Helga Zepp-LaRouche: The World
Looks Much Different from China
[Print version of this editorial]
June 1—Schiller Institute founder and President Helga Zepp-LaRouche has just completed a major trip to China, which began with her participation in the May 14-15 Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in Beijing. She gave the following briefing today to her American associates, which is also posted on the LaRouche PAC website.
I want to make sure that you get a first impression of my trip from me, because I think the worst mistake we could make would be to respond to the absolutely incredible psywar propaganda coming from the U.S. mainstream media and the neoliberal media in Europe, such as Spiegel Online, with its Chief Editor’s piece which was really out of this way! It is very clear that people who are primarily relying on such media have a completely, totally, 100% wrong idea of what the reality is, of what’s going on. And we should really get that out of our heads and not try to swim within the bounds of a fishbowl that is an artificially created environment. Because, from my standpoint, the world looks very, very different.
First of all, I have said this already, and I reiterate it: With the Belt and Road Forum, the world has dramatically consolidated the beginning of the new era, and I don’t think at all, that—short of World War III—this is going to go away, because the majority of the world is moving in a completely liberated way. And first of all, this was the highest level conference I have ever participated in. There were 28 heads of state, speaking one after the other, and obviously, the speech by Xi Jinping was absolutely outstanding. Whoever has time to listen to it, should do so, because it was a very, very Confucian speech, which set the tone for the two-day conference in a very clear way. So, please listen to it when you have some time.
To understand what is going on, you have to think what this organization, and Lyn [LaRouche] in particular, has done for the last, almost 50 years. In 1971 Lyn recognized, for the first time, what the significance of the dismantling of the Bretton Woods system was. Consider all of the many, many things we have done in the more than 40 years since then. Lyn came back from the Iraqi Ba’ath Party celebration in 1975 and then proposed the International Development Bank (IDB) to foster a new world economic order. For one year we campaigned with this IDB proposal which then basically became part of the Colombo, Sri Lanka resolution of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1976. Then, at the end of the 1970s, we worked with Indira Gandhi on a 40-year development plan for India.
In 1976, we published a book on the industrialization of Africa. We worked with Mexican President José López Portillo on “Operation Juárez.” We put out a fifty-year Pacific Basin development plan. Lyn proposed the Oasis Plan for developing the Middle East, in 1975. And then, naturally, when the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union disintegrated, we proposed the Productive Triangle and the Eurasian Land-Bridge. All of these proposals!
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CGTN
Dr. Su Ge (left) and Helga Zepp-LaRouche (center) were interviewed by Yang Rui (right) on his CGTN Dialogue show, May 15, 2017.
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And just think of the many, many activities we carried out, conferences all over five continents, all of this was on the level of ideas, on the level of program. But only when Xi Jinping put the New Silk Road on the agenda in 2013—and in the subsequent four years of breathtaking developments of the One Belt, One Road initiative—have these ideas begun to be realized! And now the genie is out of the bottle!
LaRouche, China, Trump
Now you have the Bi-Oceanic Railway discussion and the tunnels and bridges connecting the Atlantic and Pacific in Latin America, and railways are now being opened up in Africa—this is unprecedented! This was not done by the IMF or the World Bank. They suppressed it with their conditionalities. But with the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the New Development Bank of the BRICS, the New Silk Road Fund, the Maritime Silk Road Fund, the direct investment of the China Exim Bank, the Bank of China—all of these projects are now proceeding, and they have completely changed the attitude and the built the self-confidence of all participating countries.
The way people in China look at President Trump is absolutely different from what the western media are trying to say. They are very positive about Trump, in the same way that people in Russia think that Trump is somebody you can absolutely have a decent relationship with, and that is reality.
Forget the media! Forget these whores in the press who are really just prostitutes for the British Empire. Don’t pay any attention to what they say, and don’t allow the people you are talking to, to do it either.
When Trump promised $1 trillion infrastructure investments, this was the right thing, and we put out the right program saying the United States must join the Silk Road, and that should be our focus and nothing else. Everything else should be a subsumed aspect of that. This is the strategically important thing, and when the head of the China Investment Corporation (CIC), Ding Xuedong, said it’s not $1 trillion but $8 trillion that the United States needs, he was absolutely on the mark; you know it yourself from the condition of the roads other infrastructure in all of the United States.
The fact that the CIC has now set up an office in New York, advising Chinese investors on investing in the United States, and vice versa, helping U.S. investors to invest in China; the fact that the Chinese are invited to participate in this infrastructure conference in June, all of this is absolutely going in the right direction.
What happened at the Belt and Road Forum and the many meetings I had afterwards,— after all, I spent two full weeks in Beijing, in Nanjing, in Shanghai—many of these things I’m not reporting on, because they’re just works in progress. But in the many interviews, many published quotes, and the general view—you can ask Kasia Kruczkowski and Stefan Tolksdorf, or Bill Jones—we were treated with the highest possible respect. People are fully aware of Lyn’s significance as a theoretician of physical economy, his ideas are highly respected, and people treated me as we should be treated, namely as people who have devoted their entire lives to the common good of humanity. And this is absolutely in stark contrast to the shitty behavior that we are normally getting from the neoliberals in the trans-Atlantic region.
Stay On the Offensive!
You should understand what the attack on Trump is supposed to do: It is to make it difficult for him to focus on the positive tasks, and there are quite a number of them—including his working relationship with Russia and China—that are strategically most important. So instead, he has to defend himself, and everybody thinks they have to spend all their time defending themselves. Just think back, for those of you who were around then, how our lives as an organization changed with the attack in 1986. Up to that point, we were all positive, we were winning primaries in Illinois, we were thinking in terms of creating three private universities because we had a network of around a hundred professors who wanted to implement Lyn’s ideas in the form of a curriculum in universities.
And then, after the attack came in 1986, carried out by the same apparatus that is now going after Trump, we had to spend all this money on lawyers, and we had to defend ourselves, and it changed the life of the organization completely, and that’s what they’re trying to do to Trump!
So don’t fall for it. The idea that we are losing is completely off! Mankind is on the winning track, and we have to pull the American people up, bring the American people into this, to create the kind of ferment necessary to ensure that the infrastructure program, as a first step, is on the agenda, and on everybody’s mind, and nothing else.
I just wanted to say that because from the initial discussions I had today, I got the impression that people are much too underneath it, and even if Europe is still in the grip of the EU Commission, I mean, if Merkel wants to be the leader of the free West,— forget it. Macron just had an excellent meeting with Putin, defining a cordial relationship with Russia! This is not what Merkel and Obama have been cooking up—for example, when Obama addressed the Kirchentag, the Protestant Church Assembly in Berlin on May 25. But Merkel is pretty isolated.
Just look around Europe: French President Emmanuel Macron sends Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the former Prime Minister, to the Belt and Road Forum, and he gave an excellent speech on why China and France must work together. Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni said China and Italy will work together on the development of Africa. All of the East Europeans—Tsipras of Greece, Serbia, Hungary, Czechia’s Zeman, Orban of Hungary—all of them were absolutely enthusiastic about the Belt and Road Initiative. And now even Germany—it shows that German industry is actually getting it, that their interest is to work on joint ventures in third countries together with China. So I think even Germany will change.
I have a strong conviction that by the end of this year, it will look completely different, because the development perspective is so contagious, that I think all the efforts of the British Empire to somehow throw in a monkey wrench, will not work!
So take the winning perspective, take the high ground, think strategically. And realize that what is happening in reality, in many, many development projects around the world, is what this organization has been fighting for, for almost half a century. The worst thing we could do would be to look at it from inside the United States, from within the box, when the whole world has moved out of the box decisively, with the Belt and Road Forum, which is not going to be stopped by anything.
