med Tom Gillesberg, Helga Zepp-LaRouche
og meget smuk sang
Helga Zepp LaRouche Addresses Copenhagen Campaign Event of
‘Friends of the Schiller Institute,’ Nov. 10, 2017
– The Legacy of Friedrich Schiller and the Schiller Institute –
– In the Confucian Concept of Xi’s New Silk Road Today –
Schiller Institute Chairwoman and founder Helga
Zepp-LaRouche was introduced by Schiller Institute in Denmark
Chairman Tom Gillesberg, who is running for mayor of Copenhagen
on the Friends of the Schiller Institute slate.
HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE: I’m very happy to be here by Hangout
video, because there are a lot very important things happening
which the Western media are absolutely hiding from the
population. As a matter of fact, since you referred to the
founding of the Schiller Institute in 1984, I was just reflecting
that the purpose why I created the Schiller Institute in the
first place, was because I saw the world very much in need of a
different idea of relations among nations.
And that was the main reason why this institute was created,
because I realized, in 1983, the relationship between Germany and
the United States, Europe and the United States, the so-called
“advanced sector” and the developing countries, all of these
foreign relations were terrible. For slightly different reasons
in each case, but I basically said, “this is not the way nations
should organized themselves, and that is not how they should
relate to each other.”
So I came up with the idea to create an institute devoted to
the development of a just new world economic order, whereby every
person on the planet would eventually have a decent life, that
was explicitly the idea; and that this new world economic order
would only function if it would be combined with the idea of a
dialogue of cultures on the highest level, where one country
would not refer to the worst tradition of the other, but to the
best, and vice versa. And that all of this would be accompanied
by a lot of Classical culture, a lot of emphasis on science, on
science and technology as the motor for such a development.
Now, I don’t want to go through the long history of the
Schiller Institute, which has done an enormous amount of work on
five continents since its existence, but I’m very happy to say
that if you look at the world today, especially in the last
several days, a lot of what the Schiller Institute was meant to
be, is coming into being.
People really have to realize that the summit which just
took place between President Xi Jinping and President Trump, was
an absolutely historic breakthrough. Now, if you listen to the
Western media, you would think the opposite; you would think, if
you read the New York Times you would say, “Trump sold out to
the Chinese, because Xi Jinping is much more powerful than
Trump.” If you listen to second channel of German TV, their
comment yesterday was that, yes, this was all a big show, but
Trump is so irrational and changing so quickly that in two weeks
he will not even remember what happened. Or, the Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung this morning, I had to laugh when I was
reading this. On the front page, they said if Deng Xiaoping were
still alive, he would have wept tears of joy when he saw that Xi
Jinping and Trump were meeting, seeing eye-to-eye, treating each
other as equals.
So the Western media are just completely beside themselves,
they’re cynical, they’re absolutely geopolitically blinded in
such a way that they can’t even look at what is going on.
Now, let me tell you what really happened: First of all, on
Wednesday [Nov. 8], the Chinese government did something which
has never happened, giving an honor to Trump which they have
never given to any other foreign head of state. They closed down
for an entire day the Forbidden City; this is the largest complex
of palaces in the world. Since the 17th century, it was the seat
of the emperors, and it is just one large complex of palaces, one
after the other: it has opera houses, it has living quarters,
it’s just an unbelievable environment.
They closed this down, and they performed for President
Trump and his wife Melania, excerpts from three Beijing operas,
and they showed ancient handicrafts in restoration; and really
steeped the Presidential couple in Chinese culture. Which
everybody who knows it, knows it’s extremely beautiful and
extremely impressive. And they called this a “State Visit-Plus.”
A commentator from the think tank CASS [Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences] said this has never happened in the history of China,
either; they have never given a head of state such a high-level
visit, so it was a highest honor ever given to a foreign
President.
Now, the Western press is not reflecting why this is the
case, but President Xi said that the this is the beginning of a
new start of relations between the United States and China, and
it will do very important, good things not only for the two
people, but for the entire world. And Trump, on his side, said,
what could be more important than the two largest economic
countries finding a good cooperation; and he also said that he
looks ahead to many years of friendship and collaboration between
the two countries, accomplishing incredible things.
Obviously, not unimportant was the fact that there were
trade deal deals signed for, altogether $253 billion, ranging
from energy, agricultural products, airplanes were being bought,
infrastructure. And in a certain sense, this is important, and
designed to grow — it’s not the end of it. Trump made several
speeches where he said — there was an incredible trade gap up to
now, but he doesn’t blame the Chinese for it, he blames the
former U.S. administrations for allowing this to happen.
So obviously, there are many positive things in this trade
relation, as such, but I think more importantly the spirit which
comes from the New Silk Road, which is the policy which has been
put on the agenda by Xi Jinping since 2013, and which in the four
years since, has grown to be the largest economic infrastructure
project ever in history: Already something like 70 countries are
collaborating. They are building infrastructure corridors, six
major corridors, almost 40 cargo trains and connecting between
China and Europe, now, every week. The development is spreading
with absolute excitement into Latin America, into Africa, into
even European countries.
The biggest change, in my view, has happened in Africa,
because China has invested in a rail line from Djibouti to Addis
Ababa; now from Kenya; another line is being built to Rwanda.
Many hydropower dams, projects for hydropower, irrigation,
industrial parks. And all of this has led to a completely
different attitude of the Africans, who, for the first time, see
the perspective of overcoming their underdevelopment.
The philosophy behind all of this is the idea that only if
you have harmonious development of all nations on this planet,
can you have a peaceful development in China. And this is based
on the Confucian idea that only with the maximum development of
the individual, who should become a wide person, is spread
throughout the entire family and all the families develop
harmoniously, can you have peace in the nation, and obviously in
the world, among the nations.
This is not understood by the West at all. They are
absolutely convinced — and I think some of these political
forces are so geopolitically entrenched that they really believe
this, that they cannot mention that a country can actually be
devoted to the common good of its people. And that China is
doing that is without any debate, because, as Tom just mentioned,
I was in China in 1971, during the Cultural Revolution, and I saw
the country in distress. And I went back in ’96, and I saw the
absolutely incredible change for the better in these 25 years.
And what has happened in the last 30 years is just the
biggest economic miracle of any country on the planet. China has
lifted 700 million people out of poverty, and what happened at
the just-concluded 19th Party Congress of the CPC, was that Xi
Jinping announced that by the year 2020, China will have
eradicated all poverty. There are only 42 million people left
who are poor, in rural areas, and they now are using modern
technology to overcome that, by providing the means for
e-commerce to the farmers in the rural areas of poor regions, so
they can market their products via the internet, and that way
they are starting to develop more income and more wealth, so that
they will no longer be poor by the year 2020. I have no reason to
believe that they will not succeed in doing that, because, when
you see the vector of development of the last 30 to 40 years,
they are going to accomplish that.
By the year 2035, China wants to be a modern socialist
country, and Xi Jinping has developed a plan up to the year 2050,
for China to be a strong, modern, harmonious, democratic, happy
people.
Now, in this speech, at this party convention, Xi Jinping
mentioned I think it was 15 times or so, that the purpose of the
political work of the Communist Party is that people should have
a better and happier life. And what China is doing is obviously
a model which is much more devoted to the common good, than you
find it in the West, where, if you compare it to the poverty
level in the European Union, for example, where you have 120
million people who are poor; or you compare it to the economic
situation in the United States, where for the first time in an
industrial nation, you have a lowering of the life-expectancy!
Now, if there’s any parameter for the productivity and the
well-being of an economy, it is the life expectancy of its
people. And if you an industrial country with the collapse of
the life span, then you know that there is something absolutely
wrong. And this is the result of what happened with the
neo-liberal system, especially since the United States with the
neo-cons decided to become the leader of a unipolar world, which
went along with the neo-liberal system, where the rich became so
rich that it is unreasonable, and the poor become poorer.
And you have right now, I think something like 95 million
people in the United States who are no longer counted as being in
the labor force, because they have given up looking for work, or
they are sick, or they are in prison, or they are somehow
misplaced in some other form.
So, I think that what is happening right now is that Xi
Jinping has put on the agenda a model of economic cooperation
which needs to be studied. I think it’s a big mistake that the
Europeans are just dismissing it. Like, for example, the French
Economic and Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire just went to Berlin
yesterday, and there he addressed a German-French economic forum,
where he said, now Europe must stop being naïve, we must be
united to stand up against China, against Russia, against the
United States. And then the German Foreign Minister Sigmar
Gabriel yesterday on a TV show basically said the same thing —
he said, now, Europe must stand united against the aggressive
powers of Russia and China, where human rights mean nothing.
I mean, this is such an arrogance! You know, talking about
“democracy,” why don’t you just look for a second at what
happened with Hillary Clinton’s campaign? Now the big scandal in
the United States is that the Democratic Party leadership, one
year before the party convention was to supposedly decide on the
candidate for the 2016 Presidential election, has decided it
would be Hillary. And then they channeled illegal money,
violating FEC rules up and down, right and left, intriguing
against Bernie Sanders. And then, concocting “intelligence”
against Trump with the help of British intelligence, played back
into the United States. I mean, this is a joke! There is no
democracy, not in this present system.
And I think that to accuse Russia and China of being
“aggressive” is just absolutely wrong! The whole question of
what was the Ukraine crisis: [Former German Chancellor] Helmut
Schmidt said it very clearly: The reason why the Ukraine crisis
happened, and where it started was in the Maastricht conference
in 1992, because that was when the EU decided to have the
Eastward expansion without limit. And that is the same thing as
what the NATO expansion to the East was, breaking all promises
made to Gorbachev at the time, that NATO would never expand to
the borders of the Soviet Union, or Russia for that matter.
So we are in a real crisis. And rather than being so
arrogant and saying there are no human rights in China and
Russia, and these countries are “aggressive” — which they are
not — we should rather reflect on what should the future be?
China happens to be the only country which has presented a
strategic model of international relations based on a win-win
cooperation of respect for the sovereignty of the other country,
of non-interference, of accepting the other social model of the
other system; and this is a strategy for peace. This is the idea
of overcoming geopolitics. And we should not forget that it was
geopolitics which was not only the cause for many wars in
history, but especially two world wars in the 20th century.
And the idea to have an inclusive, win-win cooperation among
all countries on the planet, what should be against that? Why
can Europe not, why can’t Denmark, and Germany, and France, and
Italy, just say: When the relationship between the United States
and China is already now on such a new historical basis, where
the strategic partnership between China and Russia is also very,
very strong, and Putin and Xi Jinping have both said that the
relationship between these two countries are on the best level
ever. And now China and the United States are saying the same
thing about their two countries. Now, what could be better, than
to have the United States, China and Russia working together for
a new paradigm of relations among nations? Why can the European
nations not just say, “Well, that is very good, because if the
biggest nuclear powers can cooperate in a peaceful way, then the
danger of a thermonuclear war is obviously diminished and could
be eliminated in a short period of time; and we cooperate.”
I mean, we have so many tasks which are urgent: The
reconstruction of Southwest Asia, of the Middle East, of
countries which have been completely destroyed by wars which are
the outgrowth of regime change, of the unipolar world, on wars
based on lies, which have cost {millions} of people their lives
in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen. These countries have been
absolutely destroyed and they need to be reconstructed.
There is already a discussion that the only way you can do
that, is by extending the New Silk Road into the Middle East.
And I have said for a very long time, that the only way how you
can have peace in the Middle East, is if all the major neighbors
— Russia, China, India, Iran, Egypt, hopefully the United
States, and hopefully European nations, are all working together,
and then you can eliminate the present tensions and frictions and
ongoing fights, which have almost been eliminated in Syria and
Iraq.
And look at Africa: Don’t you think it’s time that we join
hands with China in the development of Africa? Do you really
think that the underdevelopment of Africa is a natural condition?
No! It is the result of hundreds of years of colonialism, of
decades of IMF conditionalities, which insisted, that countries
should pay their debt and not pay for infrastructure and not pay
for social expenditures. And the reason why Africa has been in
such a terrible condition is because it was the policy of the
West {not} to develop the African continent.
And now China has come, and said, “no,” we have the idea to
eliminate poverty in every corner of the planet, and they have
started the industrialization of Africa, and Xi Jinping has
offered to Europe, to the United States, to join hands and have
joint projects in all of these countries.
Don’t you think it’s time that we become adult as a human
species? I think it should be clear to everybody that in the age
of thermonuclear weapons, war cannot be a way of resolving
conflicts. And I think also, the idea that the human species
should be able to come up with an idea of self-governance of one
human species; that it’s not a natural condition that you always
will have one nation against another nation, or a group of
nations against another group of nations.
In reflecting about what happened in the recent period,
especially with the 19th Party Congress of the CPC, where Xi
Jinping developed a perspective between now and 2050, it is very
clear that if you look at the long arc of human civilization,
sometime the idea that we would be the one humanity, the
“community for a shared future for mankind” — which is the
formulation Xi Jinping always uses — had to come! And that it
comes from China should not be a reason not to be up on the idea.
It has to do with the 5,000 year history of China, the 2,500
years of Confucian tradition that this idea was made by China,
but it is a universal idea, it’s not something limited to one
culture or one nation.
So I think we are at a very exciting moment of history. I
feel very much vindicated that the work, not only of the Schiller
Institute, but the organization associated with the name of my
husband, Lyndon LaRouche, is now being implemented. This goes
back all to the early ’70s, where my husband developed the
proposal for an International Development Bank, the IDB. This was
picked up by the Non-Aligned Movement in ’76, in their final
resolution in Colombo, Sri Lanka; and it was the idea that a new
credit institution should be created, replacing the IMF, which
would provide — at that time, the idea was 400 billion
deutschemarks, or $200 billion approximately, per year, for
technology transfer to the developing countries.
And that’s what China is now doing. That’s what they’re
doing with the AIIB, with the New Development Bank, with the
different Chinese banks, focusing on the real economy.
Then, if you look at all the development plans we have been
working on: The first development plan for Africa, we published
in 1976. We had a plan for the development of Latin America,
working with [then Mexican President] López Portillo. We had a
40-year development plan for India, on which we worked together
with Indira Gandhi. We had a 50-year development plan for the
Pacific Ocean Basin in the early ’80s.
Then, in ’89, we had the Productive Triangle for the
development of East and West Europe. And in ’91, when the Soviet
Union disintegrated, we proposed a peace plan for the 21st
century, starting with Eurasian Land-Bridge, which we already
called the New Silk Road, at that time.
So I feel very much that our lives’ work has absolutely come
into reality. And what we have to do now, is we have to get
European nations to understand that the crisis not that China is
making these proposals, and the crisis is not that Trump is
rejecting the neoliberal model, at least as it was represented by
Bush and Obama and Hillary. The real crisis is that people in
Europe are still absolutely somehow in chains to their own
ideological thinking that they, first of all, are very
Euro-centric; they think Europe is the navel of the world; while
in reality, the power center is shifting to Asia, since they have
better principles than we have right now.
And just to illustrate the point, the Bundeswehr, the German
army, put out this study already in February of this year, where
they have basically six scenarios by the year 2040. It has all
options, where the worst option is Europe will completely
collapse, many European countries will leave the EU and join with
the Russia bloc; and Europe will just lose all importance. If
you look at these six scenarios, what you see there is an
absolutely wrong method of thinking: It’s the projection of the
status quo, of geopolitical thinking, and naturally in a changing
world, there is no way how such thinking can survive, therefore,
if they keep thinking that way, this is probably what happens in
Europe.
Now, look at what China is doing, instead. They just
created the largest, highest-level regulatory body, which is even
more important and has higher ranking than all the ministries,
for the case of a new financial crisis. And it has absolutely
nothing to do with the Chinese debt, because the Chinese debt
has, as a counterforce, real assets — investments in
infrastructure, in industries and so forth, so if there would be
a blowout, these assets will be there. While the monetarist
system of the trans-Atlantic sector, people have learned
absolutely nothing after the crisis of 2008. That is the real
danger, and obviously China is looking at that, and Xi Jinping
has said this in many speeches since the G20 summit last year in
Hangzhou, that the causes of the 2008 crisis have not been
eliminated, and therefore the danger of a new crisis is
absolutely there.
So what we have to do, is we have to absolutely reflect,
what is wrong with the European thinking. The problem is not
that other countries are rising and we are stagnating. The
problem is that Europe has turned away from its highest
traditions.
We have now a pretty decadent culture. If you look at the
youth culture, pop music, many of these so-called pop singers are
outright Satanic: They are ugly, they promote an image of man
which is a beast, it’s full of violence, it’s pornographic, and
it’s just “everything goes.” There is no more limit, there is no
morality, everything is allowed: You don’t have two sexes, you
have in Germany now officially three sexes, you have 49 genders,
it’s just becoming absolutely Sodom and Gomorrah, or very much
parallel to the end-phase of the Roman Empire, where you had
similar phenomena.
So, I think that the problem is not China rising. The
problem is that Europe has moved away. We have a beautiful
tradition. We have a Classical period, the Renaissance of Italy,
we have the Andalusian Renaissance, the École Polytechnique in
France. We have a German Classical period which has produced
some of the most outstanding thinkers, composers, poets, you
know, the rich tradition linking the Classical period of Germany
with that of Denmark. I mean, Danish people saved the life of
Friedrich Schiller.
So there are enough points where we can say, “Let’s just go
back to our best traditions, and then we will find out that the
Classical periods of Europe, and the Confucian tradition of
China, and the Classical periods of other nations, are indeed
creating the basis for a new Renaissance.”
I think we are at an incredible moment of history, and we
should just remind ourselves of the words of Friedrich Schiller,
who said, “A great moment should not find a little people.” So
let’s try to elevate our people, to think big, think beautiful,
become beautiful souls, create the basis that all children have a
chance to become geniuses. And if that is in our willpower to
do, and this is why the election campaign of Trump and the other
members of the Schiller Institute are so absolutely important,
and that is why we should all be happy that the Schiller
organization exists in Denmark and creates an option for all
Danish people to join this incredible historical moment and make
a better world for all of us. [applause]
