ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

The Empire Based in London Won’t Give Up.
They Must, and Can Be Defeated

[Print version of this transcript]

This is the edited transcript of the May 3, 2018 Schiller Institute New Paradigm webcast, an interview with the founder of the Schiller Institutes, Helga Zepp-LaRouche. She was interviewed by Harley Schlanger. A video of the webcast is available.

Harley Schlanger: Hello. I’m Harley Schlanger from the Schiller Institute. Welcome to this week’s Schiller Institute international webcast, featuring our President and founder, Helga Zepp-LaRouche.

There’s been an incredible density of events over these last days, with the motion toward the New Paradigm and the New Silk Road, but also with a string of war provocations coming from Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, with threats to Iran. Helga, why don’t we start there, because this is an extremely dangerous development, what Netanyahu did.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: It’s quite significant. Even a German politician, Norbert Röttgen, from the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), who is otherwise quite a hawk, accused Netanyahu of having committed a conscious fraud in an effort to fool the international community by claiming that Iran is still involved in a secret nuclear program. Meanwhile, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) announced that there is absolutely no truth to that claim; that it, the IAEA, has issued ten different reports showing that Iran is fully compliant with the Iran agreement on nuclear weapons, and that there is absolutely nothing new in the material presented by Netanyahu.

This was said even by a number of former security officials from Israel. So the question is, what was Netanyahu’s purpose? I think it is is clearly a provocation. It’s not yet entirely clear where the most recent missile attacks in Syria came from, but it’s not to be excluded that they did come from Israel. Netanyahu now has a bill in the Knesset which in the first reading got an absolute majority, which would empower Netanyahu to go to war. There is some opposition in the Knesset against this, because the term “extreme circumstances” is not specified, and therefore, it’s a sort of carte blanche because he can always declare “extreme circumstances.”

This is very, very dangerous. This is obviously a power game, not really about the nations of Southwest Asia as such. Iran is the thorn in the flesh of Netanyahu, but I think the way to look at the situation is that Southwest Asia is once again the theater for a proxy war, where the real issue is the confrontation against Russia and China. Rather than getting caught up in every single provocation, I encourage you, our viewers, to think about the strategic long arc of developments. I could take it back all the way to the collapse of the Soviet Union, but let’s start with the election of President Trump. During the presidential election campaign he promised that he would improve the relationship with Russia. He abandoned the anti-China line that he had maintained during the election campaign soon after assuming the presidency, and instead began developing a very good relationship with Xi Jinping and China. From the standpoint of the geopolitical faction of the Western world—situated largely in the City of London and with its junior partner, Wall Street—the idea of healthy relations between the United States President and the governments of Russia and China, is a nightmare, because it absolutely eliminates the divide and conquer politics, and other geopolitical games.

Let’s look at the origin of all of these developments, starting with the Russiagate hoax against Trump that is now completely out the window because there was no Russiagate. The British origin and British collusion in the coup attempt against Trump became the center of attention in the Congress and other U.S. investigative committees. Then you had the Skripal affair, which, by the way, now has also completely died out; it has disappeared from the British media. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zakharova pointed out yesterday, the Skripal affair is no longer being mentioned in the British media. When that story fell apart, you had the so-called chemical weapons attack by the Assad government, which then turned out didn’t even take place—it was a complete smokescreen by the British-controlled White Helmets organization. That’s fallen apart. Now, you have a supposed Iranian nuclear program, which also is a fraud. And not to be overlooked are the developments in Ukraine, where President Petro Poroshenko yesterday announced a military solution for the “liberation” of the Donbas. And there you have the same group of organizations involved which we have pinned down and published about many times in the past.

All these goings on really constitute a single long arc, aimed at the containment of Russia and China. Russia’s Foreign Minister Lavrov just gave a long, very important interview to the Italian media, in which he said that every time President Trump moves to improve the U.S. relationship with Russia, the Russophobia mafia inside the United States creates a new provocation. Lavrov stressed that many of the problems of the world remain unresolved because the solutions require positive cooperation between the United States and Russia.

People have to really understand that all of these crises, while they may have some internal logic, some historical or ethnic causality, are nevertheless being played on the big chessboard in the larger game, which is the containment of Russia and China. That containment is no longer possible. We are, therefore, experiencing new tensions and very dangerous developments, almost on a daily basis.

Schlanger: That review is very useful. You can look at each individual event, but the connection is what’s important. It’s broader than just a regional war in the Middle East: If something happens with the Iranian nuclear agreement, that’ll have an implication for what otherwise looks so positive in the Korean situation, wont it?

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes. The North Korea/South Korea process is one of the most joyful things happening right now. Some of the lesser known details are very interesting. During the meeting between Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in, South Korean President Moon gave a booklet and thumb drive to Kim Jong-un, detailing fully-fledged development plans for North Korea, which apparently involve, among other things, two railway lines to be built along the southern and northern coasts of North Korea, connecting both with the ancient Silk Road, but also with the Trans-Siberian Railway through Russia.

This is very positive. There has been a CIA team in North Korea for a week, inspecting various sites, and National Security Advisor John Bolton said that these are all signs of good will and that the release of three Americans being held in North Korea is possible. President Trump has let it be known that he is looking forward to meeting Kim Jong-un very soon. Kim Jong-un has expressed a desire to meet with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and President Moon of South Korea offered to broker such a meeting. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi is in North Korea today. These are all very, very good developments, because if the Koreas achieve a peace treaty and unification under Korean sovereignty, this would a very, very important milestone for all of humanity.

But there is a danger of this being scuttled. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who wants to push the Iranian influence out of Syria—timed his statement with the May 12th deadline, which is when the United States is expected to make a decision to either extend, renegotiate, or cancel the Iranian nuclear agreement. Obviously, Netanyahu wanted to create a certain kind of hysteria, so that the United States would insist on renegotiation, which from the standpoint of the Iranians, constitutes a cancellation, and would throw the whole situation immediately into a very dangerous destabilization. It may actually lead to the desire of the Iranians to then scrap the whole deal and go back to building nuclear weapons.

Should that happen, this could threaten the North Korean situation, because, remember, Kim Jong-un began intense nuclear testing and missile testing, because he looked at the Middle East and came to the conclusion that the only way for him to prevent what happened to Saddam Hussein and Muammar al-Qaddafi from happening to him, would be for North Korea to demonstrate that it is a full-fledged nuclear power and therefore, has a defense against such things.

If Kim Jong-un came to think that even if he had an agreement with the United States, that the U.S. could throw it out on any occasion, I think this would a very, very dangerous thing. I hope that President Trump does not overlook that concern, because there is very clearly an effort to play that, to ruin the possibility of a North Korea/South Korea agreement again.

All these things hang altogether. The IAEA did say that Iran is completely in compliance with the nuclear agreement. Even Federica Mogherini, the Foreign Minister of the European Union, reiterated that the IAEA is the only institution which should be consulted concerning these questions, and should any problems arise, they should be brought to IAEA, rather than resorting to wild, independent actions, because only the IAEA is equipped to deal with such matters.

This is the field of tension in which all of this is taking place.

Schlanger: There’s a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy here that the neo-conservatives play: Once you cut off negotiations and diplomatic discussion, you create what they call a “rogue state.” Then they say the “rogue state” is dangerous because it doesn’t adhere to principles. In fact, it is that geopolitical grouping in West that produces the fear that leads to nations backing away and developing weapons.

This is also important in the broader context. You’ve been pointing out the importance of the meeting between India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping of China. This meeting has extraordinary implications, not just for those two countries, but also for another part of Southwest Asia that has been wracked by war, Afghanistan. What can you tell us about the progress on that front?

Zepp-LaRouche: This may be as important as the Korean developments, because there was an effort to play India in the so-called Indo-Pacific combination—Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and India—against the New Silk Road and against China. For historical reasons, there is a strong British geopolitical influence in parts of India’s establishment, which has been susceptible, and was played upon by the neo-cons and the British. That British empire faction asserts that India, being the world’s largest democracy, is not interested in working with communist China but rather believes in the Western way of life, and is therefore a natural partner of the western led Indo-Pacific combination.

For a while it looked as if this manipulation would go forward. However, after the border incident at Doklam, both India and China realized how devastating it would be for the two largest countries in the world to get into some kind of a military conflict again. There was a process of rethinking in India. Most people around Modi are now moving in the direction of working with China.

That does not yet mean that India supports the New Silk Road. The issue of Pakistan is really a sticky one for India. China is building a very important China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, from China to Gwadar Port on Pakistan’s Arabian Sea coast, which India completely objects to. That’s why, at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) meeting, the Indian Foreign Minister did not sign the New Silk Road resolution. But India and China are now working together on the China-Nepal-India corridor, which is part of the New Silk Road.

In their “informal summit” over two days in Wuhan, China, Modi and Xi had six discussions. Remember, India and China are not only the two most populous countries—they have together 2.6 billion people. That’s 40 percent of the entire human population of the world. They also have the longest continuous cultures, more than 5,000 years old, and have, over the course of universal history, contributed an enormous amount of knowledge, poetry, and art, and are both important creators of human civilization.

What is very exciting is that they agreed, in this context, to joint development between India and China, in war-torn Afghanistan. They will build a railroad from Iran to Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and China that will tie Afghanistan into the Belt and Road Initiative, which is obviously very important for Afghanistan. Several months ago, Afghanistan’s President, Ashraf Ghani, had said that the only way to solve Afghanistan’s problems would be as part of the New Silk Road; but it also is a way of bridging, so to speak, the India-Pakistan conflict, because there are close relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan. China has a better relationship with Pakistan than India does. If China and India can now develop Afghanistan together, it touches on this higher level of reason, which is, as we have said from the beginning, the really essential core of the New Silk Road. You need a concept under which everybody benefits, where you have a higher level of cooperation to overcome ethnic, historical, and other conflicts.

So if India and China can work together in Afghanistan for the improvement of the situation there, this is a typical example of how the New Silk Road is also a peace initiative that can solve all kinds of problems. So I think this is a very, very good development.

Schlanger: The Pentagon has just released a report on Afghanistan, saying that after 16 years, the situation is worse—with continuous war, with both U.S. and NATO deployments. What you have just presented is the only alternative.

This brings up a very important point: In the last couple of days, we’ve been reviewing the role that your husband has played in bringing forward this idea of the Four Powers. His first formulation of the idea of a Four Power agreement—Russia, India, China, and the United States—was in December 2008, right after the great financial crash in September 2008. I know you’ve been to India, you’ve been to China repeatedly, you’re now seeing this potential becoming real.

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes. I think it’s really very good. I remember when my husband, Lyndon LaRouche, first put forward these ideas of a Four Power Agreement, everyone was full of disbelief: “How could this ever be?” But at that time he said, given that a financial oligarchy is really running so much of the world, and is using private security services that are a sort of modern mercenary force defending this financial structure, you need the four most powerful sovereign nation-states in the world to ally together to defeat it.

He emphasized that we are dealing with an empire, which is the British empire. This characterization is historically correct because, as he also developed in great detail, many times this empire—the idea of an empire with an oligarchical elite ruling over a backward mass of people—is not something new. It goes way back, even to the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire; then it moved to Venice, and then it became the Anglo-Dutch Empire. In a certain sense, it’s like a chameleon or a slime mold: it remains the same in character, despite the fact that its colors or outward form may look different.

People nowadays often say, “Oh, the British Empire no longer exists.” However, once you look at it from the standpoint of the geopolitics of the financial architecture that rules the world—which has tried in the past to keep parts of the developing sector backward and underdeveloped, and which, especially in the last 20 years, has made sure that the rich become richer, the middle class increasingly dies out, and the poor become poorer—you can see clearly that this is an empire in a modern form. It’s quite powerful, it used the IMF, it used the World Bank, and kept development in the Third World down. Only after China emerged and offered cheap credit, donations, and infrastructure, did this dynamic begin to change.

As I said earlier, when Lyndon LaRouche first discussed this need for a Four Power Agreement to defeat this modern day British empire, people were full of disbelief. But as we look at the world today, we see that Russia and China have a strategic partnership which is absolutely solid, and I think will be there forever. I don’t think it can ever go away. With the recent developments between China and India, India is moving closer; India already has a very good relationship to Russia. President Trump—despite the present trade negotiations—just issued a tweet saying he is looking forward to meeting President Xi Jinping in the near future and that he will always remain Xi’s friend. There is also the prospect of an early meeting between Trump and Putin. We are very close to such a four-power combination that could really move the world in a completely different way, to a New Paradigm in which geopolitics stops!

Behind all of these war provocations—Russiagate, the Skripal case, the alleged chemical weapons in Syria, now Netanyahu—there is obviously an effort to keep the status quo, to prevent the emergence of China as the rising power, to keep the illusion that Russia can be contained or be regime-changed. But anyone who thinks that you can keep the status quo when the whole world is already moving in the direction of cooperation, win-win, working together—is sorely mistaken.

So I say to those in the West who are pushing these provocations, and say also to ordinary citizens, please think: Can you imagine what the future should look like, let’s say, 10, 20 years from now? Either we will have World War III, or will have had it already, or, we will move into a completely new set of relations among nations, in which the common interest, or as Xi Jinping always calls it, the “shared community for the future of humanity,” comes first, and after that, national interest.

It is an existential question for humanity that more and more people start to think: What should the world look like in 10 years, in 20 years? If you are of the opinion that we must develop a new phase in the evolution of mankind, in which we stop geopolitics, we stop war, and have a New Paradigm, you should become active. You should join the Schiller Institute, because we are trying to cause such a change in the thinking of the people. We need many more people to help us in this effort. I’m really appealing to you: Join the Schiller Institute and work with us, because the potential has never been so great, to move to a much, much, much more beautiful period in human history.

Schlanger: We’ve been talking about Lyndon LaRouche’s Four Power proposal. He also has his four basic laws that address the economic crisis. People should not take their eyes off the economy! There are some new reports coming out—from former FDIC vice chairman Thomas Hoenig, and Sheila Bair, very prominent in her fight against derivatives; and now Nomi Prins has a new book out. Obviously, we ignore this financial side of things to our own detriment, because this is a crucial aspect of the strategic situation.

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes this is a very important, strategic issue. Nomi Prins’s book, Collusion: How the Central Bankers Rigged the World—I have not read the book yet, but I have an initial report about it—describes how the quantitative easing of the central banks, to the advantage of the speculators in the last ten years, has created a situation where we are in a bubble 40 percent worse than in 2008, which could explode at any moment.

We have talked to some well-placed people in the financial community who are quite worried that what could happen—and I think people should take this warning very seriously—if the proponents of the old, collapsing Western financial system realize that this is end-game, that they can’t really prevent this from happening; that China is rising, and that the other countries are rising with China, they may deliberately trigger a financial crash, to pull the rug out from under President Trump, destabilize him, blame him, in order to bring the neo-cons back into power in Washington. That is one of the biggest hidden dangers.

The only way to prevent that is the immediate implementation of Glass-Steagall, but also the rest of Lyndon LaRouche’s Four Laws package: a National Bank in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton; a credit system; and a crash program to increase the productivity of human labor in the production process through fusion power and cooperation in space exploration. This is necessarily part of joining the New Silk Road, joining the Belt and Road Initiative, and participating with China in the buildup of infrastructure in the United States, with joint ventures in third countries. You need the full package. By itself, reinstating Glass-Steagall is not enough. We need the return to a sound financial and economic system based on the tradition of Alexander Hamilton. Whenever that principle has been applied, as in the postwar reconstruction of Germany, you had economic miracles, and this can be replicated any time.

A financial collapse is the Damocles Sword hanging over the world, so I again urge you to join our efforts to have a global Glass-Steagall, because we don’t need speculation. Let us instead put all our resources into real production, productive jobs, and education. There are so many important things to be done, that everyone will benefit. I don’t think we need mega-billionaires. People should have a decent income but they shouldn’t be excessively rich, and the majority of the people are poor. We really need to change that.

Schlanger: Especially when they become rich by creating things that nobody needs. To conclude, I think it’s important that we provide a sense of the broader scope of what’s happening around the New Silk Road. We’re almost the only ones reporting on some of these things, but maybe you have something you’d like to add—the developments now in the Dominican Republic, on top of what Panama is doing, which is in our own Western Hemisphere. Peru has just moved ahead with some agreements with China, and now Portugal has also, with respect to the Maritime Silk Road. The Chinese are definitely on the move.

What do you have from the U.S. Congress? The Senator from Florida—whom Donald Trump calls “little Marco Rubio”—threw a fit, saying that China is about to take over the Western Hemisphere.

Instead of embracing these initiatives, you see a certain hysteria in some quarters. Helga, I think it’s important for you to emphasize the scope of this development, how it is, as you said, “unstoppable.”

Zepp-LaRouche: I’m very convinced that the genie is out of the bottle, never to return. These initiatives appeal to the best inspiration and aspiration of the people. Looking at the world map, the majority of countries are already on board: That’s why I think it’s unstoppable. In Europe, for example, Eastern and Central European countries are working with the Silk Road, as are the Balkan countries. Italy, Spain, and Portugal all want to be hubs of development, not only for Eurasian connections, but also for the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries in Asia and Africa and Latin America. Switzerland is on board, and so is Austria, where the new government has officially made a clear commitment to cooperate strategically with the New Silk Road, announcing that it wants to take leadership in Europe, to bring the European Union into connection with the Chinese New Silk Road. Even Holland and Belgium, and the Scandinavian countries, are moving, so if you look at the map, it is really the minority of countries that are not participating in some way.

That’s why I’m absolutely optimistic that if you help us to spread the news, there will be a new era of civilization, not based on war, subversion, regime-change, and coups, but on the advantage of the other, in the spirit of the Peace of Westphalia. The Spirit of the Silk Road is contagious, and it will catch on: So, help us to spread this word.

Schlanger: One of the ways you can help us, is to go to the New Paradigm Schiller Institute website, where you will find a Sign Up! option (under the Contact tab) to become a member, at whatever monthly rate you can afford. We are the most important organization in the world right now, informing people about these paradigm-changing developments. We need your support! We need your involvement. So sign up, and become a part of this.

Helga, is there anything else you want to cover today?

Zepp-LaRouche: I think everyone needs to be acutely aware we are on the verge of a new hot war. Do not underestimate that danger. The situation in Ukraine is extremely dangerous. If a war breaks out between Israel and Iran, it has the potential to immediately escalate. So don’t be complacent.

On the other hand, I think we have never been so close to putting all of this behind us, because once the Four Power Agreement comes into being, there is no problem on the planet that cannot be solved. Don’t sit on the fence! Become active, and help us to turn this into a winning direction.

Schlanger: Thank you Helga, and we’ll see you again next week.

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes, I hope so. See you then.