Helga Zepp-LaRouche

The Persecution of Lyndon LaRouche, and of Free Speech Today

This is the edited transcript of the presentation of Helga Zepp-LaRouche to the Oct. 6, 2022, press conference sponsored by EIR, titled “We Will Not Be Silenced! Speaking Truth in Times of War.” Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche is the founder of the Schiller Institute. Subheads have been added.

The video of the entire conference is available here.

Hit-Listed Since the 1980s

Hello, thank you. I had the good prescience when we moved in Leesburg into a new farmhouse, that I insisted that it should be called Ibykus Farm. This is a reference to the poem by Friedrich Schiller, “The Cranes of Ibykus,” which I can only advise people to read, because it is a poem which reminds people that there is a higher force of justice. Sometimes it’s called nemesis, sometimes called natural law. I believe that the “Ibykus principle” is operating, and eventually will bring the culprits to justice.

Given the fact that today is this memorable—not-so-nice, but memorable day of the 36th anniversary of the raid [on the LaRouches’ home and offices in Leesburg], I just want to recall it. Because when you wake up at a quarter to seven in the morning by the deafening noise of a helicopter flying around your bedroom window—because that’s what happened. Then, we naturally jumped out of the bed and looked at what was going on. We discovered very quickly that there were these 400 FBI agents, armored vehicles, and police dogs, armed people.

Four hundred people! This was clearly designed to cause us to react in any way, to then have a pretext to get rid of us. We were able to stop that by, on the one side, calling up the White House. There was clearly an intervention from higher people than those who had ordered this FBI raid, which stopped it. So, we managed not be killed in this moment.

But this was a really profound experience, and I must say that ever since, my naïve belief in democracy and the rules-based order—if I ever had such a naïve belief—was somewhat shattered. Because, what was the crime? My husband, Lyndon LaRouche, was the most law-abiding, peaceful, loving, creative person you can imagine, and what was his crime? He reacted to the medium-range missile crisis at the beginning of the 1980s, which was the period in Europe when you had hundreds of thousands of people in the street because U.S./NATO Pershing II and the Soviet SS-20 missiles were directed against each other with only a few minutes—5, 6, 7 minutes—flight time, and all these missile systems were all the time launch on warning. [Then-Chancellor] Helmut Schmidt at that time was absolutely convinced that we were on the verge of World War III, and all the people in the streets were as well.

So, my husband had designed something which is up to the present day, the most advanced design for a new international security architecture: Which was basically a proposal to the Soviet Union, that the United States and the Soviets together would work on new technologies based on new physical principles which would be implemented together and make these nuclear weapons—together—obsolete. This was a very, very far-sighted proposal to overcome the blocs. We were in back-channel discussions with the Soviets for one full year, so it was a very serious proposition. President Reagan, on the 23rd of March 1983, declared it to be the official U.S. policy.

When the Soviets rejected it, because the Ogarkov faction in the Soviet Union had completely different plans, then all hell broke loose. The relevant neo-cons in the Reagan Administration also went into a rampage. That was the crime. My husband had proposed something which would have completely changed the geopolitical blocs of the post-War period. He predicted in 1984, when it was clear that the Soviets rejected this proposal, he predicted that the Soviet Union would collapse in five years if they would stick to their policies.

That was the background of this raid. The idea that you would dare to have an idea to change the established geopolitical order was just too much.

Then, my husband had proposed another thing—this was a prognosis in 1971, when [President Richard] Nixon went to the floating exchange rates by dismantling the old Bretton Woods system—[my husband] had predicted at that time that if one would continue on this monetarist track, it would necessarily come to a new depression, a new fascism, and a new danger of world war. That’s exactly where we are today. Even the European Central Bank is putting out at the end of September, a warning that we are in a very severe systemic crisis, and we are about to see an explosion of a hyperinflationary collapse of the trans-Atlantic system, then that prognosis of my husband turns out to have been exactly correct.

The parallel to today, and the reason why it was important to remember the raid, is because this raid and the subsequent prosecution of my husband, which [former U.S. Attorney General] Ramsey Clark correctly called the worst one in the history of the United States, is to the present day, the reason why his name—the name of the LaRouche movement—is being slandered. Many people are supposed to be scared away from looking at the solutions, which would be the way to come out of this crisis.

A New Security and Economic Architecture

When it became clear that the negotiations would not happen—which was clear after Boris Johnson had intervened in Ukraine in March—we called the first conference of the Schiller Institute on the 9th of April, demanding a new international security and development architecture which would take into account the interests of every single country on the planet, being in the tradition of the [1648] Peace of Westphalia. We assembled speakers, we had conferences in May, in June, July, August, and September. More than 30 people who participated in these conferences are now on that list!

All we demanded was that if you continued with the present geopolitical confrontation, with the idea that there must be a victory on the battlefield, more and more heavy weapons, ruin Russia—just a few days ago, the Russian Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov warned that this basically means that the U.S. is becoming a war party, and that this will have the most serious consequences.

This is going to be the danger of World War III, and we were mobilizing against that by putting forward a solution which would solve all these problems: To have a new security architecture which would include Russia and China; to have an economic cooperation along the lines of the Belt and Road Initiative, the Eurasian Land-Bridge which was our proposal in 1991. And it would also help the Ukraine, which is right now—even before the war started—in a terrible economic crisis. So, all our proposals are really solution-oriented, and they still are absolutely what needs to be put on the table.

Now, what Colonel Black was referring to pertains to that, because the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, where now we have a lot of experts speaking out; we will hear from one of them in this show. All basically say that if you look at the cui bono, the motive, the capacity, the opportunity, all that speaks for either the United States or a country under the umbrella of the United States, like the British or the Poles or some other NATO countries. But it is almost impossible for Russia to have done it, because as Colonel Bosshard, who will speak shortly, points out: If Russia would have been able to do the sabotage in an area which is 100% controlled by NATO, it would mean a capacity of seabed warfare superiority which would completely shake up the entire assumptions about the so-called weak and outdated and old-fashioned Russian army defeated in the east of Ukraine. It’s really food for thought.

Having mentioned all of these things, I think that we have reached a point where the truth about the sabotage of Nord Stream 2 must be found. The pipelines must be repaired immediately, because right now, as a result of the sanctions—which the German people and European people never were asked if they agreed with that—it has backfired. It is not Russia that is going bankrupt; Russia has completely moved toward the East. They are now building a new system together with China, with the Non-Aligned Movement, with the Global South, the BRICS countries, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. So, Russia is doing relatively well! But Germany, Europe is about to crash against the wall! If these sanctions continue, and the energy coming from the pipelines is no more, it means that Germany is about to be deindustrialized. If Germany goes under, then all of Europe collapses.

This is not a joke. The demand is to immediately start the repair of the pipelines, including Russia because it’s a Russian pipeline; immediately stopping the sanctions; and going in the direction of a solution which can only be inclusive, an international security and development architecture; reorganizing the bankrupt financial system; and going in the direction of Mutually-Assured Survival; and not going in the direction of World War III.

This is a serious matter, and we want to have the widest discussion possible about these ideas.