»En ny finansarkitektur og en renæssance
af klassisk kultur er presserende nødvendigt«
Med udskrift af Helga Zepp-LaRouches hovedtale til konferencen:
»BRIKS topmødet: Alternativer for en Verden i Krise«
13. oktober, 2016 – Helga Zepp-LaRouche holdt følgende hovedtale, »En ny finansarkitektur og en renæssance af klassisk kultur er presserende nødvendigt« ved en videokonference den 13. oktober med titlen: »BRIKS-topmødet: Alternativer for en Verden i Krise«, som blev afholdt med samtidige møder i Guatemala City, Mexico City og Lima, Peru. Møderne i disse tre byer var forbundet live via Google Hangouts on Air, og en paneldiskussion fulgte efter fr. Zepp-LaRouches bemærkninger, med dr. Mario Roberto Morales (professor ved San Carlos Universitetet, Guatemala), dr. Horacio Sanchez Barcenas (vicepræsident for den Nationale Sammenslutning af Økonomer, Mexico) og Luis Vasquez Medina (EIR, Peru). Begivenheden blev sponsoreret af Centret for Latinamerikanske Studier ved fakultetet for politisk videnskab ved San Carlos Universitetet, Schiller Instituttet og Executive Intelligence Review (EIR).
Det følgende er det engelske udskrift (i udkast, er ikke redigeret) som forlæg til oversættelse:
Helga Zepp-LaRouche Message to Ibero-America Events
Thursday, Oct. 6, 2016
HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Good day. Thank you so much for
inviting me to address your conference. The world is in a very,
very dangerous situation. Everybody who watches the strategic
development every day can see how the confrontation between the
United States and Russia is increasing. Just a few days ago, the
official coordinator for the cooperation with Russia of the
German government said in the 2nd channel of German TV, that a
direct military confrontation between the United States and
Russia can no longer be excluded. Now, it's not that this is
something new, but the fact that a representative … What he referred to was the complete breakdown of
negotiations between Russia and the United States over the Syria
crisis. And there is the immediate danger of an escalation if
the policies of such people as General Petraeus or Sen. John
McCain would be implemented.
And I think everybody knows that if it would come to war
between Russia and the United States, it would be a global war,
and it would lead to the annihilation of all of mankind in all
likelihood.
Now, there is a second danger to civilization which could
also lead in the end to a nuclear war, and that is that we are
about to face a total collapse of the trans-Atlantic financial
system, much, much worse than 2008. The IMF has named Deutsche
Bank as {the} bank with the most risk in the whole global
financial system, and depending on what will be the outcome of
both the IMF/World Bank annual meeting in Washington right now,
where the CEO of Deutsche Bank, John Cryan, went to, but also at
the same time to negotiate with the Department of Justice to
reduce the fine of $14 billion which the DOJ had fined Deutsche
Bank for criminal manipulations before the secondary mortgage
crisis in 2007-2008, from $14 billion to only $5 billion, because
$14 billion would mean de facto the insolvency of Deutsche Bank.
Now, the German daily {Die Welt} said what Cryan is doing is
a "chicken game," that Deutsche Bank has $42 trillion worth in
outstanding derivatives, and that is enough if Deutsche Bank goes
bankrupt, to bring down the entire financial system, and
according to the old wisdom, if you have enough debt you can
impose the conditions how this debt will be renegotiated; but
{Die Welt} basically said, this is a chicken game which nobody
would survive.
Now, Deutsche Bank is maybe the worst case, but by far not
the only one. Deutsche Bank, as I said, has $42 trillion in
outstanding derivatives, that is about 12 times the entire GDP of
the German economy per year, and it's still about 3 to 4 times
the GDP of the entire European Union. Therefore, it is obvious
that if Deutsche Bank collapses, neither the bail-in law which is
by now law in the entire European Union, nor bail-out would be
sufficient to solve the problem. And if you look at the
engagement of these derivatives with the banks which are
counterparty to Deutsche Bank, it involves the entire
too-big-to-fail banking system of the trans-Atlantic system, and
if Deutsche Bank goes without state intervention, and that is
obviously not the solution either, it could be like the
super-nova, basically evaporating in a very brief time.
A similar situation is true for the Italian banks, for the
British banks after the Brexit, and one should not overlook that
all of these banks have large fines to pay for crimes. Deutsche
Bank had to pay because they manipulated and cheated the
customers in the real estate market in the United States. Wells
Fargo just had a hearing in the U.S. Congress because they set up
2 million fraudulent, fictitious bank accounts to steal. Then
you have HongShang banking corporation, which is openly
laundering the entire drug money of the Mexican drug mafia. They
all were involved in the LIBOR manipulation, which caused the
three-digit billion losses for the customers.
We are for sure heading towards an October crisis. This is
not going to be a crisis after the U.S. election: This is now.
And all the means of the central banks, quantitative easing they
have been doing since 2008; negative interest rates, which kills
the savings of the population; and now they're talking about
"helicopter money" which is really the last straw. All of these
tools do not function any more.
There is a remedy, and that is, you have to implement
immediately the Glass-Steagall banking separation law, exactly
what Franklin D. Roosevelt did in 1933. Lyndon LaRouche has
enlarged that conception to say, we need Glass-Steagall, that is,
you have to write off the speculative part of the banks; but then
you have a lack of liquidity and therefore, you have to have a
credit system in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton, which
issues new, large credits for productive investments. But you
also have to increase the productivity of the economy, you have
to have a science driver, and the best for that is international
space cooperation and vanguard technologies which go along with
that.
We also need what Roosevelt did at the time, a Pecora
Commission. Pecora was the New York State attorney, who
investigated the CEOs of the Wall Street banks under oath at the
time, to then send many of them to jail. And as a leading banker
contact told us, if you don't do that, you cannot reinstate the
confidence in the banks, because people have lost completely
confidence in the system which is obviously more criminal than
not.
There is good reason that this can be done. Because in the
United States both parties, the Republicans and the Democrats,
have the Glass-Steagall Act in their platforms and despite the
fact that Hillary Clinton is not for Glass-Steagall, it is
important that in times of crisis such provisions are there. And
there is a renewed optimism that you can mobilize the Congress,
even if normally people have little hope that the Congress will
do something useful, they just did by voting up the JASTA bill
overriding the veto of President Obama in respect of the ability
of the families of the victims of September 11th, to sue the
Saudi government. This is a tremendous victory, because what was
victorious in this situation was a sense for justice: That it was
completely unjust that the victims of the September 11th
terrorist attack would not have the ability, and the families in
particular would not have the ability, to bring the criminals
responsible for that terrorist act to court. And that has now
occurred, and there is a tremendous sense that you can move, once
people are united for a good plan, and once they act together.
Now, there is an equal yearning for justice concerning the
banking system. The banking system which has provided
unbelievable profits for a few, where bankers which provably are
criminal can get away with bonuses of hundreds of millions of
dollars, while the people they are looting, more and more of them
become completely impoverished.
The other important aspect about this is that the
alternative financial system is already in place. Since 2013,
when President Xi Jinping announced the New Silk Road, there has
been an unbelievable development, in the tradition of the ancient
Silk Road of 2,000 years during the Han Dynasty, which at that
time was an immense exchange, not only of goods, but of culture,
of ideas, and most importantly of technologies, of the ability
how to produce silk, how to make porcelain, and other such
vanguard technologies of that time; the idea is now that the same
kind of exchange has been occurring since three years among the
nations of the New Silk Road, but with modern technologies.
This is the largest infrastructure plan in all of human
history: It's about twelve times larger than the Marshall Plan
was which was helping to reconstruct Europe after the Second
World War, in terms of actual buying power. It right now
encompasses $1.4 trillion; it already involves 43% of the world
economy, and 4.4 {billion} people, 70 countries, are cooperating
around it. It is the only long-term development strategy under
the leadership of China right now. As a matter of fact, it's the
only strategic plan to overcome this present geopolitical
confrontation I mentioned in the beginning, because it is based
on the idea of a "win-win cooperation" of all countries on this
planet.
Very important, in respect to the financial crisis, these
countries have started to set up an alternative financial system.
They have started the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank
(AIIB), where immediately about 70 countries wanted to be
founding members, despite enormous pressure from the United
States not to do so. Even close allies of the United States,
like Great Britain, Japan, South Korea, Germany, France, and
Canada, they all wanted to be founding members of this new bank,
which has a starting capital of $100 billion, which can be
expanded, and will be. They also have created the New
Development Bank, that is the bank of the BRICS countries; the
New Silk Road Fund of $40 billion; the Maritime Silk Road Fund;
the Shanghai Cooperation Organization has created a new bank; and
they have created something called the Contingency Reserve
Arrangement which began as a pool of $100 billion, helping the
BRICS countries and other developing countries to fend off
manipulative speculative attacks like those of George Soros and
other speculators.
It is very important that this idea of the New Silk Road is
expanding with an unbelievable speed, and many countries, not
only in Asia, but also in for example, Eastern and Central Europe
are picking up on it. There is now a cooperation between China
and Greece, Serbia, Hungary, Czech Republic and even Poland, all
working on high-speed trains on infrastructure cooperation. And
the idea is to extend this kind of a New Silk Road into the
Middle East and into Africa, to address the very, very dramatic
situation there, to reconstruct the Middle East after the war,
and to develop Africa, so that also the refugee crisis, which is
one of the largest humanitarian crises in the world ever, to
create conditions where Africa and Southwest Asia are being
industrialized so that people do not want to leave their home,
but rather, help to build up their nations.
All of this is not just business. The Silk Road is by no
means only infrastructure in the narrow sense, connecting A to B
through trains and ships, but it is also not just a replacement
of American imperialism by Chinese imperialism, which is what
some media are trying to insinuate. The New Silk Road, put on
the agenda by China, is truly a completely different model of
cooperation among states: It is based on dialogue, partnership
and cooperation; and China does not want to be a new hegemon, but
wants to have cooperation with all countries based on a "win-win"
mutual benefit, where each country has their own advantage.
China has said many times, as a matter of fact, Xi Jinping
has used the formulation that what is needed is a "community of
shared destiny." Now, this is what the Schiller Institute has
promoted for 25 years when we proposed the Eurasian Land-Bridge
when the Soviet Union collapsed, and expanded it in the 25 years
since, that the Silk Road must become the World Land-Bridge, we
always have said that we need a completely new paradigm based on
"win-win cooperation"; and that is exactly what is now pushed by
China.
Now people always have suspicions, "what is the real aim of
China?" But I have come to the absolute conclusion, that China
{means} exactly what they're saying, that the world must not be
run on the basis of a zero-sum game, but on the idea of a harmony
of all nations.
Now, 2016 is the 2,567th birthday of Confucius and you have
right now a total revival of Confucian philosophy, in all of
China, in all schools, universities, cities, and there is right
now a two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old history of Confucian
tradition in China, with the very short except of the ten years
of the Cultural Revolution. And that has shaped the Chinese mind
to a very large extent, the Confucian idea that the world should
be organized in a harmonious way, by allowing the harmonious
development of all nations, of all families, of all individuals;
and that a country cannot do well, if its neighbors are not doing
well. The idea of Confucius that politics must be based on love,
now that is associated with the idea that politics has only one
aim, and that is the happiness of people, an idea which used to
belong the American Declaration of Independence, and an idea
which is also very, very known in the history of European
humanism.
Confucius also taught that people have to have a lifelong
learning, and that they should perfect themselves without limit,
and that the highest ideal of man is the {chun tzu}, the wise man
who is basically perfecting himself in the highest degree. And
out of this comes the idea that the sage king is morally much
more attractive than the hegemon. This is the same idea as
Plato's "philosopher king," that only the wisest and most moral
people should rule.
Now, while the hegemon rules by forcing the underlings into
submission, the wise king and the wise leadership is elevating
the people through inspiration. At the recent G20 meeting in
Hangzhou, which occurred for the first time under the leadership
of China, they have made a wonderful proposal to put the whole
world economy on the basis of innovation and to share whatever
scientific and technological breakthroughs are being made,
immediately, with all other nations, but especially the
developing nations, so that their development is not being held
up.
Since then, they have announced scientific and technological
cooperation among the countries along the New Silk Road; they
opened up science and technology parks, huge exchange of
scientists and youth, in order to spread these ideas in the
quickest possible way. All of these policies are a reflection of
the Confucian philosophy.
If you study it more closely, you will realize there is a
tremendous affinity between Confucian thinking and European
humanism. They are much closer and much more related than most
people are aware. While in China, a Confucian Renaissance is
fully underway, it is the West which is in urgent need of such a
cultural renaissance.
The Western world has plunged into a terrible moral
degeneracy and decadence: If you look at the drug addiction, for
example, well the case of Mexico, for example, is famous: The
drug lords have taken over much of the country. But in the
United States the drug addiction is the most important cause for
the rising suicide rate which has quadrupled since 2001, since
Bush came into office, suicides in all age groups. If you look
at the violence in the United States, but also in other Western
parts, you have the police violence, you have the school
shootings, you have pornography, you have the total brutalization
of behavior, which almost is a breakdown of civilized relations
among people. I don't want to go into this more deeply, because
you all know it.
So we need urgently, if you want to save humanity, we need a
Renaissance of Classical culture. We have to go back to an image
of man which emphasizes that, which separates man from all other
living species and that is the creativity of the mind of the
human being. The problem with popular culture is that it
{de}-emphasizes this creativity. Pop music, for example, if
young people go to discos, it almost always goes along with drug
consumption, with something which destroys the creative faculties
of the mind.
We need a Classical culture which emphasizes the beauty of
the best traditions of Greece, for example, Greek architecture,
Greek historical dramas, Greek philosophy, but also the beauty of
Dante, of Petrarca, of the Italian Renaissance; in the Spanish
culture, of the Andalusian renaissance, of Cervantes, of Goya; in
Germany, the Schiller, Beethoven, and many other great thinkers.
Now, why is Classical culture so absolutely important?
Rather than being a soap opera, where you add irrational emotions
one after the other, without rhythm or rhyme, you have in
Classical culture either a poetical or a musical idea, and then,
according to very strict principles of composition, you develop
that idea until it is exhausted, in a thorough-compositional way;
and then you come to a conclusion on a higher level of reason.
And when you train your mind in this way, in Classical thinking,
you become more creative. And it also leads to an education of
the emotions. Because if you only rely on your senses, you are
just reacting. That is why Friedrich Schiller demanded the
aesthetical education of man: Namely, through Classical art, the
aesthetical education teaches man to feel more noble and to
education your emotions up to the level of reason, so that you
can blindly follow your impulses because they will never tell you
anything different than what reason commands. This is why we have
to reintroduce beauty into art, and the great German poet
Friedrich Schiller said "Art which is not beautiful should not be
called art."
In the Greek Classical period, you had the ideal of the
identity of the beautiful, the truthful, and the good. And you
cannot be truthful if you are not trying to develop the idea of
beauty, and you cannot develop the good without being truthful.
So there is an inner connection between these because they
address the same faculty in the human mind.
The future of mankind very clearly will be in space. If you
look at the evolution of man, or even of life as it developed
through photosynthesis from the oceans to land, from lower to
higher species, and eventually the creative mankind, man settled
at the rivers and oceans first; then through infrastructure
development, opened up the landlocked areas of continents. And
now with the New Silk Road we are completing that phase of the
evolution, where man through infrastructure, develops the
landlocked areas of all continents. And the natural extension of
that infrastructure development will be the opening up near
space, probably first a colony on the Moon, and that will be the
launching pad for future space operations as our energy sources
become more dense, and we will be able to even understand much
better what is the position of our planet in the Solar System, in
the Galaxy, and we will develop a much deeper understanding about
the laws of the universe and the relationship of creative
mentation to that Universe, because our mind is obviously not
outside of the universe, but it's part of the universe, and it is
the most developed part.
A lot more studies have to made about that connection
between the mind and the universe at large, and the better we
understand that connection, the more rational we will become as a
human species. The great German space scientist Krafft Ehricke
developed the beautiful notion of the "extraterrestrial
imperative," saying that man only becomes truly adult when we try
to understand and conquer space more deeply, because man will
only become fully rational when we do that. And Krafft Ehricke,
who was a close friend of ours, said at the end of his life, that
the importance of great Classical art was absolutely crucial,
because if science is developed that does not yet say whether
it's applied for something good, or for something bad; it is
always man who applies that science which makes the difference.
And therefore, the aesthetical and moral education to beauty and
to the good is what will make the longevity of the human species
possible.
Now, this is why we are saying, so emphatically, that the
economic development of the New Silk Road must be combined with a
Classical Renaissance of Classical culture, and that we must
bring forward the best traditions of each culture, of Chinese
poetry and philosophy, of Chinese painting, of Indian philosophy,
of African wonderful philosophical contributions from the time of
Timbuktu; of other great cultures, which each, at one point had a
high phase in their culture, like the Arab Renaissance of the
Abbasid Dynasty at which point the Arab culture was the most
developed.
What we have to do, is we have to make the best phases of
these periods known, and then have a dialogue between these
cultures and then out of that will generate love for the other
culture; and we will indeed reach a new paradigm of civilization.
If we make that cultural universal heritage known to all
children, in the universal education, I think the future will be
that such geniuses as Bach, Schiller, Einstein, will not be such
an exception. There will never be a second Einstein, but we will
have many, many geniuses because we will provide children with a
much, much better opportunity to unfold all the potentials which
are embedded in them.
Now, I think we are not only on the verge of a potential
global war, but with the New Silk Road we are also at the edge of
entering a completely new paradigm of civilization, what I like
to call the "adulthood of mankind," and not any more behaving
like stupid two-year-old little boys kicking each other in the
knee.
So we are really at an important historical moment, and I
would ask all of you to join in a Renaissance movement, because
I'm absolutely optimistic that if all good people on the planet
are working together to this aim, we can do it.