Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Strategic Impasse: End of History,
Or Common Aims of Mankind?

This is the edited transcription of the Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche’s keynote presentation to the Schiller Institute conference on September 5. She is the founder and President of the Schiller Institute. Subheads have been added.

I’m greeting you wherever you may be around the globe, and let me—in this very, very dangerous moment of history—tell you about the purpose of this conference. If humanity is to overcome the present existing threat to our existence, this conference, and the mobilization of networks all over the world that are in contact with us, must catalyze the crucial interventions to pull the world back from the edge of the abyss; the abyss of nuclear war and with that—and this is not an exaggeration—the possible annihilation of the human species!

The purpose of this conference of the Schiller Institute is to propose concepts and solutions for this present unprecedented crisis. We have, like never before, a combination of an out-of-control pandemic, a famine, the greatest economic crisis since the end of World War II, a pending financial collapse, and most deadly, the danger of a new World War, and last but not least, a deep cultural crisis. Because of the enormity of these interconnected crises, there cannot be a solution for each of these problems separately, or just addressing a partial aspect. What is needed is a completely new paradigm, a solution on a higher level than that on which all these crises erupted. We have to jump to a new level of thinking; something that Nikolaus of Cusa called the Coincidentia Oppositorum, the Coincidence of Opposites.

Why are we at the brink of war, and why could this present confrontation become very quickly a new world war? The short answer is, because the British Empire would rather risk the annihilation of the human species, than allow the empire to be replaced by a system of sovereign republics. Ever since President Trump won the election in 2016 to their surprise, there has been a relentless coup attempt instigated by MI6 in collusion with the intelligence apparatus of the Obama administration: Russiagate, about which we will hear more from Bill Binney; a fraudulent impeachment effort; and an ongoing insurrection, by what Trump himself called the Military Industrial Complex and the “Deep” State Department, including violence in the streets.

Not only had Trump in 2016 promised he would restore the relationship with Russia, against which the entire Russiagate was designed, but from the standpoint of the British Empire, his Presidency was an accident, which never should have been allowed to happen. Just consider, what you just heard in the video clip from Lyndon LaRouche, which still is true for today. The fundamental strategic issue today is that there are essentially two policies in fundamental opposition: One is that of the British Empire, and the other is associated with the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble of the Constitution.

The Fundamental Conflict

The entire history of the so-called Western world and beyond of the last 250 years has to be seen from the perspective of that fundamental conflict. The British Empire never reconciled with the loss of their most precious colony. They tried to win it back in the War of 1812, and the Civil War, where Great Britain was openly allied with the Confederacy. After they realized that they could not win America back militarily, they decided to subvert the American Establishment to get them to adopt the model of the British Empire, from the British Round Table and the Fabian Society, to H.G. Wells and his “Open Conspiracy,” and the teaching of William Yandell Elliott, the mentor of a whole stable of anglophiles from Kissinger, to Samuel Huntington, and Zbigniew Brzezinski.

With the administrations of the Bushes and Obama—Clinton was at least aware of the problem—the British takeover of American politics had finally succeeded. The Project of a New American Century, PNAC, was the answer of that Establishment to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and was supposed to finally realize the utopia of Bertrand Russell for a world empire, a unipolar world, where subsequently all resisting governments were to be eliminated through color revolution, regime change, interventionist wars, or outright assassinations as in the case of Qaddafi.

So here was Trump, who wanted to repair the relationship with Russia, end the endless wars, bring the U.S. troops back home, and, in the beginning of his term, even spoke of his friendship with President Xi Jinping.

There is also another expression of the same attempt to establish a unipolar world. Increasingly over the last years and months, there has been an acceleration of geopolitical confrontation against Russia and China, aimed at isolating Russia, containing China, regime change against Presidents Putin and Xi Jinping, complete economic decoupling from Russian and China, and in complete defiance of the strategic realities, to force the world back under the control of the unipolar “rules-based” order run under the control of the Anglo-American special relationship.

The latest aspect of this is the operation around the supposed poisoning of Navalny, with the chemical nerve agent Novichok, famous from the Skripal case, which was supposedly documented by a special lab of the Bundeswehr, in consultation with the British lab in Porton Down, Salisbury, which played a very strange role in the Skripal affair. The scientists behind the development of Novichok, Leonid Rink and Vladimir Uglev, basically said that if Novichok had been used, Navalny would be dead, and all the people in contact with him would have been contaminated. So, it is completely ridiculous. If Putin had wanted Navalny dead, why would he allow the plane to land in Omsk? Why not use the time in the hospital there to kill him? Why not disallow the bringing of him into Germany?

A very dubious role in this was played in this by the Cinema for Peace Foundation, which paid for a special team of doctors, and hired a costly chartered plane for several days. If you look in the international committee of that foundation, you find Gary Gasparov, David de Rothschild, the Klitschko brothers, Joschka Fischer, and others. Now [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel, for some reason, immediately moved this case up to the level of the EU and NATO. Notorious hawks like Norbert Röttgen, like an angry snarling dog let off the chain, immediately demanded: Now let’s cancel Nord Stream 2.

So, if you look at the cui bono of this case, it’s clearly not Putin. It’s clearly on side of those who want the economic decoupling from Russia and China. Decouple Russia, and hit Germany at the same time.

Heightened International Tension

In recent weeks, there was an acceleration of military flight incidents turning almost into accidents, which are an expression of the heightened international tension. A few examples of many:

A U.S. military plane entered airspace in northern China when the PLA had a drill with live ammunition. The Chinese reacted by sending two missiles from two different locations into the South China Sea. Related to a NATO exercise going on simultaneously in all NATO member countries, B-52 bombers flying over the Baltic Sea were sharply intercepted by two Russian Su-27 fighters. Also, there was the intercept of an RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft over the Black Sea. Also, a Russian MiG-31 fighter of the Northern Fleet was scrambled to intercept a Norwegian Air Force P-3C Orion maritime patrol plane over the Barents Sea. Russia has reported a dozen such events in one month.

Some of these intercepts were at extremely close range. If human error were committed, it could trigger immediately a major escalation. People should reflect on the fact that if world peace depends at this point on the flight skill of a pilot, we are in deep trouble.

Remember, all of this is taking place with the enemy image of Russia and China being painted in ever more sinister colors every day, turning the reality of a color revolution and a Nazi coup instigated by Obama, Joe Biden, and Victoria Nuland against Ukraine upside down into a narrative of “Russia changing the borders by force in Crimea”; Putin poisoning his opponents; China being responsible for the spread of coronavirus pandemic and the economic damage caused by the lockdowns; the Chinese being behind the riots in U.S. cities.

Where is all of this coming from?

The Economic Development Plans of
Xi and LaRouche

In September 2013, President Xi Jinping announced in Kazakhstan, the New Silk Road policy, which would quickly become the largest infrastructure program in history.

The Schiller Institute immediately afterwards published a 360-page report, The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge, an update of our economic platform for the preceding 40 years: how to overcome poverty and underdevelopment in the developing countries. We were extremely excited, because there was a great affinity between policy of Xi Jinping and life work of my late husband Lyndon LaRouche and our movement, who already in 1975 had proposed to replace the IMF with the International Development Bank, the idea to have a real development policy of the developing countries.

LaRouche, already in 1973, commissioned a biological taskforce to investigate how the IMF conditionalities, by lowering the living standards of entire generations over a long period of time, would invite the danger of the reemergence of old and new diseases like the present pandemic.

He developed the Oasis Plan in 1975. We worked out a first Africa development plan in 1976. We worked on a plan to develop Latin America with [Mexican President] López Portillo in 1982. A 40-year development plan to develop India. The Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983, which was a concept to overcome the military blocs of NATO and the Warsaw Pact and to use the associated science driver for a gigantic technology transfer to the developing sector. Between the 1988 “Productive Triangle Paris-Berlin-Vienna” and in 1991 the “Eurasian Land-Bridge,” these were the many versions of the LaRouche recovery program, including his various U.S. Presidential campaign programs for the recovery of the United States.

Lyndon LaRouche’s conception of physical economy has the idea that the only source of wealth is the creativity of individual. The discovery of new universal physical principles applied as scientific and technological progress in the productive process, leading to an increase of productivity of labor power and the productive capacities, which requires a continuous increase in population, a greater division of labor, an increase of relative potential population-density, in correlation to higher and higher energy-flux densities.

Such a conception of the economy obviously pertains to the image of man. It sees mankind as the only so far known creative species in the universe. Human creativity is the most powerful geological force in the anti-entropically developing universe. It is that force which accelerates that development in an anti-entropic way.

With Xi Jinping’s New Silk Road, the economic power of second largest economy is now in affinity with this idea, to overcome the under-development of developing sector. Also, it is reconnecting the fight to the intention of FDR—what the old Bretton Woods System would have become, had Roosevelt not died at the wrong time: the idea that peace in the world at large is only possible if the living standard of all human beings is increased.

This was the issue between Roosevelt and Churchill; to make the American System available to the entire world, versus the British colonial system for the defense of the privileges of the upper classes at the expense of the majority of the population, both the British subjects, as well as those subjugated by the colonies.

It was absolutely amazing: Soon was developed the largest infrastructure program in history, ever. With an enormous speed of development, soon you had six major economic corridors, train connections, dams, bridges, industrial parks. At the beginning of 2017, there were more than 130 bilateral and regional transport agreements, 365 international road routes, 4200 direct flights connecting China with 43 Belt and Road countries, and 39 China-Europe freight train routes. In April 2017, there was the visit of Xi to Mar-a-Lago, and in May 2017, the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing, which I had the good fortune to attend. I could experience what had happened, how the world had changed and was inspired by the spirit of the New Silk Road.

What that spirit signified, was the concrete perspective of the developing countries for the first time to overcome underdevelopment. There was the possibility to overcome geopolitics, by putting a win-win cooperation among sovereign nation-states on the table. China intending explicitly not to replace the U.S. as a hegemon, but respect for the different social system of the other, non-interference in the internal affairs. A vision of the one humanity, and Xi Jinping’s conception of a community for the shared future of humanity.

In the meantime, there were repeated offers by China, to open the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to everybody; to have a win-win cooperation. To the United States, they repeatedly offered a great-power relationship. There was really never an answer to that. In November 2017, Trump visited Beijing for what the Chinese called a “state visit-plus,” offering complete insight into the 5,000-year history of China. President Trump at that point talked many times about “my friend, President Xi Jinping.”

The Empire Strikes Back

All of this happened, and there was as good as zero coverage of the New Silk Road in the mainstream media for over four years! But behind that wall of silence, the military-industrial complex was in total preparation for a complete geopolitical backlash. What evolved was a ferocious counterattack of the forces of the British Empire not to allow the “post-World War II international order”—i.e., the perpetuation of the colonial, Malthusian control over the developing sector, and its principles and “rules of the road”—to be undermined by Russia and China, by offering them access to industrial and scientific development such as nuclear energy, infrastructure, or even leap-frogging to the most advanced technologies by joining the Space Silk Road.

In December 2017, there was the publication of the “U.S. National Security Strategy” (NSS) under the guidance of H.R. McMaster, the Acting National Security Advisor at that time, which for the first time, in a very sharp way, defined Russia and China as geopolitical rivals; saying:

China and Russia challenge American power, influence, and interest, attempting to erode American security and prosperity. They are determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their militaries, and to control information and data to repress their societies and expand their influence.

The NSS doctrine demanded a rethinking of the policies of the previous two decades. This refers to accepting China in WTO, and the Fukuyama declaration of the “end of history” by thinking that by integrating Russia and China into the Western institutions, they would eventually adopt the liberal model of economics and Western democracy. Instead, China developed a model much closer to the original American System, namely a highly dirigist policy with Chinese characteristics. But at the same time, reviving the 5,000-year history of China. It was the assumption of the NSS doctrine that “Their inclusion would turn them into benign actors and trustworthy partners. For the most part, this premise turned out to be false,” they conclude.

The offer of the BRI to developing countries and even those EU members whose economic development had been suppressed by the EU Commission—such as the Eastern and Southern European countries—to participate in the BRI projects was regarded as “creating divisions among ourselves, our allies, and our partners.” All of this would erode U.S. advantages, therefore the task of the U.S. would be to “ensure that U.S. military superiority endures.”

Russia and China were seen as a much more severe threat to the U.S. than global terrorism. They “are developing advanced weapons and capabilities that could threaten our critical infrastructure and our command and control infrastructure.” China and Russia are called “revisionist powers,” claiming that China would attempt to displace the U.S. in the Indo-Pacific region, expand the reaches of its state-driven economic model, and reorder the region in its favor.

And Russia—what a crime—“seeks to restore its great power status, (after Yeltsin had successfully colluded with the Western oligarchy to turn the Soviet Union into a Third World raw material producing and exporting country, and which had been insulted by Obama as being just a “regional power”). They accuse Russia of trying to re-establish “spheres of influence near its borders,” because they wanted to expand NATO up to the borders of Russia. This was regarded as a nuisance.

In short: “They are contesting our geopolitical advantages and are trying to change the international order in their favor.” Therefore, the document concludes, the U.S. and its allies must retain military overmatch, convince the adversary “that we can and will defeat them—not just punish them, if they attack the U.S.”

Dangerous Changes in Military Doctrines

Only a month later, on January 19, 2018, the Pentagon announced the National Defense Strategy—a document which is still classified—then under the leadership of Secretary of Defense James Mattis. It claims:

It is increasingly clear that China and Russia want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model, gaining veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic and security decisions.

The document stresses the need to build military readiness for “a more lethal joint force,” prioritizing preparedness for war, deterring aggression in three key regions—the Indo-Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East—modernizing key capabilities, including nuclear forces, warfighting capabilities in space, cyber-space, command and control, and intelligence systems, missile defense, etc.

In February 2018, followed the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), continuing the Obama administration’s nuclear modernization of all three legs of the “triad,” adding “supplements,” which include the deployment of low-yield nuclear warheads, which they claim will not reduce the nuclear threshold—but everybody knows they do—but just asserts it will raise that threshold, equipping a small number of Trident submarines with such low-yield warheads, and also includes nuclear-armed, sea-launched cruise missiles.

With the release of these doctrines, there was also a shift suddenly in all major trans-Atlantic thinktanks, which had ignored the BRI for four years. Now, they all adopted the line that China is becoming the strategic rival.

In February 2018, the German thinktank MERICS put out a study called “Authoritarian Advance,” in line with U.S. thinktanks, which pushed the line that China is an authoritarian country; the Silk Road is just a debt trap; and that the social credit system is spying on its own population. This has been escalated to the present potentiated McCarthyism against Chinese students, professors, media, and diplomats in the United States.

One month later, on March 1, President Putin announced new nuclear weapons systems, the Avangard hypersonic vehicle missile complex, the Kinzhal air-launched hypersonic missile, a new intercontinental missile of 20 times the speed of sound, with excellent maneuverability, which therefore could out-maneuver all existing air defense and missile defense systems and render them obsolete; including nuclear-powered cruise missiles, fast drone submarines, and laser weapons.

So, in the two-and-a-half years since, the Department of Defense has undergone a total reorganization according to the doctrines mentioned. They added an Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine which now includes one or more missiles armed with W76-3 low-yield thermonuclear warheads, and nuclear-capable B-52 bombers flying within the range of Russian and Chinese air defenses. A U.S. Space Command was established, and a U.S. Space Force created. The space doctrine makes clear that the aim is American dominance in space, to prevent China from defining new rules in space. The new commander of U.S. Space Force, Army General James Dickinson, said in a recent speech:

Sure, we will try to avoid conflict, but to be absolutely clear, if deterrence fails, our order is clear. We will win. I will concentrate to develop, foster, and accept a culture of space warfare.

All of these changes in military doctrine occurred in close coordination with the British. Several weeks after the NPR was released, the UK Armed Forces Minister, Mark Lancaster, was in Washington, underlining that the policies of NSS, NDS, NPR were also the policies of the British government; that the two programs were closely aligned, with a strong emphasis on modernization of all of these forces.

So in addition to Pence, who made the first major anti-China speech according to these ideas in 2018, it was Bolton—who Trump correctly said if he had not kicked him out, there would have been the sixth World War already—[FBI Director] Christopher Wray, [National Security Advisor Robert] O’Brien, [Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy Peter] Navarro, [Attorney General William] Barr, and especially [Secretary of State Michael] Pompeo, have been spearheading the campaign against China.

Pompeo, who, in July of this year in London meeting with British circles that had initiated the Russiagate story and the coup against Trump, put out a tweet that it’s “Great to be back in London to reaffirm the Special Relationship we share with our closest ally.” So, Pompeo openly put himself in good company with Henry Kissinger, who had made these infamous remarks on May 10, 1982 at Chatham House:

As National Security Advisor, I kept the British Foreign Office better informed and more closely engaged than I did the American State Department.

Are We Sleepwalking into World War III?

So if we look at all of this military posturing and build-up, including the recent Pentagon’s 2020 China Military Power Report, which portrays China’s military power completely out of proportion, as compared to the U.S. focus on the Asia pivot policy, in place since the Obama administration, and the ring of 400-plus military bases the U.S. has built around China, and the recent efforts by NATO to extend its global policy into the Indo-Pacific, are we sleepwalking into World War III?

Yes and no.

No, because some of the military strategists obviously have the illusion that there is such a thing as a winnable regional nuclear war, against which Russia has warned again and again and designed its own military doctrine in such a way to destroy that option for any thinking opponent. This was reiterated on June 2nd of this year when Russia again published the conditions under which it would be forced to go to a first nuclear strike policy.

Yes, sleepwalking, because as Lyndon LaRouche wrote in the paper in which he discussed the methods of the British manipulation of the population in the whole world, The Toynbee Factor in British Grand Strategy:

In a properly ordered republic, [and we don’t have a properly ordered republic right now] as the forces around Benjamin Franklin and George Washington understood this point correctly, the greatest single source of potential danger to the republic is the very sort of estrangement of the citizen from rational comprehension of national policy issues which prevails in the United States today. This, as we shall shortly demonstrate, impinges directly upon the Toynbee syndrome.

Now that is, indeed, the biggest problem: That we are on the verge of World War III; something which could be triggered at any moment, and for which the military doctrines are based completely on illusions of winning a possible regional nuclear war. And that war, once you use nuclear weapons, could be stopped; which I think everybody who has concerned themselves with the writings of such people as Ted Postol, clearly can see that once you use the first nuclear weapons, it will be the entire arsenal which will be used. It is that estrangement of the average citizen not being aware of it, not caring about it, which makes them so extremely susceptible to the synchronized propaganda campaigns of Russiagate, and now about China as the systemic adversary, and the international simultaneous demonization of Trump, Putin, and Xi, alike.

What Is To Be Done?

We have to wake people up to the imminent danger of annihilation. And we have to mobilize around the world for the summit of the Presidents of the Permanent Five of the UN Security Council to absolutely take place this month. These Presidents and Prime Ministers must go back to where Franklin D. Roosevelt—whom they all referenced positively in the past—was unable to realize his intention with the original Bretton Woods. They must declare their intention to end the casino economy, establish a global Glass-Steagall Act, establish a New Bretton Woods credit system to provide long-term low-interest credit to restart the economies in the industrialized countries, and provide credit for a serious industrialization program for the developing countries. Which obviously must start with the building of a modern health system in every single country on the planet, so that this and future pandemics can be defeated.

The studies the Schiller Institute developed, on how “The New Silk Road becomes the World Land Bridge,” in combination with a crash program for the realization of fusion power and the international cooperation in the colonizing of the Moon and Mars, as President Trump has emphasized in his Artemis program, can establish the new economic platform, where all nations can benefit from a higher productivity of the economy.

The real wealth which will be generated by such leaps and by several orders of magnitude [increase] in productivity, will compensate very quickly for the alleged losses caused by an ending of the sales of ever more armaments. But unlike the latter, it will increase the real wealth of society, instead of imposing the kind of primitive accumulation on the physical economy caused by the military build-up.

Once there is a general agreement to replace geopolitical confrontation with win-win economic cooperation for the common good of mankind, the basis for a new security architecture exists. President Trump has reiterated repeatedly, that he regards a new nuclear arms pact with Russia as the biggest problem in the world to be solved. The summit therefore should announce the intention to prolong the New Start Treaty, as well as confirm once again the principle of the inadmissibility of nuclear war.

The world is clearly at a crossroads, and it is up to these five leaders to make sure that the choice will not be an impasse which leads to the actual end of history.

Embrace Not the Worst, but the
Best of All Great Cultures

We have to add another dimension. We must reject the degenerate popular culture, which all empires have always used to dumb the population down and to control them by degrading their impulses, just as the Romans did by having the masses gather to watch the killing in the circuses and become complicit in the decision as to whether the gladiators should live or die. And we must draw our conclusions from the fact, that Biden revealed the depravity of his own counterculture, by trying to make himself more attractive in cooperating with such “stars” as Cardi B, whose video WAP [Wet-Ass Pussy] reveals the image of man that the oligarchy is more than happy for the population to have, because a population so degraded will never challenge their power.

If mankind is to escape the looming catastrophe, all great cultures of the world need to bring forth their best traditions, the loftiest ideas of their philosophers and poets, the most ennobling compositions of their composers, the most beautiful works of art in painting, sculpture, and architecture. We should all be inspired by the treasures humanity has produced so far, and start to think like patriots and world citizens as a unity. Not only on the planet Earth, but as members of the same species, soon living together in a village on the Moon and a city on Mars. The five leaders of the summit soon to be held, must have the courage to project a magnificent vision of the future of the human species, of the millions of geniuses yet to be born, which they have to protect by creating a New Paradigm in international relations. And they must think and act on the level of the Coincidentia Oppositorum, the Coincidence of Opposites.