der er nødvendig for at overvinde en ny mørk tidsalder?
Schiller Instituttets ugentlige webcast med Helga Zepp-LaRouche d. 11. marts 2020
Helga gentager de seriøse advarsler fra ledende tyske eksperter indenfor smitsomme sygdomme og ser på Wuhan-modellen for at bryde smittevejene i begyndelsen. Helga beder lande om at koordinere deres indsats for at besejre denne pandemi, inklusiv at dæmme op for de økonomiske indvirkninger på den globale økonomi, men det betyder ikke at redde Wall Street! (Se hendes opdaterede underskriftsbegæring)
Helga og Harley diskuterer svindelen med her-og- nu-økonomien, og påminder folk om Lyndon LaRouches advarsel, at hvis vi fortsatte ned ad vejen mod nulvækst, ville Vesten ikke længere være i stand til at opretholde sig selv og ville sprænges indad. Hun kræver en ende på geopolitik, og at alle kræfter må være fokuserede på at løse den fælles virus- og finanskrise. Pas på dig selv, og tak for at du følger vores arbejde.
Afskrift på engelsk:
HARLEY SCHLANGER: Hello, I’m Harley Schlanger from the Schiller Institute, welcome to our webcast with our founder and President Helga Zepp-LaRouche. It’s March 11, 2020. And now we’re very deep into a process which has been unfolding rapidly with the coronavirus, the emergence of a pandemic worldwide. And Helga, this is something that people in the West have been trying to wish away, but it’s something that’s going to be wished away: It requires a total change in thinking. Why don’t you start with your thoughts on that, because you have been very out front in the need for an emergency call to reject this old paradigm, and move to the new.
HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Yes. I think the situation is very serious. It probably will not be possible without a lot of casualties, but nevertheless, if there are decisive measures now, and a complete change in the attitude, the damage can be minimized. Otherwise, it will be catastrophic.
Now, I think it is useful to listen to the experts from Germany who are making regular podcasts, Christian Drosten, the virologist from Berlin Charité hospital, and Professor Lothar Wieler from the Robert Koch Institute, and they put out very drastic warnings. What Drosten said is that there will be no lessening of the increasing in the spring and summer period, which some people temporarily assumed, because we will face a virus wave, and naturally, in the summer period, the virus will continue to spread to the summer hemisphere, where it will be winter, and then in all likelihood return even more, and with possible mutations in the fall, and a vaccine, as of now, cannot be expected before a year or so.
So, Merkel announced what is now commonplace among many leaders of countries, that the infection rate probably will infect 70% of the population, and unfortunately, it is absolutely not true what our Health Minister Jens Spahn still thought in January, which is really incredible, where he said that the coronavirus does not represent a danger for Germany, and that the mortality rate of the coronavirus would be lower than of the common flu — that’s what he said in January.
Now, obviously, that that was not the case was clear, already if people looked to China, which in the month of January was waging an incredible battle, and by closing down the entire city of Wuhan and Hubei province, effecting a lockdown for 60 million people, implementing it and also enforcing it and having a population which was very cooperative in doing so, according to the World Health Organization, China has set a new standard in dealing with such pandemics. And the West could have taken that as an example, but people in the West are just too arrogant, too Euro-centric, or too Western-centric, so they thought they could ignore, or even think “this is affecting China and not coming to Europe or the United States”; so they lost three valuable months, maybe not entirely, but obviously, a completely different attitude would have been necessary.
And now, it is spreading and changing by the hour, so people are completely aware of the fact that this is out of control. And I do not want to add to any panic, but it is very clear that the numbers which are announced right now are not accurate. I talked to my colleagues in France, today, and there are only a little bit more than 1,000 tests which have been made in France so far! That is not a representative figure which comes out, then. And we have some cases where people clearly have symptoms, and they try to get tests, and they were told, there are no tests in France right now, France doesn’t have the production capability and all the tests have been bought up and there simply are no tests. So, obviously, the fact that in Germany, there are only two deaths so far, as of this webcast [midday in Germany March 11 — ed], they attribute that to the very well testing — now, we have to see.
I think the lesson from Wuhan, and now that all of Italy is basically a red zone, after some very irrational behavior on the side of some citizens, after the north was locked down, you have quite an advanced situation; but I think the lesson to be learned from all of that is that is that we have to learn from China. We have to get rid of our Western arrogance, and simply look at the way how China effectively dealt with it, and then the only conclusion is, that you have to enforce these measures before you have a mass of cases. That means that if you have anywhere, a region, like some cities or areas in North Rhine-Westphalia, one should apply the Wuhan model immediately. It should be closed down, there should be a quarantine for a certain number of weeks, and these measures must be taken early on, because everything which counts in this is the speed, to take preemptive measures before the virus spreads completely out of control.
So I think we are in a very serious situation, but it’s not some moment where you can completely panic, but there are clear ways, and I think the Chinese efficiency with which they dealt with this, should be a lesson for everybody.
SCHLANGER: When you speak of the arrogance, I think you’re referring, in particular, to the continued adherence to geopolitics, to the neo-liberal model, the whole idea that the West is superior, the West has solved all the problems. Isn’t this what hampers the thinking of people at the European Union and many of the people in the U.S. Congress, and think tanks in the United States?
ZEPP-LAROUCHE: I think the reaction so far by the leading politicians, for example, the European finance ministers — the so-called Eurogroup — they have a meeting on March 16, and on their agenda is first, the European Stability Mechanism, and then something else, and then only third, the coronavirus attack, and it is very clear that the reason why the reaction was so late, and why they didn’t use the word “pandemic,” because they were more concerned about the stock market, the efficiency and the profits coming from the so-called “pandemic bond” — which is an absurdity all by itself, that you would try to finance the cost of pandemics with bonds from which people can make a profit, but only if you have the maturity of the bond. So, I think the thinking is still very much dominated by the geopolitical idea: For example, yesterday, I was listening — and one should actually stop doing that! — I was listening to the ZDF news and this moderator reported about the coronavirus crisis, but then, instead of praising what the Chinese accomplished in Wuhan, he took the occasion to blast China and attack it, or to continue to attack Russia, China, that has to stop! Because if you look at it, the only way how humanity will get out of the crisis, is international cooperation. Wang Yi, the Chinese Foreign Minister, has just telephoned the Italian Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio, and the Chinese offered share their experience, to send their experts; they’re donating masks, protective suits, and tests to Italy. This is a completely different approach. And I think the West has much to learn how to respond to challenges which all of humanity is facing. And this whole geopolitical thinking is really one of troglodytes and should be eliminated completely.
SCHLANGER: We see people like U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo continuing to attack China; he calls coronavirus the “Wuhan virus” — you have this kind of attitude, when in fact, what we’re seeing is a significant drop of cases in China. And you mentioned earlier the importance of President Xi Jinping going to Wuhan to talk to the people who are on the front lines. I think it’s important to report this, Helga, because it’s not going out in the Western press.
ZEPP-LAROUCHE: I have proposed something, which may look impossible to some people, but I dare the prediction that the situation will — because of this ineffectiveness of Western response — that the situation will soon come to the point where more and more people are recognizing that what I’m saying is the only way to address this problem. What I have reiterated is my call to have an emergency summit by Xi Jinping, Putin, Trump, Modi, as a minimum combination, to address all these problems. Because it’s very clear that we need an international cooperation concerning the coronavirus pandemic. This is already threatening the international financial system: We saw, in the last several weeks, several plunges, absolutely of the same dimension as after the 2008 systemic collapse, or after the September 11, 2001 attack; and only because the central banks have now decided to flood the markets, to lower the interest rates — like the Bank of England lowered the interest rate by a half-percent, 50 basis points, today — as if the simple pushing of liquidity would remedy any of the real, physical causes for why the system is collapsing. So, I want to have a mobilization of the population to demand that the leaders of the most important governments — of the United States, Russia, China, and India — need to discuss the Four Points which were proposed by my late husband Lyndon LaRouche, in June 2014, because you need to have an immediate end of the global casino economy, by implementing a Glass-Steagall system; we have discussed this many times on this program, but it is the only combination of measures which would address the problem. Then, you need a national bank in every country; in Germany, we could extend the functions of the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau; have a national bank in every other country; have an international cooperation among these national banks, reinstate fixed exchange rates, and then have agreements about industrial development projects, like the industrial development of Southwest Asia, of Africa, and this will become then, a New Bretton Woods system. There must be cooperation with the Chinese New Silk Road to have these kinds of development plans. And we need a crash program to go into a new platform of higher productivity of the economy, joint cooperation in advanced technologies, like fusion, like biophysics, like space research cooperation. And then, such a summit could implement these measures, and then could have a series of such summits, and that way change the geopolitics, and move towards an international cooperation, a shared future of humanity.
And that shift has to occur. And I’m predicting, and I think I’m on the safe side in doing so, that the crisis will accelerate, there will be many more unfortunate consequences, and people will recognize that to establish a completely different level of thinking will be the only way out for all of mankind.
If you agree with that, you should help this mobilization. There is a resolution, which is attachéd to this webcast [https://schillerinstitute.nationbuilder.com/four_laws_new], please sign it, please spread it among your friends and colleagues, get more people to sign it: Because we need a public discussion about this, and public demand that the whole world should move into a completely new way of cooperating and solving these kinds of problems.
SCHLANGER: I’ve received a few emails from people who have asked, why do we focus on “neo-liberalism” as the problem? What does that have to do with the virus? And I think it’s important to look at what Dr. Redfield of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had to say about the need to rebuild the system: That the so-called “just-in-time” system, which has been accepted as an economic model doesn’t work. We need redundancy. And Helga, I think it would be very useful for you to just review again, why this neo-liberal system is the cause, or sets humanity up for these kinds of crises. Because this is what your husband was warning, going back to 1971, with the Biological Holocaust Task Force he set up, and so on.
ZEPP-LAROUCHE: The prognosis of Lyndon LaRouche, which he made on Aug. 15, 1971, when Nixon dissolved the Bretton Woods system by going to floating exchange rates, by decoupling the dollar from the gold-reserve standard and that way, opening the deregulation of the markets which has escalated ever since. My husband at that point had made the prognosis that if the West would continue on this road, of liberalizing the markets, of going with neo-liberal, monetarist policies, that it would end up in a new depression and the danger of a new fascism; or, one would go to a completely new economic system.
Now, that prognosis has proven to be absolutely on the mark. And the Biological-Ecological Holocaust Task Force which you just mentioned, he set up in 1974, and it was to study the effects of the policies of the IMF and World Bank on the economic system, especially in the developing sector. And in meantime, we have produced many studies, which you can all see in our archives, that if you impose such austerity or zero growth policies, especially on the developing countries, that you would inevitably cause the emergence of old diseases and new diseases, because you cannot consistently lower the living standard of entire continents, as the IMF and World Bank have done in the last 50 years, without creating conditions of breakdown. And that is exactly what you see right now: Because you don’t have only the coronavirus crisis, you have the locust situation getting completely out of control in many African states, in the Horn of Africa, and in the Arabian Peninsula and Pakistan-India, even threatening to go into China.
Then, as part of this geopolitical, liberal scheme of the West, the refugee crisis: It’s not a natural phenomenon, it is the result of the interventionist wars conducted by the Bush Administrations and Obama, with the idea that you have to spread “democracy” and “human rights” and that it’s legitimate to made interventionist wars against Iraq — doesn’t matter if it’s based on lies that there are so-called weapons of mass destruction which Nancy Pelosi, in the meantime has admitted that they all knew it was lie and they did it anyway; Iraq, Afghanistan — these are all the reasons why you have a refugee crisis. The underdevelopment of Africa is a result of these policies.
So that is why I am saying, if we don’t get rid of this paradigm, which has many elements — it has geopolitics, it has neo-liberal economic policies; but it also a Malthusian dimension to it. The Green axiom which says that nature, or some spiders or some ants somewhere are more important than human beings; and I even go so far as to say that I think the reason why there is such an absolutely bestial attitude — I mean, on the coronavirus, do you think that most African countries or Asian and Latin American countries that do not have the health systems we have, do you think they are testing their people? I don’t think so. So the figures are in all likelihood completely off, and the ability of these countries to remedy it is much, much less. And I’m absolutely convinced that there are some people who say, “Oh, there are too many people anyway,” like Bertrand Russell, who said, you need a pandemic every generation — these are quotes we have published many times! And the absolutely disgusting way how the EU is dealing with the refugee crisis, now again erupting at the Turkish-Greek border, that is a mindset which is disgusting! And it is the reflection of geopolitics, of the Malthusian idea that there are too many people anyway.
Now, Erdoğan, obviously, is playing his own, terrible games. But I think in this moment, where innocent people who have nothing, — the whole thing is that these refugees, even if they’re sitting in camps for years on end, and have begun speaking Turkish, and now Erdoğan is instrumentalizing them, that may all be true — that’s what the Greeks are saying — but what is the solution to that? You have to stop insisting that you have regime change in Syria, that has to stop. There has to be recognition that the only legitimate government in Syria is the one which the Syrian people themselves elect. There was a constitutional process under way, which is now stopped again; that has to be resumed. There has to be an end to the war. Turkey should not be backed by NATO — this is an insane idea. The U.S. special envoy for Syria James Jeffrey just demanded that NATO should fully back up Turkey against Syria, that is complete insanity: What needs to be done is you have to have peace with Syria, and then you have to have an orderly negotiation between the Assad government and the opposition, to arrange for the return of the Syrians to their own country, which is what most people want to do, anyway.
So I think all of these assumptions, that you just keep going with the policies which have proven to be a failure, that that has to absolutely stop. I don’t see a sign that the European establishment is capable of doing it. That just means we need a mobilization of the population, because this is becoming a serious existential crisis for all of us, and we have to take responsibility to put in a new paradigm — a paradigm of cooperation, and then we can solve most problems; at least over time, we can find solutions to such problems as coronavirus. But we need to change the view of the West towards China and Russia, and this whole idea that regime change is allowed under the pretext of spreading democracy and human rights, is one of these imperial, colonialist ideas which have to go.
SCHLANGER: Another perfect example of that is the expansion of sanctions against Iran and Venezuela for regime change, in the face of this growing pandemic.
I’d like to come back to one other point, which I think you alluded to earlier, which is the financial crisis: We now see, if something is going to be quarantined, we ought to quarantine Wall Street and the Bank of England. The idea that lower interest rates will solve something, but what’s going on with the repo lending, the incredible demand for liquidity without any concern for solvency, this is the other aspect of Mr. LaRouche’s warnings over many years.
ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Yes. I don’t know how long this will continue. And I think what the central banks are proposing is completely irresponsible, because the continuous flooding of the markets with money, and the idea to go even to negative interests rates, all of this is already eating up the savings and life’s earnings of the population, and is threatening at some point to go into a hyperinflation. So these derivatives must be absolutely written off — this is why Glass-Steagall is so crucial — and I think the whole EU program as it was announced by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, in this presence of this deplorable Greta Thunberg, that has to go, too! Because you cannot have an industrial state and implement these policies. I think if you want to have hospitals, if you want to have enough intensive care units to deal with such a situation, you have to have a productive society. And that Green policy of von der Leyen it has to go. We need the full package that I talked about before: Glass-Steagall, and the return to Hamiltonian banking, which every time there was a successful economic system in history, whether it was the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, whether it was the reconstruction of Germany in the postwar period, these were the principles which were applied, and that is what is urgently required.
SCHLANGER: And while this is all going on, we have this incredible soap opera in U.S. politics around the Democratic nomination. I think it would be very useful, as we come toward the end of this webcast, for you to emphasize again, what do you think people should do, to make sure we can change the paradigm? There’s a hunger for change, people are still extremely unhappy, and now, very nervous, both because of the financial crisis and the coronavirus, what should people do? How should they respond?
ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Since you mentioned the U.S. situation, I think it’s a big problem, because, unfortunately Trump said he had a hunch that the mortality rates of the coronavirus is much less than what the World Health Organization was saying. Now, I think that he’s probably saying that because of the election campaign and he thinks that this will intervene. But I think the reality will assert itself very quickly: This will come as fast as it came in Europe, maybe faster even, and the U.S. right now is really unprepared! The health delivery system was taking even more than in Europe. The Democrats have this Biden now as a major candidate — I can only advise people, there is a very interesting collection of videos which was published by Consortium News, the author is Caitlin Johnstone [https://consortiumnews.com/2020/03/06/stop-calling-it-a-stutter-dozens-of-examples-show-bidens-dementia-symptoms/], and she collected about 20 or so videos of speeches of Biden where you clearly can see that he doesn’t have it any more — he’s lost it. So the idea to somebody who has clear signs of aging (to put it mildly), to think that you can run him through the Democratic Convention, the election campaign, and then win the election in November against Trump, is also a sign of extreme mental deterioration of the people who think they can do that and get away with it.
So if you look at all of these things, we need a completely new thinking: We are in a Dark Age, the Dark Age is absolutely comparable to the 14th century when the Black Death killed one-third of the European population, and people just went crazy! You see signs of this insanity, already now, and we need therefore, a completely different approach, like it came with the 15th century and the Golden Renaissance in Italy. We can talk about that some other time, but, I think people have to really recognize, we are in a Dark Age, and we have to reject all the assumptions which have led to this present situation.
And I actually would like to make one other point: I think the coronavirus will force lockdowns, it will force measures, schools and universities are already closed for several weeks in several countries; you don’t know yet what will be the effect of all of this on the financial system, on the real economy, and I think on these circumstances, where Merkel is talking about 70% of the population will become infected, and if you assume worldwide it may be 100 million people, and then, if you take present mortality rates, it will be 2-4 million people — under these circumstances, we should not have war games. And therefore, I think we need to stop the present NATO maneuver in Eastern Europe, the Defender-Europe 2020: Because obviously, the virus does not stop in front of the military. And to have these kinds of things going on, when you have an immediate health threat to the population, is really something which doesn’t make any sense. So this NATO maneuver should stop. Presently I think the highest commander of the U.S. forces in Germany is a victim of the coronavirus and is in quarantine in Wiesbaden: So, that should just give people to think that the virus does not stop in the face of the military.
And I think we should go in the direction of mobilizing for the summit: I know people think that this is too big, but sometimes, when you are in a real crisis, only if you reach a completely new level of thinking, namely the idea that all the major countries of the world — the United States, Russia, China, and India, as a minimum; and then other countries can come together with these countries — only if you change the level of thinking, and the level of approach, can you find a solution. So if you agree with that, then help us in this mobilization, because, you know, we will do other things: We will call for the rebuilding of the health delivery system, there are other things we can do. But I think because of the complexity of the world situation, the interaction of all of the elements of the breakdown, that we will not solve the problem unless we go to a completely new paradigm, a new system of international relations, and you should help us in this mobilization, and that’s the very best thing you can do for your own life and your own future.
SCHLANGER: And I would recommend, toward that end, that people circulate this webcast, get this webcast around, so people can hear the extent of the crisis and the solutions; and secondly, go to our website, and download the call for emergency summit from Helga Zepp-LaRouche, take that to your city council, to your trade union group — well, maybe you shouldn’t go too far, but you can certainly use the internet to get it around and get people signing it and support it.
So, Helga, anything else you want to add?
ZEPP-LAROUCHE: No. I think this is a moment where people will be freaked out and it’s understandable: But sometimes a shock is also healthy if it helps you to get out of a wrong idea, and to think things through and then move ahead and find a solution. So, I would urge people to overcome your present fears and be confident that if we work together as one humanity, we can solve this.
SCHLANGER: OK, well, with that, we’ll see you again, next week.
ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Till next week.