HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

Frenzied ‘Global NATO’ Consolidation Is a Threat to All Humanity

This is the edited transcript of the Schiller Institute’s weekly online live dialogue with Helga Zepp-LaRouche. A video of the webcast is available here .

Harley Schlanger: Hello! Welcome to our weekly conversation with Helga Zepp-LaRouche. She is the founder and leader of the Schiller Institute. I’m Harley Schlanger, today is January 18, 2023.

What we’re seeing is an absolute frenzy of activity from the war-party leaders. There are discussions of continuing to fight until Russia is defeated, discussions of continuing this war into 2024. It’s really quite bizarre to see what’s going on. The Ramstein meeting is coming up on Friday [Jan. 20] with the Ukraine Contact Group. Helga, why don’t you catch us up on some of what you have on this?

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: The announcement made at the NATO summit in Madrid last summer, to go for a Global NATO, is in full swing. If you watch the totality of these things, you really get the impression that this is all preparation for World War III, for a global showdown with China, in which the present conflict between NATO and Russia over Ukraine is just a stepping-stone. But, that’s not the whole picture.

The Jan. 20 Ramstein meeting is the third of such meetings. I know for sure that U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley will be there, maybe U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin as well. The pressure on Germany to finally agree to send Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine is escalating by the day. One can expect that at this meeting, some new escalation will be announced. It certainly appears that some of these people are driven by frenzy, without thinking about the consequences.

However, more and more people are warning that this may lead, step by step, into an escalation leading to World War III. For example, General Erich Vad (ret.), who had been an advisor to former German Chancellor Merkel, said such in a very important interview with the German magazine EMMA. Former U.S. Sen. Ron Paul also said we are edging toward a nuclear World War III. More people who are waking up and seeing that sending more weapons to Ukraine, crossing Russia’s red lines every five minutes, actually does increasingly take us to the edge of global nuclear war.

Yet there are still people, associated with the NATO-U.S.-British outlook, who keep saying these war-mongering things as if all of this had no consequence.

And it’s very clear in this context, that the continental Europeans are being completely trampled upon, their interests are trampled upon. The German economy is about to be completely destroyed. Everything which happens is really at the orders of Washington and London. We apparently don’t have governments in Europe anymore that defend the interest of the European people.

We are in a situation that cannot continue very long, even if some intend it to do just that. Wolfgang Ischinger, for example, who is the former Chairman of the Munich Security Conference, said that this war will run for a good, long time, despite the fact that he has noted the anomaly that Ukraine every day uses as much ammunition as Germany produces in half a year. How that will continue, is another mystery. But he indicated that the war would go on, and that others are saying it will continue well into 2024.

Now, that is the date of the presidential election in Russia. Some of these people clearly want to drag this war out so that it will become a war of attrition. According to their calculations, by 2024, the Russian population will be so affected that they will accept a regime change that finally gets Putin out of office. That’s completely illusory, but that is clearly what some people want. They don’t think for a minute what that would do. It would repeat the horror-show of the Verdun fight in the trenches in World War I, when one million German and French young men were slaughtered for no good reason. And this led to the horrible social consequences, which then led to World War II. So, they don’t want to learn the lesson of history. To have the idea of dragging this war on for another year or so is completely evil.

Global NATO Alliances

Schlanger: Let’s just take a look at some of the frenzied activities. U.K. Foreign Secretary Cleverly was in Washington yesterday. The British have announced that they’re sending Challenger 2 tanks to Ukraine. A U.K.-Japan alliance was announced, and a lot of this is aimed at pressure on Germany. And in Germany, we just had a change of Defense Minister. What do you think the effect of that will be?

Zepp-LaRouche: I don’t know—there are some reports that say that Boris Pistorius is more capable of defending his decision than Christine Lambrecht was. Lambrecht for sure was the wrong person in the wrong spot. But the way the media hyenas went after her after the decision was leaked on Jan. 13 that she would resign, makes you almost feel sorry for her. This style of politics has become so absolutely disgusting and brutal. People should look into the mirror when they write such things—and interestingly Spiegel is called “spiegel” because when these people look into the “Spiegel,” (into the mirror), they don’t see a very nice face.

I don’t have a clear opinion yet about Pistorius. There are some hints that he may be loyal to [German] Chancellor Scholz. In the past, he was critical of sanctions. He has pulled back by qualifying his previous remarks. Be that as it may, as long as this German government, with Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock from the Greens, running around calling for tribunals against Putin, and all kinds of things like that, acting a sidekick of Blinken—is not standing up for German interests. It is not in the interest of Germany to become a war party.

However, step by step, with the sending of Marder tanks, with training Ukrainian troops, Germany is a war party. If this thing continues to go wrong, there will be absolutely nothing left of Germany, nor for any other country either. So, I don’t have the opinion that the change of defense minister will cause a significant change. Pistorius may be a different personality than Lambrecht. He may have some opinions—but nothing stands against this war drive right now in any serious fashion, and that is the problem.

Raving About War with China by 2027

Schlanger: Talking about Global NATO, there were some new developments in the last few days: There was the publication of an article by R. Evan Ellis from the U.S. Army War College, titled “The Strategic Role of Latin America in a Global Conflict Over Taiwan,” It includes the idea that Ibero-America should be a resource base for the United States to loot, and that China’s Belt and Road developments in Ibero-America are a threat against the United States. This is pretty blatant, isn’t it? This is the new face of colonialism.

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes, the article you mentioned was published in a magazine of the Peruvian army. Maybe Evan Ellis thought it was for a limited audience. This article is actually quite revealing. He says that there will be war with China, at the latest by 2027 over Taiwan, and that that war will be global. Therefore, the countries of Ibero-America have no right to ally with the Belt and Road Initiative, because that would give China access to resources in Latin America.

Now, first of all, to say that there will be war with China by 2027 and that this war will be global, and also planning for that war, preparing for that war, that’s just insane! It’s insane! Who wants to plan for World War III? Who thinks anybody will survive it? If you thought that this was merely the statement of some low-level guy from the War College, consider that the head of the U.S. Southern Command, Gen. Laura Richardson, said basically the same thing. She was even more specific, noting that Latin America has a great store of raw materials. The region has 60% of the world’s lithium, rare earth minerals, other crucial minerals, and raw materials. Therefore, she indicates, Latin American can absolutely not be allowed to make deals with the “adversary,” meaning Russia and China. This is because, she says, that this is total confrontation, including the whole gambit—air, sea, cyber, and space. She also says that China is only becoming involved in these infrastructure projects with countries in Latin America to lure them into the “debt trap.”

Now, if people start to believe their own propaganda, it’s really becoming bad! One hundred and fifty countries of the developing sector are very happy to work with the Belt and Road Initiative. It provides them, for the first time, the chance to have real infrastructure projects, to overcome poverty, to have the hope of overcoming underdevelopment. And as for the “debt trap,” if you look at the record of which country is indebted to whom, you find that the majority of debt is going to banks of the Paris Club, to the IMF and World Bank—to the West. It is not China at all.

With the election of the Lula government in Brazil, the overwhelming majority of countries in Ibero-America are determined to cooperate with China in the formation of a new world economic order. But you have, at the same time, massive destabilizations going on in many countries, Brazil being the most violent so far, but also Peru and others.

Schlanger: Well, Gen. Richardson also said that we are not in competition, we are in conflict. And she said, we’re not going to allow this to occur in “our neighborhood.” Doesn’t that remind you about what Brzezinski said in the late-1970s about not wanting any more Japans south of our border?

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes. And it also reminds me of the famous, or infamous, Kissinger NSSM-200 memorandum from 1974, which was only published in the 1990s, in which he said very blatantly, that all the raw materials of the world belong to the United States, or are of U.S. national security interest.

This is definitely not going to go unnoticed. Concerning Global NATO: You have right now a very clear effort to put together one military alliance after the other, to create a network of corresponding military agreements.

For example, between the EU and NATO, an agreement was just made that moves toward a merger, with the idea that each member of the one group is automatically in contact with all other groups. Now, if you then add to the fact that you have the Japan-U.K. “Reciprocal Access Agreement”, the two nations can now use each other’s territory and forces in a reciprocal way. Then you have AUKUS, which is a U.S., Australia, UK security alliance, of which China is clearly the target. Then you have an effort by Japan—Japan is now, with Kishida’s visit to the United States, going back to its militarist past. Really, one has to look at that!

Germany is going back to its militarist past. People are talking about putting the German industry back on a war economy. Well, doesn’t that bring forward very eerie memories of 80 years ago? Japan is now talking about nuclear weapons and doubling its military budget. Kishida also said that Japan is going to actively seek a role in military alliances with countries in the Caribbean and Latin America, in Africa, in Asia—and is obviously courting India very heavily, for an India-Japan strategic partnership.

So, you can actually see that there is a real effort to cement Global NATO into an alliance against Russia, China, and the countries of the Global South, which do want to go in the direction of a new world economic order. And that’s really the fight. There are some people who want to keep the status quo, which makes the billionaires happy, but keeps billions of people in relative poverty. And then you have the efforts by those countries that want to overcome colonialism, because they have recognized that colonialism has continued to exist in modern dress. Today’s colonialism is basically by monetary and trade agreements that put nations in a status of inferiority. Those nations want to end that.

So that is really the essence of the conflict. It has very little to do with what mainstream media are telling anybody. Ukraine is just the battleground for the containment of Russia, which is now linked to China. So, you can’t look at Ukraine in an isolated fashion: You have to look at the totality of the process going on, and this has the potential of disaster. That is why we are calling for a complete shift in policy. We have to go back to negotiation and find solutions by diplomacy. Because if we continue on this road of militarizing the whole world, the existence of humanity is at stake.

The Process of Schiller Institute Conferences

Schlanger: Helga, you’ve been asking the questions: Where is the outcry? Where are the sane leaders from around the world? We’ve seen certain things, such as General Vad, as you mentioned, former U.S. Senator, Ron Paul. There were some relatively decent statements from Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg, saying that Russia must be included; Croatian President Milanovic, and others. But I think it’s important that people understand that the real center of the opposition to this war policy requires an alternative. We’ve had a series of conferences. It would be useful for you to review, going back to last week, when we had the conference on the Merkel/Minsk story, and then on the weekend, on the “International Assassination Bureau,” in which people came forward with very profound expressions of opposition to this, what some people call the “deep state,” which really is the unipolar order.

Give us a sense of how you’ve been deploying to bring about this change?

Zepp-LaRouche: Well, since the war broke out, we’ve had a whole series of Schiller Institute internet conferences through which we have been putting together a growing group of people from all over the world, who are fighting for a shift in the strategic situation. We have made it clear that there must be put on the agenda a new international security and development architecture that takes into account the interest of every single country on the planet. The challenges posed are: How can we, as a human species, govern ourselves in the very complex situation of the 21st century? How can we self-govern?

Are we condemned to repeat the mistakes of the 20th century, with world wars, which this time would be a global thermonuclear war? I say no. I think that’s not acceptable. Therefore, that’s why we are trying to fight to build a world partnership of world citizens, who put humanity first.

Friedrich Schiller coined this idea that there is no contradiction between patriots and world citizens. We have to get people to think as world citizens. Only if you take the interest of humanity as a whole into account can you come up with the right answers.

I would ask you, our viewers, go to the Schiller Institute website, and look at the “Conference” page. You can go back to April 2020, and look at the 20 or more conferences, and the extraordinary list of speakers who came there together. You can see that this is a growing movement of people who say, we definitely need an alternative.

The last conferences addressed specific aspects: One was what was triggered by the revelation that then-German Chancellor Merkel and then-French President François Hollande admitted that they had agreed to the Minsk process, only in order to gain time to arm the Ukrainian troops and to prepare them for war with Russia. And I can tell you, from the reaction to this program, and discussions we had, people in Germany are really very, very upset! This was noticed by at least the more conscious political people. We got several reactions in which people said: Look, I didn’t have much trust in government before, but this was really the last straw; that Merkel would cheat in this way was really one step too much. That’s one aspect.

The Russians reacted very, very severely to this admission. Putin said that just confirmed for him, that he should have started the special military operation in Ukraine much earlier. He does have some internal opposition in Russia, of people who say that it was Putin’s softness that he waited so long.

For those people, who want to get rid of Putin, by the way, they should consider that he may not be the worst option from their standpoint. There are some real hardliners in Russia, who may take even steps other than Putin has taken.

Then, on Jan. 14 we had an event on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s birthday, and there, we had a whole variety of speakers looking at important different aspects. The conference made clear that the murder of Martin Luther King had to be understood in the context of three other murders, John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Malcolm X, and the coverup of those murders. And there’s now a big motion in the United States to finally fully release the files on the Kennedy assassination, which was supposed to happen 25 years after the murder occurred. It did not happen. For some reason, Trump did not do that, and now Biden hasn’t either. Some leaks have occurred that maybe Hoover was involved in this assassination. Making these Kennedy files public is extremely important, because if you want to know what went wrong in the United States, you have to go back to the paradigm shift which occurred with the murder of Kennedy, and especially the coverup of the Warren Commission.

Then we also reviewed other political assassinations: In Africa, the murder of Patrice Lumumba; of Enrico Mattei and Aldo Moro in Italy; the assassination attempts against de Gaulle; and for Germany, all the assassinations of the Baader-Meinhof between 1977-78 and then again, the so-called “third generation” of Baader-Meinhof with the murder of Herrhausen in 1989 and Rohwedder in 1991, which clearly was an attempt to make sure that German sovereignty would not occur in the reunification context. So, if you look at all of this, you get a sense of history which is quite different from the official “narrative.” Narrative, by definition, means an effort to control the explanation of what happened, and has nothing to do with historical truth.

I can only encourage you, our viewers, if you haven’t done that yet, go back and view these conferences, because they were incredibly rich in terms of groundbreaking historical materials. And in order to understand this present situation, one absolutely has to look at these historical contexts.

Schlanger: I think especially the Jan. 14 event, which gave a continuity that doesn’t exist anywhere else: The fact, that as you mentioned, Italy, France, Germany, and in Africa, you see that these were not isolated instances. And this is crucial for being able to figure out how this oligarchy is operating, and has been operating, and what their intention is.

Upcoming Feb. 4, International Conference

Now, Helga, we have another scheduled for Feb. 4. Do you want to say something about that?

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes: That will be a major Schiller Institute conference, where we will, on the one side, try to analyze where we are at in terms of the war danger. The larger part of the conference is designed to bring together speakers who will discuss what we have to do to get out of this situation. What are the principles that such a new security and development architecture must have? What would they look like?

And there I can say, we have a growing interest from many countries of people who want to be part of that, because the efforts of the Schiller Institute to actually discuss what is necessary, to discuss the nature of the principal programmatic solutions for overcoming poverty. That includes creating a world health system, having universal education, creating a credit system which finances all of that, going back to a crash program for thermonuclear fusion power, international space cooperation to be able to have the necessary jump in productivity: All of these things will be elaborated. And nobody but us, (maybe China has a similar approach), but I will say, that the Schiller Institute is really the most comprehensive in terms of how we get out of this.

And, naturally, we have to discuss the philosophical underpinnings: What is the nature of man? Are we beasts? Are we just a burden on nature? Or, is man, by definition, good and the most advanced geological force in the universe, as Vladimir Vernadsky said? [See the presentations in the Schiller Institute’s November 12, 2022 conference. Our answer is that we are good by definition, and all evil comes from a lack of development, and therefore, can be overcome.

So, we will have a quite challenging discussion. So, I can only suggest to you that you should reserve the date, Feb. 4. Register to be part of the conference, because then you will have access to simultaneous translation. Get the word out, because we urgently need a real alternative which is visible, and which has the power to change the present course of history.

Schlanger: And we need more voices that know what they’re talking about. That’s why I would recommend, look at these series of events that are archived on the Schiller Institute website, including the ones from last week.

So, Helga, thanks for joining us again, and we’ll look forward to seeing you again next week.

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes, till next week.