Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Great Prospects for the
Development of the Global Majority

Helga Zepp-LaRouche gave this keynote speech to the April 15 first panel, “The Growing Danger of World War III Underlines the Necessity for a New Security Architecture,” of the Schiller Institute’s international conference, “Without the Development of All Nations, There Can Be No Lasting Peace for the Planet.” She is the founder of the Schiller Institute.

Subheads have been added.

Dear friends of the Schiller Institute around the world, wherever you may be!

We are gathering here via Internet, united by the sincere commitment to develop and present options, how humanity can overcome the present existential dangers which lie in the presently escalating geopolitical confrontation between the “West” and Russia and China in particular, which could, in the worst case, and very short-term, lead to a global nuclear war and therefore the annihilation of the entire human species and life on earth in a following nuclear winter.

But while that danger is very acute, there is at the same time reason to be extremely joyful and optimistic, that we are experiencing the birth of a new era in the history of mankind: an epochal change, whereby the remnants of the old colonial order, in which several billion human beings were condemned to suffer poverty, hunger and underdevelopment, are being replaced by a new world economic order, which in the coming years will create conditions, whereby every newborn child will have the chance to fully develop his or her potential to become a creative person and contribute to the further advancement of humanity.

So we are very privileged to live in one of the most exciting moments in history! Let me start with a truly breaking development: Brazilian President Lula da Silva announced on Thursday in Shanghai, at the investiture ceremony of former President Dilma Rousseff as head of the New Development Bank, that now this bank of the BRICS will fulfill its original mission: to provide substantial credit to the countries of the Global South, free of the “shackles of conditionalities imposed by traditional institutions on emerging economies.”

Given the size of the populations and the weight of the economies of the BRICS+, this bank with a global reach would meet all the conditions to become the “Great Bank of the Global South.” As to the goal of the New Development Bank, he said:

It is intolerable, that on a planet that produces enough food to meet the needs of all humanity, hundreds of millions of men, women, and children have nothing to eat. It is inadmissible that the irresponsibility and greed of a small minority endanger the survival of the planet and of all of humanity...

LaRouche’s International Development Bank

That was exactly the motivation behind the proposal for the International Development Bank (IDB), that my late husband Lyndon LaRouche made in 1975 after he came back from some celebrations of the Ba’ath Party in Iraq, where he had met many leaders of the developing sector. Members of the LaRouche Organization organized in all countries of the Non-Aligned Movement for one full year for this IDB, and its concept was practically adopted in 1976 in their final resolution, which demanded a just New World Economic Order, at their conference in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

But at that time the global oligarchy proceeded to destabilize all the leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement—Mrs. Gandhi, Mrs. Bandaranaike, Ali Bhutto, and many others. It took many struggles and 48 years for this concept of an International Development Bank to be implemented by a combination of countries powerful enough to defend it against those financial institutions which regard any such effort as a “systemic rival,” which has to be contained or smashed.

There is right now an epochal change taking place. The historic period, which lasted approximately 600 years, when the first forms of sovereign nation-states—which broke with the up-to-then existing tradition that the state was only existing to protect the privileges of the oligarchical elite—devoted [themselves] for the first time to the common good, began to emerge in Europe with the France of Louis XI and the writings of Nikolaus of Kues, who formulated for the first time the concept of the representative system of government, [which] became influential.

The various empires which had been the only form of rule until the 15th Century, which existed uninterruptedly from the ancient times—the Mesopotamian, Persian, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Venetian, Anglo-Dutch, British Empires, just to name a few—always would protect only the interest of the nobility and their hangers-on to power, while trying to keep the majority of the population as slaves or as backward as possible, in order to rule over them more easily. The colonial system of exploitation of the resources of the subjugated countries—the slave trade, the very system of free trade as the means to control prices and the terms of trade—all of this was an outgrowth of the system of empires.

And as President Sukarno and President [Jawaharlal] Nehru emphasized during the time of the Bandung Conference, colonialism continued to exist in modern forms. It continued to exist in the lack of access to credit for development by the financial system, the conditionalities, the debt traps of the World Bank and the IMF so aptly described by John Perkins in his book, Confessions of an Economic Hitman, or in the form of the worldwide control of food, from the seeds to planting to harvest to food processing to sale to the customer, through the half-dozen food mega-cartels.

A New Currency To Defend Development

That system is now coming to an end! The New Development Bank promises to become one crucial element of the New Paradigm emerging through the collaboration of the BRICS+ countries, for which, according to Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov, already 24 additional countries of the Global South have applied for membership, and who are now representing a significantly larger GDP than the G-7 countries. And for sure, they represent the vast majority of the world population.

Another aspect of the new system is the new international currency based not on monetary values, but on gold and other commodities, which is being created by a combination of countries of the Global South. That new currency is being created as an act of self-defense against a whole combination of measures by the up-to-now leading financial institutions: The reckless money creation of trillions of dollars, euros, pounds, and yen; the so-called “quantitative easing” after the systemic collapse of 2008; the weaponization of the dollar through the confiscation of foreign assets of Russia, Afghanistan, and others; and the brutal sanctions against so many countries, aiming to induce regime change by starving the populations of the targeted countries to death and trying to get them to rise up.

And again, also the new currency reflects the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche, which he laid out in a famous article dated July 18, 2000, “On a Basket of Hard Commodities: Trade without Currency.”

Also in another country, not belonging to the Global South, but also being affected by the same money system of profit maximization for the few, resistance is emerging against the devastating consequences of the ongoing collapse of the trans-Atlantic financial system—namely, Switzerland. After the near-collapse of Credit Suisse, failed bail-out attempts with 50 billion Swiss Francs, and then the forced takeover through UBS, Switzerland sits now on the volcano of a monster Too Big to Fail bank, a bloated UBS which could potentially smash the entire Swiss economy, and whose counterparty derivative exposure is a ticking time bomb for the entire system.

So, a significant fight to introduce banking separation legislation in the Council of State has erupted, since much of the Swiss population has still an identity as citizens of a sovereign state.

Level of Discourse in the West

So why then is the West not happy about the emergence of the new system, which could be the lifeboat for everybody? If one listens to the mainstream media in Germany for example, or the U.S. administration, the big controversy of our time is the battle between “democracies” which are naturally “good,” and “autocracies,” which are obviously “bad.” For them, Russia is, naturally, paranoid to assume that six NATO expansions to the East, not by one inch, but 1000 km, up to more than 1,300 km of its borders, could be a threat, since neither the U.S.—with its military budget of over $800 billion, which is more than the next nine countries combined—nor NATO, could ever harm a fly.

In such coverage, they portray an amazing degree of amnesia concerning the various interventionist wars in Southwest Asia causing millions of casualties. And for sure, they don’t want to expect the average citizen to look more deeply into the implications of the official U.S. military doctrine, which allows for a pre-emptive nuclear strike, the nonchalant attitude in which countries of Europe become the battlefield of a hypothetical “limited nuclear war.”

Or consider why Daniel Ellsberg recently reminded us of the plans of John Foster Dulles to use nuclear weapons in the case of a military conflict around Taiwan in 1958, where he referred to a study of the Rand Corporation with the title, “The Crisis in the Taiwan Strait—a Documented History,” to then appeal to today’s whistleblowers to report about debates in the Pentagon about the use of nuclear weapons in China. China, about which most people know almost nothing, according to think-tanks and media, has just recently become “more aggressive” and wants to take over the world through investments.

The public discourse in the West is no longer about historical truth, which can be unearthed through investigation and Socratic dialogue; it is about the control of the “narrative,” which then becomes a belief structure.

A very noteworthy recent example: When Rolf Mützenich, leader of the SPD [Social Democratic Party—ed.] group in the Bundestag, recently supported French President Macron’s demand that the Europeans had to defend their own interest and not get drawn into the conflict between the U.S. and China over Taiwan as a U.S. vassal, leading SPD member Michael Roth countered, “I do not see any blind allegiance in Europe. Instead, I see in Washington the highest degree of sense of responsibility for peace and stability in Europe.”

It is not clear however, if he referred here to the potentially last moments of peace following the U.S. pressure on Germany to send ever more heavy weapons to Ukraine, [just] before the whole situation escalates to global war; or if he meant the stability of Europe, after the entire European political class kept their mouth shut after Seymour Hersh’s credible analysis about who had blown up the Nord Stream pipelines.

Forgotten, obviously, is the harsh rebuke by Helmut Schmidt against the unilateralism of the Bush Administration, when he wrote in Die Zeit, “Europe does not need a legal guardian”—denouncing the influence of Robert Kagan, Richard Perle, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Paul Wolfowitz. It is unclear if the apologists of the “good democracies” are simply good pupils of former CIA head Pompeo, who advocated publicly that they had “entire training courses” teaching how to lie, cheat, and steal, or if they have indoctrinated themselves for so long that they believe now their own propaganda.

The West Needs To ‘Reflect’

Any serious student of contemporary history will discover, that at the core of the present conflict between the West, and Russia, China and the Global South, is the so-called Wolfowitz Doctrine of the Project for A New American Century (PNAC), which claims the right of the United States to uphold an unipolar world based on the Anglo-American special relationship, in which no nation or group of nations would ever be allowed to bypass the U.S. in terms of political, economic, or military power.

That has been the belief structure before, of all those Anglophile presidents and strategists, who were fundamentally convinced that the “ultimate partition of China” had to occur to preserve the “Aryan stock,” as Churchill had put it in an interview in 1902; or that Russia had to be “defeated,” “weakened,” split up into ten entities, as was stated recently by members of Western governments.

It has also been consistently the belief structure behind Kissinger’s infamous NSSM 200 paper, which essentially stated that the raw materials of countries of the Global South belong to the strategic interest of the United States. It has been behind Madeleine Albright’s formulation, that the death of 500,000 Iraqi children was “worth it”; of Obama’s insistence that Africans should not have a house and a car, or “the planet would boil over.”

The vast majority of countries of the world can see that the pretense of the “rules-based order” as being the protagonists of the “good” who live in a “garden,” while all the others somehow vegetate in the “jungle,” is crumbling. Under these circumstances, a “decoupling”—not only from China, but from the emerging new economic system—would not only mean the demise of the West into chaos, it would in all likelihood mean the escalation into nuclear war.

We must therefore succeed, by all means, to convince a significant segment of the people of the United States and European nations to reflect about the significance of the historic change which we are in the middle of right now. This is not the time to run around the world and exert pressure on countries of Africa, Latin America, or Asia to break with Russia and China, which they won’t do anyway.

If we can mobilize at least segments of people in Europe and the United States in time, to recognize that it is in our best interest to cooperate with the BRICS+, the SCO, ASEAN, the African Union, and other organizations of the Global Majority, then the human species will enter a new glorious era, where we can finally concentrate on the great tasks of humanity: on creating peace through development; overcoming poverty for every person on the planet; on providing universal education to every newborn child, on creating energy and raw material security through scientific breakthroughs; by cooperating in international space science and travel; by realizing that we are the creative species in the universe.

Let me call on all participants of this conference to cooperate with us, to encourage as many nations as possible to put an international security and development architecture on the table which resolves all conflicts—by creating a just world economic order, by creating a new renaissance in a dialogue of the best traditions of all cultures, and thus by behaving, finally, human.

And let me express a big “Thank You!” and the applause of all good people on the planet to my late husband, Lyndon LaRouche, for what he has contributed to the current chances of humanity!

Thank you.