fierce storm of opposition coming from the City of London and from neo-con circles in the United States. I do not think opposition is the position of President Trump, who, as I said, got along very well with Prime Minister Conte.

We have to see how this plays out. My suspicion is that the tension will increase in the days leading up to the visit of Xi Jinping who, after he is in Italy for two days, will go to France, and then, according to several sources—not totally confirmed in the United States yet—but certain European sources say he will go to the United States on the same trip and meet with President Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

I think this is really incredible. Because, according to certain Italian news blogs, citing unnamed insider officials, the one sentence in the memorandum of understanding that apparently the U.S. Embassy in Rome was most freaked out about, is a formulation used by Xi Jinping all the time, namely that the aim of the Belt and Road Initiative, is to form a “community for the shared future of mankind, a community for the common destiny of humankind.”

Away with Geopolitics!

I have always emphasized that it is exactly this conception which is the closest approximation to what we in the Schiller Institute are pushing for, namely a New Paradigm in the history of mankind, that you have to put the one humanity first, before all national interests, and that we have reached a point in the history of humanity where we have to think in terms of the united future of the one human civilization, being united in space travel and research, being united in other scientific breakthroughs, and overcoming geopolitics.

Now, if it’s confirmed that this is really a bone of contention, well, then this is the smoking gun of the geopolitical faction that they oppose this idea of the one humanity—which we know they do, but we have to see.

I think this is a big fighting issue, because as we discussed in the last days and weeks, the strategic outcome of this historical period will depend on our ability to move the United States away from geopolitics, and to move it into accordance with this idea of being part of this one humanity and not necessarily insisting on a unipolar world, which in any case, does not exist any longer, because, with the rise of Asia, with the rise of China, with the absolute, dramatic success of the Belt and Road Initiative—which now involves 156 nations and international institutions which have signed such agreements—I think it is very clearly the sign and the future of civilization.

So I think this is a very interesting fight, and in the United States, people would be well advised to talk to Italian Americans, who are proudly American, but also proud of having come from Italy. We have seen that, when a couple of months ago, one of the European Parliamentarians, Marco Zanni, came to the United States, and had many meetings in the Congress, there was a huge interest in the Italian community. And I think this is very worthwhile to be pursued.

Go with the Belt and Road!

And I think in the United States there should be a discussion about all of this, similar to the way we discussed it two years ago, before the first Belt and Road Forum in Beijing in May 2017, where we pushed for the United States to participate in that, and then President Trump sent an important delegate to this Belt and Road Forum.

The second such forum will take place this April. Prime Minister Conte will attend. We should use this period between the coming visit of President Xi Jinping to the United States, and the Belt and Road Forum in April, to really escalate our campaign for the United States to join the New Paradigm and not oppose it. I think President Trump in any case does not oppose, but the opposition comes from those people who are his opponents, meaning the war party of the Democrats and the neo-cons. And it is very, very urgent that we use this international constellation to move the United States and the world forward.

A Unipolar World Is a Bad Idea

Schlanger: I think it’s ironic that the charge against China from the European Union and from U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and others, is that China is trying to become the unipolar power, when in fact, as you just pointed out, more than 150 nations are signing on, to one degree or another, with the Belt and Road Initiative.

DoD News
Gen. Curtis M. Scaparrotti. Commander of the U.S. European Command and Supreme Allied Commander of NATO in Europe.

Now, also on this unipolar world issue, we have the testimony given by Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, who went into a typical neo-con attack on Russia. This just continues to reverberate from the people who are opposed to President Trump’s calls for cooperation with Russia. Where is this going? Sections of the U.S. military are cooperating with Russia’s military in Syria, but then Scaparrotti comes out with his wild statement.

Zepp-LaRouche: Scaparrotti is the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO in Europe and the head of the United States European Command, so he is quite important in the role of NATO. He addressed the U.S. Congress a couple of days ago, where he went into this absolute incredible line that Russian aggression is increasing everywhere, and they are supposedly challenging “the U.S. ability to deploy uncontested in all domains.”

Now, that formulation is a synonym for the right of the United States to defend a unipolar world, to do whatever it wants to, in the Middle East and the South China Sea, in the Pacific, in the Arctic. This is the attitude behind the global missile system, which is right now being challenged by the new weapons systems announced March 1 of last year by Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Russians are absolutely worried with the suspension of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty).

This is very, very dangerous, because if the United States keeps insisting on a unipolar world and keeps insisting that Russia and China are the big enemies and competitors and opponents and so forth, I think we are really in a much greater war danger than most people have an inkling of. Many people have said in the recent period that it’s much more dangerous than during the 1962 Cuba Missiles Crisis, it’s much more dangerous than it was with the medium-range missile crisis at the beginning of the 1980s; the only difference is, then, you had a large peace movement in the streets, hundreds of thousands of peace people in the streets being concerned about World War III. And now, it is more like before World War I, that the world is in danger of sleepwalking into a new world war.

So, I think Scaparrotti’s remarks, demanding an increase in the U.S. military budget, already the largest in the world by far—I think it’s ten times as big as the Russian one—point to no solution other than pushing the world into the potential of a catastrophe.

Schlanger: As you’ve been emphasizing, other than people sleepwalking into war, there was an effort made by the Russian Ambassador to the United States to bring a sobering assessment, in a presentation he gave this week in Washington, D.C. What did he say?

U.S. Mission Geneva/Eric Bridiers
Anatoly Antonov, Ambassador of Russia to the United States.

Mutually Assured Survival

Zepp-LaRouche: This was Anatoly Antonov, who spoke at the Stimson Center. In reviewing the mutual suspension of the INF Treaty, he took it back a little to when President George W. Bush withdrew the United States from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty). He said, up to that point the world was aware of the fact that we are living under a Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine, meaning that if it ever came to nuclear war, nobody would survive. And it was that deterrent which contributed stability and peace.

This is not what mankind should live under. This is what my husband at the time tried to replace with the doctrine of Mutually Assure Survival with the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), so I’m not speaking in favor of having nuclear Armageddon as a threat over humanity as the only condition for mankind to maintain peace, but it worked insofar as it was clear that a nuclear war was not winnable.

With the cancellation of the ABM Treaty, however, that stability in the international system has been eliminated, and that was obviously the origin of President Putin’s telling Russian scientists and engineers and military men, to come up with new weapons systems, which he announced more than a year ago. Many of those systems,—hypersonic missiles are highly maneuverable in flight, so they’re not following a ballistic trajectory; then nuclear-powered missiles—all weapons systems which the West presently do not have, and whose weapons systems, Putin emphasized at various points, are now made technologically obsolete, including the ABM system of the United States.

That is the context in which, then, the INF Treaty, that is, the agreement which was reached between President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachov in 1987, to eliminate an entire category of weapons, namely the intermediate-range missiles deployed in Europe, is now out the window.

Ambassador Antonov used maps in his presentation, making graphic that if the United States deployed intermediate range missiles in Europe, Russian cities would be within range, leaving Russia no other choice but to counter by targetting all of Europe.

This is very important, because I think there must be a completely different approach. We have said many times, you need a completely New Paradigm and you need a new security architecture, based on such a New Paradigm.

But I just wanted to mention this, because people should be alert: The war danger is not very far away.

The Green New Deal: Depopulation

Schlanger: Part of the fight for the New Paradigm, is the rejection of the anti-science, anti-technology approach being taken, for example in the United States in what is called the “Green New Deal.” There’s been a lot of activity around this. Very interestingly, President Trump has set up a new commission to do what they say is not acceptable, which is to question the scientific basis of the claims of man-made climate change. This has an impact in Germany, as well, where the Greens have shut down nuclear, they’re threatening coal, and the auto industry is under attack. This Green New Deal, as you’ve said, Helga, has to be stopped in its tracks, or there’s not going to be a survival of mankind.

Zepp-LaRouche: Well, we have pointed out, for a long time, that the Green New Deal really has nothing to do with protecting the environment, but is for depopulation. Sir John Schellnhuber, the former head of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said that decarbonization of the world economy means there is only room for one billion people on the planet, and that’s what they want! I mean, they want to use the green discussion to eliminate people.

Above left: CC/Malte Hübner; above right: CC/Jan Ainali
Green hysteria today: Hans Joachim Schellnhuber (above, left), Greta Thunberg (above, right) and “Fridays for the Future” demonstration (below) in Hamburg, Germany on March 1, 2019.
CC/Gastian Greshake

And if you needed one more proof, look at page 2 of today’s German tabloid Bild, the so-called “political page.” It has a headline, “Children are the Worst for the Environment,” and then it quotes a book author, a woman named Vernea Brunschweiger, saying that the best thing is not to have children anymore, because they’re the biggest threat to the environment; for every child you don’t have, you save 54.4 tons of CO2 per year; if you don’t drive car, it’s only 1.4 tons—so it’s insane!

In Great Britain, BBC hosted a discussion with two women who are part of a group called “birth strike,” under the headline, “The Women Too Scared of Climate Change to Have Children.”

So you can see, this is highly orchestrated.

Then you look at the operation of Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old Swedish teenager, with Asperger’s syndrome, and she’s being trotted around the world, sponsored by all kinds of things. In the United States and in Europe, she’s promoting March 15 as a day on which all the schoolchildren don’t go to school, but strike against the politicians for not doing enough about climate change. This is all financed very well by the Sierra Club, and by various foundations.

This is a complete onslaught by the oligarchy at a moment when the financial system is about to blow, again, much larger than in 2008, to divert attention, using this green hysteria—and it is hysteria; there are now schoolchildren in Germany who say, “I don’t need to learn anything anymore, because the world will end in 12 years anyway,” which is what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been saying. Others are saying, “I’ll commit suicide in 13 years, because the world is ending.” This is really too much!

Many parents are really upset that their children are being turned into fearful, hysterical little monsters, turning against their families. This is what dictatorships do: They turn children against their parents.

This must be absolutely countered, because there is no science to it. The universe is anti-entropic, science and technology are the drivers of a continuous progress of civilization, a better understanding of the laws of the universe, and this green stuff is just completely brown. It’s not green, it’s brown, and people should recognize that it comes out of the eugenics movement and similar things which we have documented very well, which you can find on our website.

I think this is really very dangerous, and people should understand: People who are willing to use children in such a way, will not stop at anything.

Investigations Shift Away from Russiagate

Schlanger: There’s lots of speculation now concerning the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report. I think it’s becoming increasingly clear what we’ve been saying since the beginning of the attacks on Trump, that there’s nothing there: No evidence of collusion, no evidence of Russian meddling.

Despite the lies of former Trump lawyer, Michael Cohen, and former FBI Director Andrew McCabe’s admission in his interview with CBS that there’s a coup underway, in the midst of this, the Democrats are beginning a new onslaught in the Congress, with at least three committees having hearings right away. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler gave it all away the other day an interview, saying “It’s very clear that the President obstructed justice.” When the reporter asked him, “Well, if it’s so clear, why aren’t you beginning impeachment right away?” he said, “Well—we don’t have the facts, yet.”

So, again: Suspicions, lies, slander, gossip, but there’s an intent to this, isn’t there Helga? To prevent the President from being able to carry on with the mandate for which he was elected—not to mention the larger intent, to destroy the United States.

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes. I think the constitutional lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, put a point on it. He said the Congress is completely overstepping its competence. It has the oversight, according to the Constitution, but it doesn’t have the power to investigate out of proportion, and what it’s doing is only aimed at preventing the President from acting.

Same Apparatus Going After Trump Went After LaRouche

I think we need a full-fledged mobilization, because as we’ve pointed out so many times, the apparatus which is going after Trump right now—Mueller and his people, and William Weld, who wants to run against Trump as a Republican in the upcoming primary election—this is the same apparatus that went after my husband and his organization in the 1980s, and which covered up 9/11 and which is now attempting a coup against President Trump, with the same aim.

So maybe I’ll turn it around this time and ask you to comment on this.

Left: FBI; right: CC/Gage Skidmore
The same legal assassins Robert Mueller (l.) and William Weld (r.), who attempted to destroy Lyndon LaRouche in the 1980s are today out to destroy President Trump.

Schlanger: Yes. I think this is very significant. Because what we’ve been discussing for the last twenty minutes, the crisis in the world, the dangers in the world, each of these developments being run by geopoliticians trying to divide the nations—divide the world between East and West, North and South, using wars, assassinations, false flags and so on—for each of these developments over the last five decades, your husband Lyndon LaRouche identified who was behind them and what their intention was.

Not only that, but LaRouche offered the solutions to outflank these operations. And it was for this reason that the British Empire made him Enemy No. 1, enlisting networks in the Justice Department and the Democratic Party in the 1980s, when Lyndon LaRouche was brought in by Reagan to bring about a joint agreement on the Strategic Defense Initiative. They launched a vicious slander campaign and then a “Get LaRouche Task Force.” As you pointed out, William Weld headed it, the man who is now announcing that he’ll run against Trump in the Republican primaries. It was William Weld who brought in Robert Mueller to run the Get LaRouche Task Force in Boston.

And they’re using the same lies, slanders, and prosecutorial fraud that were deployed against your husband, against Trump. For that reason, this has to be overturned: Not just for the sake of justice alone, but what’s the intent of running this kind of attack on someone like Lyndon LaRouche? It’s to terrify people so they won’t take up these issues!

The same way they’re trying to stop Trump from addressing the potential of a U.S.-Russian cooperation, and a U.S.-China cooperation, ending wars, getting fair trade agreements and so on, they’re trying to stop this and shut it down.

LPAC-TV
Organizations associated with Lyndon LaRouche are conducting an international campaign petitioning President Trump to exonerate Lyndon LaRouche.

Therefore, Exonerate LaRouche!

And for that reason, we have to wage a fight for the exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche: This is not simply about Lyndon LaRouche the man, although I think people should read the obituary and condolences to you Helga and to our organization, to see that people around the world had enormous respect, and love, for Lyndon LaRouche. But the fact that this injustice was done against him, and the same networks continue to carry out injustices, whether it’s the Iraq War with the mass slaughter, the deprivation of medicine and food there as a result of sanction policies, and so on. There’s too much at stake to allow this to pass.

So, go to the Schiller Institute website. Go to this link to reach the Petition to Exonerate LaRouche. This is something that people should use. Our listeners should study what’s in the statement in the petition, look at the condolence letters, look at the history of Mr. LaRouche, and use all of this to educate your friends and your family. Because what’s at stake now is the future of mankind, and this is what Lyndon LaRouche devoted his life to.

So I urge people to take this opportunity, to wage a battle for the exoneration of LaRouche, which is a fight, precisely, for bringing into existence the New Paradigm based on the ideas of LaRouche, such as a Four-Power Agreement, a New Bretton Woods, the Four LaRouche Laws for the economy, and other ideas.

This is an opportunity for people who always ask, “What can I do to stop this attack on Trump?” Fight for the exoneration of LaRouche and the destruction of the anti-science networks, and that will clear the way for the proper kind of discussion to take place in the United States.

Helga, do you have anything you’d like to add?

Zepp-LaRouche: For a very long time, I have thought that for the United States to become really great again, to go back to the great tradition of the American Revolution, it has to honor my husband. And I’m asking all of you to look at what he has been writing and his vision for the future. And then, I really appeal to you: Fight with us for his exoneration. That’s the best thing you can do for the United States and the world.

Harley Schlanger: And for yourself and your families.

So, Helga, thank you very much, and we’ll see you again next week.

Zepp-LaRouche: Till next week.

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