Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Is Mankind the Immortal Species,
Or More Stupid than Animals?

Helga Zepp-LaRouche is the Founder and Chairwoman of the Schiller Institute. She delivered this keynote address to Panel 1, “The March of Folly: Can Mankind Still Extinguish the Now-Lit Fuse of Thermonuclear War?” of the Schiller Institute’s May 8, 2021 conference, “The Moral Collapse of the Trans-Atlantic World Cries Out for a New Paradigm.”

I greet all of you, wherever you may be around the world.

I’m telling you that we are conducting this Schiller Institute conference with an urgent appeal to as many people as possible, to help to change the direction in which the political situation is going right now. Because we are on a course which, in a very short period of time—much shorter than anybody is probably realizing—we are on a course of potential extinction of civilization. It’s not clear where the greater danger comes from—the danger of thermonuclear war, the danger of a pandemic going out of control in combination with a world famine, or with a neo-Malthusian virus which has beset the brains of so many people, where it is not clear if they are more eager to destroy the industrial society, or if they are willing instruments of the geopolitical confrontation against Russia and China.

So, let’s start with the danger of thermonuclear war. It’s not just one trigger point, one strategic crisis. It is the overall tension between the United States, the so-called Global Britain, NATO, and increasingly also the European Union, with Russia and China. It’s becoming so big that any one of the crises around the globe could become the trigger point. It could be a crisis with Russia over Ukraine going out of control, or with China over Taiwan.

It is alarming, and it should alarm all of you that now more and more people—even so unlikely ones like Henry Kissinger, who has been not exactly a friend of our organization, which has everything to do with his infamous NSSM-200 paper which he wrote when he was National Security Advisor in 1974, that he was the enemy and adversary of everything Lyndon LaRouche and his movement stood for. But even Kissinger is now warning that the tension between the United States and China is becoming so all-engulfing for the whole world that it could lead to an Armageddon-like military clash, extinguishing mankind “in a finite period of time.” This he said about a week ago.

Then the commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, Admiral Charles Richard, in February informed the Pentagon that it should change the likelihood of nuclear war from “not likely” to “very likely.” He repeated that in front of the Congress recently.

Just two days ago, the New York Times had an article by one Peter Beinart, who said that the Biden policy towards Taiwan is truly reckless, that we are very close to war, mainly because the Democrats have abandoned the One-China policy already last year. Biden is now receiving envoys from Taiwan, as he did for his inauguration. Then, the article quotes Graham Allison, the historian who thinks that a danger of a Thucydides trap exists, by saying that people have to be clear that China would be more willing to go to war than accept losing Taiwan. In light of the history of China, this is very likely.

If it would come to such a war, given that China has 39 air bases around the region of Taiwan, [and] the United States has only two, the United States would lose any conventional war. If it would think of using regional nuclear weapons, the danger is that it would go into an all-out global nuclear war. I advise those people who don’t think that that is true, to read the papers by Ted Postol over the difference between conventional and thermonuclear war, where it is the logic that once you use one nuclear weapon, all will be used.

And also to listen to what Tulsi Gabbard said recently in an interview with Tucker Carlson, where she said that to have this geopolitical confrontation with Russia is completely crazy. Russia has “thousands of nuclear weapons” which, in a conflict, would hit every U.S. city “in less than 30 minutes.” This would bring about “excruciating death and suffering” over the American people; millions would lose their lives, and “flesh would be burned from their bones.” That would be the end of the world, and this could come much sooner than anybody thinks.

Also, the Australian press is warning that Taiwan may be a trigger for a catastrophic war, and that is not just a question of if, but when, that China has become the enemy for no other reason than it has dared to eclipse the U.S. as the most powerful economy.

On March 21st, Admiral Philip Davidson, the head of the [U.S.] Indo-Pacific Command, said we must be absolutely prepared to fight and win such a war, should competition turn into conflict. Then, the U.S. Pacific Fleet commander, Admiral John Aquilino, who will replace Admiral Davidson in his position, said we are much closer to such a war “than most think.” And [H.R.] McMaster, the former National Security Advisor to Trump basically said the most dangerous time in his view is the period between the Congress of the Chinese Communist Party later this year, and the Winter Olympics in Beijing next year. So, that is, indeed, very close. The Taiwan Defense Minister already announced that they will now mass produce long-range missiles capable of striking deep into the inside of the Chinese mainland.

So, the situation around Taiwan could be the trigger point for a global war. But so could the situation over Ukraine.

Now, with the developments in Ukraine, you had an escalation in the recent years of an incredible demonization of President Putin. But it has nothing to do with Crimea, because as Putin correctly said, if it would not have been Ukraine, they would have found some other reason.

The narrative of what is going on with Russia, Ukraine, Crimea is completely upside-down. It did not start with the so-called annexation of Crimea; it started with the EU Association Agreement for Ukraine at the end of 2013, which was rejected for good reasons. Then, that led quickly to the demonstrations on the Maidan, which escalated into the coup, leading to a Nazi coup, in February 2014. As a consequence of that coup—Victoria Nuland is now again in a position in the State Department—you had the development where the people of Crimea voted to join Russia.

You have right now [U.S. Secretary of State Antony] Blinken and Nuland in Ukraine. This is a very dangerous game, because they’re there to further the building of U.S. bases in Ukraine to support the demand by the Ukrainians to join NATO. That is reaching, then, a point where Putin has recently said that people in the West should not cross red lines, because if it would occur, “the response would be asymmetric, swift, and tough.” Russia is a nuclear superpower, and this could lead, if it would be provoked to answer in such a way, to the annihilation of mankind.

Scott Ritter, who warned that the “weapons of mass destruction” were a fake story in Iraq, recently commented on the DEFENDER-Europe 21 large maneuvers, which are going on right now along the Russian border. He basically said that all that this demonstrates is that NATO is absolutely inferior compared to the Russian troops in a conventional way; that therefore, the danger would be that if it comes to a conflict, it could go nuclear. There was a RAND Corporation study in 2016 entitled War with China; Thinking Through the Unthinkable, in which they basically say it would be better to have the war with China now, than in ten years, because the gap will close and China would probably win such a war later on.

The same RAND Corporation had a study in 2019 called Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground, which is a 354-page piece in which they describe how one should overextend Russia economically, militarily, and propaganda-wise: Number one, conduct economic warfare. Hinder the oil exports; block export of natural gas; block the construction of pipelines, such as Nord Stream 2; escalate sanctions; escalate the brain drain. Escalate the situation with Ukraine; bring lethal weapons to Ukraine; support the rebels in Syria; topple Lukashenko; increase the cost for Russia in the South Caucasus; go for a color revolution in Moldavia. Discredit the election process in Russia, like [with] Navalny; cause unrest in Russia, go for a color revolution. Put military bombers, missiles at the border to cause permanent stress for Russia. Provoke Russia into a costly arms race. Now, if you listen to that so-called study, you have the exact script for about everything that happened in the last two years.

This conference actually was caused to happen by the urgent appeal by Cardinal [Mario] Zenari from Syria, where he has issued a call saying that as a result of the combination of ten years of war in which the United States was allied with al-Qaeda, al-Nusra, and ISIS—these are my words, not his—which was aimed to topple the legitimate elected government of Syria, the pandemic, and the co-called “Caesar sanctions,” we have now a situation where more than 90% of the Syrian population are below the poverty line.

I just should note that the Caesar sanctions are based on the same kind of fraud as we have seen used as a pretext for all of these endless wars, like the chemical weapons supposedly used by the Syrian government which was a fraud by the White Helmets; or the babies ripped out of incubators [by Iraqi soldiers invading Kuwait] in 1991, which was a lie. Then you had the so-called weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003; the yellowcake from Niger. This was all a complete lie.

Unilateral sanctions such as these Caesar sanctions are, from the standpoint of international law, completely illegal. We will hear about that from Professor Köchler shortly. The only kinds of sanctions which are allowed would be those which are agreed upon by the UN Security Council. Otherwise, unilateral sanctions are a form of warfare, which targets the poor, the old people, the children. It is the idea to drive the pain of the population so high because of lack of food and medicine, that eventually it will cause an uprising and conduct regime change.

Brian O’Toole, who is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a former advisor to the U.S. Treasury, and he worked for the CIA, is an expert in so-called “behavior economics,” He said that this is a strategy to raise the “pain meter”—what an insane expression. For Russia, it would only be 10% of this pain meter, and it would be important to drive it up to 70% by cutting Russia off of SWIFT, the connection to the international financial system, and to cut off Sberbank from financial transactions.

For Syria, a continuation of these Caesar sanctions means the deaths of many thousands, maybe millions of people. But the people who are conducting this say literally, “So what?” I’m not exaggerating! [Former Secretary of State] Madeline Albright said on a “60 Minutes” program with Leslie Stahl, that the half million children who died in Iraq as a result of the sanctions—these were children under the age of 5!—she said, “I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”

David Beasley, the head of the UN World Food Program, just made a documentary about the famine in Yemen, called “Hunger Ward,” which I would urge everybody to watch. He showed how in Yemen, there were little girls with arms as thin as my finger. They had hollow eyes and their skin was like parchment because of the starvation process. But I think Mrs. Albright should have nightmares every single night where each of these 500,000 dying children from Iraq look at her and haunt her, looking at her with their dying eyes, and this would continue until this woman has a human feeling.

The situation is much worse, because according to the UN World Food Program, the new report they published, 2021 Global Report on the Food Crisis, says 55 nations are in extreme need of food. And Syria, because of the sanctions, the war, the depreciation of their pound, there is now a very high number of food-insecure people. The food prices from December 2019 until 2020 increased by 236%.

That means that all together in all of these nations—40 nations—34 million people are in acute danger of starvation in the coming months. Beasley, at the SIPRI—the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute—called on all nations to mobilize urgent support to avert mass deaths of millions of people. Actually, a number of people which is very quickly going to be as much as all of World War II deaths. He mentioned that UN Security Council Resolution 2417 was passed unanimously in 2018, and that resolution states very clearly that hunger cannot be used as a weapon of war. There are, right now, 155 million people in acute food insecurity. These people are in countries like Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Haiti, northern Nigeria, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Yemen, Zimbabwe.

The COVID-19 pandemic in India has already officially caused 238,000 deaths. But according to experts, it is 5 to 10 times higher, because they count only the people who die in hospitals, not the people who die in the countryside. The few planeloads of aid, which are being sent by international countries, is just a drop in the ocean. The head of the African CDC said that they are horrified by looking at India, because most of the vaccinations which came to Africa were produced there, and now with the crisis exploding in India, they are worried that no more vaccine is coming. It is also clear that we are looking at mass deaths in Brazil and many other places.

If you look at this picture as a totality, and that is what we have to do, the chickens are coming home to roost. We are now at the exact point Lyndon LaRouche predicted in 1971 when Nixon destroyed the old Bretton Woods system and went on a course of monetary liberal policies. Lyndon LaRouche at that point said that if you continue on this course, it will come to a point where you are faced with the danger of a new depression, the danger of war, and the danger of a new fascism. My late husband was also absolutely correct when he warned already in 1973 that the IMF conditionalities would mean that new pandemics would come and that would eventually be a total threat to civilization.

The financial system is about to blow. We are looking at a situation where, after the 2008 systemic crisis, nothing was done to remedy the root causes, but just quantitative easing and pumping money by the trillions, and now we are looking at the potential of a hyperinflationary blow-out like it was in Germany in 1923. In 1923, the Reichsbank printed money to pay the war debt and the reparations. First you didn’t see much of it, but then in November 1923, it exploded, and became the complete expropriation of the life work of the people.

Yesterday, Bank of America put out a report saying that we have just a “transitory hyperinflation.” This is visible because all the commodity prices are going up, but this will soon translate to an increase in consumer prices. “A transitory hyperinflation” is as much as being a “little bit pregnant.” However, that hyperinflation is the necessary result of all of this policy of further speculation in the last period, is known to all the big players. And this is the real reason why they are betting to create one last super-bubble by going for the Great Reset, the Great Transformation of the decarbonization of the world economy, the Green New Deal. It is the illusion that if they pump now in the next ten years another $60 trillion into the financial system, that that would somehow save their earnings and their system. But it would just mean a gigantic transfer of wealth again from the poor to the rich.

This is already on the horizon. It’s happening because the EU is implementing the Green New Deal, the Biden administration is doing it. While that only threatens the de-industrialization of the so-called advanced countries, for the developing countries it means mass death on top of the crises I already mentioned. The Indian Energy Minister, Mr. [Raj Kumar] Singh, recently said that the Green deal may be OK for the industrialized nations, but absolutely not for the developing sector. Alone in Africa, 800 million Africans don’t have access to electricity. It would mean—and these are my words now—it would mean an absolutely massive reduction of the population, and it is also clear that this is their intent.

What is to be done? There is a solution, but it is important to take all these problems at once, because when you have a systemic crisis like what I’m describing with these different elements, it is not enough to solve a little of this and a little bit of that crisis. You have to create a completely different system. President Putin, in January 2020, called for an urgent meeting of the Permanent Five Members of the UN Security Council. I think that is what must absolutely happen now. Such a summit should be called because of the danger of World War III, a pandemic out of control, a world famine, the danger of a blow-out of the financial system. It must lead to an immediate implementation of the following program:

Given the pandemic, the only way to stop that and future pandemics, is to create a world health system, which means a modern health system in every single country. Because if you don’t stop the pandemic in even the poorest country on the planet, it will come back; there will be new variants, new strains, which eventually could make obsolete the vaccines which already have been distributed. So, we are in a race against time.

We should do in every single country what was done in Wuhan when the pandemic broke out. Build hospitals! This can be done with the Army Corps of Engineers, with aid organizations. In one week, one can build a hospital for 1,000 people. Then, these modern hospitals need well-educated doctors, nurses. You need lots of clean water; two billion people in the world have no access to clean water. You need lots of electricity; this cannot be done without infrastructure. So, the building of a modern health system in every country can and must be the beginning of overcoming the underdevelopment of the developing countries for good.

We have to have a program of global poverty elimination, exactly as it was intended by Franklin D. Roosevelt when he called for the Bretton Woods [system], which was never implemented because of his untimely death. But now, we need exactly that. It must start with a global Glass-Steagall banking separation which then must be followed by the creation of a Hamiltonian national banking system in every country. We need a credit system which then can become a New Bretton Woods system. Then we can finance the extension of the New Silk Road into Southwest Asia. The possibility to overcome the death and starvation in Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, the solution is obvious. When President Xi Jinping was in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Egypt in 2015, he offered to extend the New Silk Road into the entire region.

That program, and the Schiller Institute has worked on a comprehensive program for the entire region, can be implemented in such a P-5 UN Security Council meeting. It is agreed, and then all the big neighbors of Southwest Asia—Russia, China, India—all work together and the United States and European nations agree to cooperate in the reconstruction of this region, which has been destroyed by these endless wars. Then, naturally, the New Silk Road with this international cooperation—including other countries like Japan, India, South Korea—should all be involved in the reconstruction of Africa.

We have to replace geopolitical confrontation with a crash program of cooperation for the development of thermonuclear fusion power, where in the recent period, major breakthroughs have occurred. Once we have fusion power, we will have a safe energy source for the whole human population, and we will also tackle the problem of limited raw materials, because you can separate isotopes with the fusion torch procedure and create new raw materials. We have to have international cooperation in space. Rather than extending geopolitical confrontation into space, we should have international cooperation to build a village on the Moon, and soon a city on Mars.

We should listen to the head of the Mars mission and the head of the Space Agency of the United Arab Emirates, Miss Al-Amiri, who already some years ago made a beautiful speech where she stuck her finger in the air like this—please put on the video—people should look at what is at the end of her finger to see what the sky will tell them. Can you put on the video, please?

Sarah Al-Amiri (video): The Hubble Space Telescope was pointed at a region that small [pointing her finger]. And it came up with this image. This image, the dots of light that you see in these images are not stars. They’re galaxies. There are hundreds of billions of stars in each one of those dots in that small region of sky that we look at. [end video]

Zepp-LaRouche: Now, the Hubble Telescope discovered that there are at a minimum 2 trillion galaxies. I would like you to really put your mind on that thought, and then think how stupid it would be that we, as a human species who are the only species which can potentially be the immortal species because of our creative reason, that we would destroy ourselves in a thermonuclear destruction. I think we should have the ambition not to be more stupid than the animals, because there is no animal species which would ever conduct such a behavior. Thank you.