Afskrift og video på engelsk: Nu skal USA og Europa tilslutte sig Kinas nye Silkevej,
og mobilisere fødevareressourcer til bekæmpelse af sult i Afrika.
Hussein Askarys tale til vores danske videokonference den 8. november 2020
Her er afskrifter på engelsk af Hussein Askarys tale i tre dele:
Here is the transscript of Hussein Askary’s speech in three parts:
Første del:
First part:
Hussein Askary’s speech to a Danish webinar “The World After the U.S. Election” on Nov. 8, 2020
Hussein Askary is the Schiller Institute’s Southwest Asia coordinator, and board member of the Belt and Road Initiative Institute in Sweden (brixsweden.org).
Thank you very much for inviting me. It’s always a pleasure to be with you in Copenhagen and unfortunately, this year, it is very sad that I couldn’t be there in person. I always get a lot of inspiration from being with you in Copenhagen, but hopefully, next year, we will have a better situation to meet personally. I have to leave after my presentation, because I have to prepare for another presentation. If you have noticed on my Facebook page, I’m involved in a major movement or development in Iraq where we now have young people organizing themselves, not to make a regime change, but to join the Belt and Road, and work with China. This movement had no good idea about what the benefits of working with China are, and what the Belt and Road is, and how Iraq can benefit from that. For a month now, I’ve been giving classes to these groups. The one I’m talking to today has 270,000 members, so I will give a live presentation, because yesterday, two breakthroughs happened. The Iraqi parliament voted to join the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), and also one of the major political and religious leaders in Iraq told the government that they have to reactivate China-Iraq agreement, which has been frozen. So, people in Iraq say ‘Who can tell us about that Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank?’ and people say, ‘Call Hussein Askary’ so that’s what I’m going do today, because it’s a quite optimistic situation.
Tom Gillesberg gave a thorough briefing, a fantastic overview of the developments in the U.S., and why both the United States and Europe should work with China and Russia, to have economic development in all parts of the world, but also, most emphatically, inside the U.S. Europe, because these two also need economic development today. One thing I have learned from Lyndon LaRouche, is that when you try to address a problem somewhere in the world, as we discussed today the situation in the U.S., but the subject of my presentation is on the hunger crisis in the world, and the pandemic today, LaRouche says that you have to zoom out from this this situation itself. It is like what you do with Google Earth. First you find the area on the map which are looking for, and then you zoom out, and you see the whole planet. You not only zoom out to see the whole planet, but you also look back into the entirety of the history of mankind, and then look to the future of mankind – what is supposed to be the future of mankind. It’s like a string quartet, where you keep all these factors in your mind, each one of the players in the string quartet sounds like they’re playing their own notes, but then they are dissonances, and there are consonances or harmony, and then you come to a solution afterwards. But you have to keep all these factors in your mind when you discuss a specific problem.
Yes, what happens in the U.S. affects the whole world, but I also have to argue that what happens in the world has to affect the United States. We are not Americans, but our role is to make sure that we present to the American people, but also to the European people – honestly, I don’t think Europeans are less ignorant than Americans about what’s going on in the world, because the media here is completely full of false, fake news and disinformation, but we need to help people by bringing a view of the world which is completely different from what they get.
So, in that sense, all work, whether concerning the Belt and Road Initiative, or Africa, or the Middle East, etc., should reflect this universality of the work we are doing.
Let’s go to the slide show. As you see, in the first slide, many of you know, in 2017 Jason Ross and I and other members of the Schiller Institute put together this report about extending the New Silk Road to West Asia, the so-called Middle East, and Africa, and it has a comprehensive report on not only what is going on, but also where Africa should go, and also West Asia. We have a whole chapter on the food situation in Africa, and how Africa can not only feed itself, but feed other parts of the world. Because the tragedy is that 60% of the untouched arable land in the world, agricultural land, which also has enormous water resources, is in Africa. Africa can potentially be the bread basket of the world in the future, but there are reasons why not only Africa is capable of that, but also the fact that we have a famine in many parts of Africa.
The next slide which is the projection of the Belt and Road Initiative and also reaching Africa. We’ll come back to that, but this is the image we have to have it our mind when we discuss the problem of famine in Africa. The next slide is about what are called the UN sustainable development goals of 2030. Now there is nothing problematic, but for me, it’s not a problem to talk about sustainable development, as long as we understand sustainable development as the Chinese do, which means sustained development. Which means you have always continue increasing the living conditions of your population using science and technology to do that. That’s how the Chinese understand sustainable development. That’s why they played a key role in designing these 17 goals for the international community to achieve by 2030.
Now, number one and two, which I called the Siamese twins, is poverty and hunger. By 2030 we were supposed to eliminate poverty and hunger as the first priorities of the human community. The problem is that that did not happen. Actually, we went back, as the International Food and Agriculture Organization reported last year, that we are actually going in the opposite direction of achieving that goal. Things are getting worse concerning poverty and hunger in the world.
Now what are the problems? If you look at the next slide, you saw in the first slide, if you go back, it’s very orderly. It says number one, eliminating poverty, number two eliminating hunger, three, achieving universal healthcare. Then we have gender equality, of course, but then you have physical economic improvements that are needed. Electricity for all, clean water, etc. But in the next line, what I put there, the Europeans and Americans turn this whole concept into a game, where you don’t really know where the priority is. So, what they did is that they mixed the whole bag, and then they came up with the idea that fighting climate change is the priority for mankind, because they said whatever you do to eliminate poverty and hunger, if you don’t end the climate change crisis, you cannot solve hunger and poverty, which is a lie. So, they made this a priority. They say there is hunger and poverty in the world because of climate change, and that’s also a lie. The reason there is hungry and poverty in the world is that we have had a policy of depriving people, especially in Africa, South America, and Asia, of scientific technological development in order to keep them under the control of the British Empire, the Anglo-American Empire, and their allies. They use regime change, and this is one of the reasons we had this crisis in Africa becoming bigger, is because, for example, of the Obama-Biden NATO operation in Libya, to destroy, kill the leader of Libya Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, and supporting terrorist groups, Al-Qaida and ISIS, to take over the country. But what happened then is that you had weapons, there were lots of weapons in Libya, they started spreading into all of Africa, especially in the Sahel region, and then we had new terrorist groups developing, like Boko Haram, which wreaked havoc in all other parts of Africa. That was policy from the Biden-Obama administration and NATO and the EU.
Anden del i EIR tidsskrift:
Second part in EIR magazine:
Diskussion:
Q: Why hasn’t the U.S. and Europe joined in this effort, and what do you think has to be done to make that happen?
Hussein Askary: We have had a cultural paradigm since at least the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but it had already started after World War II, with the destruction of classical culture in the United States and Europe — the reversal of what Franklin Roosevelt did, and his policy for the post World War period. That nations will be sovereign, and we will use what we have learned to do in the United States itself, increasing the power of the productivity of labor using scientific and technical progress, and had a completely different idea about relations among nations. But that was destroyed in the so-called cultural revolution which followed the assassination of President Kennedy. We had a totally different paradigm in the United States and Europe where people started going against this, which is documented by Executive Intelligence Review. This was an intentional operation by British and American intelligence agencies and the City of London, in collaboration with Wall Street, to brainwash the American and European people into believing that scientific and industrial development has its limits. We cannot continue like that. We have to live in “harmony” with nature. People became antagonistic to scientific, cultural and technological development. And that was used as a way of neutralizing the movement in the post World War II period, to implement what Franklin Roosevelt had intended to do. So, the whole cultural paradigm shifted, and with that, since 1971 with the end of the Bretton Woods system, we also had a shift in the economic thinking, away from investment in infrastructure, industry and science, to investments into financial markets to make quick profits. So, this has become the trend. But, as everybody can see from the conditions in the United States and Europe, that is self-destructive.
But the impact on the rest of the world has been that Africa, until today, cannot grow its own food. We have famines. We have civil wars. We have wars in West Asia the Middle East by the same forces who wanted to prevent economic and cultural development in the United States, in Europe, and around the world. So, there is a paradigm, a cultural paradigm, an economic paradigm, which started in the 70s that now has reached its end. And the people who are clinging to that that old paradigm, to the empire, to control people and control resources in the world, they realize that their system is ending, but they keep hanging on to it, whatever the price. If you instigate civil wars, world wars, it doesn’t matter. The important thing is to save their system.
But that’s not going to happen so easily, because there is a whole new trend around the world, which Helga Zepp-LaRouche has called the new paradigm, which China, Russia, until recently India, the BRICS nations were leading, and many, many nations in Asia, in Africa, and South America, have joined that new paradigm. Where they say relations among nations should not be based on the extraction of wealth, but on what the Chinese call Win-Win. You get the resources you need for your development, but you will give us the tools, the technologies, that we need for our own development. And that’s an equitable relationship among nations. This should be the standard for world governance. And that’s the trend which is going on in the world. It is unstoppable unless the British Empire and it’s supporters in the United States, start a World War. Because there is nothing else that can stop it. It’s very popular. It’s very affective. It’s very productive. So that old paradigm has to be shifted.
Q: There’s a question from Sweden: Does China have a priority plan in terms of stages of infrastructure development in Africa?
Hussein Askary: I’m not familiar with a grand design for specific project, on how this will happen. But when the Chinese prime minister came to Africa in 2014, he made a tour in different countries in Africa, East and West, and pledged that China is willing to connect all the African capitals with high-speed railways. That’s their vision.
But the Chinese pay a lot of attention to the idea of a sovereign nation. Yes, Africa (China?) works with the African Union, but the African Union is not like the European Union, where nations have lost their sovereignty. In the African Union you still have sovereign nations. the Chinese work with sovereign nations. They work with Egypt. They work with Ethiopia, Nigeria, etc. And each nation has its priority projects, and they present these priority projects to China, and the Chinese say, “We can do this. We can do that.” And then they may go to the next stage.
So the Chinese do not have a grand design for others. They say, “Whatever you take as your priority, we are willing to work with you, if it is reasonable, if it is productive. If it is Win-Win.”
But the also Chinese know that they have to diversify their markets. They cannot rely only on the United States and Europe, for the political reasons we know. So, therefore, they are creating and developing a market in Africa for high value products, not small products which they can just overwhelm Africa with. But they want to go to higher value chains, like building factories in Africa. Chinese companies will build the factories which will produce the consumer goods Africans inside Africa. That’s a completely different level of trade or economic relation with other nations. Like concerning the agreement with Egypt to build the high-speed railway. Part of that agreement is that trains will be produced in Egypt. So the Chinese will build a train factory inside Egypt for the trains that will run in Egypt. The Chinese workers and engineers at home will be working with much, much higher value products the than producing toys, which the Chinese used to do before. Now China has moved somewhere else. And, therefore, they are moving the supply and value chains, outside of China to other countries where there are advantages, like closeness to markets, closeness to raw materials, and the ability of labor. That’s what the Chinese think about.
But in terms of the specific projects on the continent of Africa, they leave it for the African nations and the African Union to define their priority projects, and the Chinese say, “We can build this railway. We can build this damn. We can finance it. The Chinese thinking is not like European thinking, where you make a plan for another nation. That’s not our business, because the Europeans and Americans think they know better, what is good for you Uganda. They know better what is good for Iraq, for South Africa. That’s not true. The South Africans and Iraqis and Ugandan’s no better what is good for their country, and they do have capable people who can understand reality and define their priority projects. That’s why the Africans like working with the Chinese, because they respect them. They don’t dictate to them what to do.
Q: Can you say something about this issue of asserting sovereignty, because it’s clear that the old British Empire financial center and the whole thing that goes with it, they are not interested in having this kind of development policy for the African continent, for example, or for any nation. So they will manipulate their currency through speculation or you have, maybe, terrorism, or assassinations, and things like that, in order to prevent this kind of development from happening.
How can they assert their sovereignty in a better way than doing now, or is it even possible for them? For example, you have written about creating a national banking institution. You wrote something about Egypt and an emergency economic reorganization there. Can it be done in one nation, or does it have to be done with the African Union? And China? How do you look at this question?
Hussein Askary: The idea of national sovereignty terrifies the British and their Wall Street collaborators. You always notice, also it’s in the mindset, when you have these at advertisements for aid to Africa, you never hear which country those kids in the videos come from. They are that just Africans. They are black kids. You are never told that, “OK we going to work with these people in this African country. No, they say they are hungry people in Africa. Send us some money. So they completely ignore the fact that you have a nation there, with a government with borders, with regulations, with rules. No, there’s only a people.
Also, when you have people talking about the Russians, the Belarusians, the Iraqis, the Iranians, Pompeo talks about the Chinese. He says we have to care about the Chinese people. We have concerns for the Chinese people. Well, the Chinese people have a government they love. They always want, even in the dialogue, in the way they talk, they want to push aside the idea that there is a nation there. They say “a people.” “There’s a people.” It’s like the Trump administration plan for the Palestinians. They say there’s a Palestinian people. We care about the Palestinians. But there’s no Palestine. There’s no state called Palestine, and they think that there should never be a state called Palestine.
That’s a problem because sovereign nations can decide, suddenly, we don’t want you here. Look at Djibouti, one of the smallest countries on the planet They had leased their port, the Duralay (??) container port, which is very important for Ethiopia, to the Dubai World Ports, a company which is not really just from the Emirates, it’s British controlled. So, in Djibouti, the government changed. Djibouti doesn’t even have an army. there are seven super powers who have military bases in Djibouti, first and foremost, the French and Americans, and the British, but even the Japanese, the Italians and the Chinese. Djibouti decided, No! This is our port. You got this lease in a corrupt way. You bribed the minister to take over our port.
We are taking at that port from you. What Dubai Ports did, was they went to London to an arbitration court. The arbitration court said that Dubai Ports are right, and you have to give them back your port. And then the Djibouti government told the British court to go to hell. And now, they have a contract with a Chinese company to run the place, but without taking over the port.
This is what terrifies the empire from the idea of sovereignty, because sovereign nations say, “Our own peoples interest come first, not your financial interest, not the World Trade Organization, not the UN, etc. Our people come first, the interests of our people. We are willing to work with you on an equitable basis, but you don’t impose things on us, including our currency, and our banking system.”
Now the problem is that most nations are still dependent on the IMF, the World Bank, and other institutions, so they are incapable of — like Egypt didn’t fully go with a national bank. While they were negotiating with the IMF and the World Bank, they managed to get the people do something amazing. When the president went out the people out to the people and said, “We are going to build the Suez Canal, but we don’t have any money. As you know our country is almost bankrupt. I want you, the Egyptian people, to raise the money for the new Suez Canal.”
In one week, Egyptians raised $8 billion. I was in Egypt and a banker told me he had to stay open during the night because the Egyptian people were taking their savings from their homes to stand in long queues to buy the certificates of the Suez Canal. This is what happens when you have a leadership which can inspire the people. $8 Billion in one week! Before that, Egypt had been in negotiations for three years to get $3 billion from the IMF. That’s the difference between a sovereign nation, and a nation which is enslaved by international institutions.
And now the Chinese, and now the Russians, are very, very aware of that principle. They want this to be the number one issue in their dealings with everyone. So that’s terrifying for the City of London and the Wall Street gang, and also for NATO forces who think the whole world is an open place for tanks and airplanes and soldiers to walk in. Sorry, that’s not happening. It’s not going to happen.
Q: There’s a question from Ulf Sandmark, the chairman of the Schiller Institute in Sweden, about vaccine distribution in Africa, which he can ask, but I would in your answer, please also speak about Helga’s proposal for establishing a Committee for a Coincidence of Opposites to deal with the health and food crises.
An interesting Chinese article described the plan to distribute Covid-19 vaccines, which will be a giant effort to bring millions of doses to the nations that need it and it will be a special challenge to bring it to Africa. Denmark will be an important country in this effort with its big Pharma industry, but also with Maersk and especially Scandiavian Airlines SAS, which are struck to the ground now but can be put to use in the airlift that could be organized. In Sweden we have the Electrolux company producing refrigerators, which is very important as the big thing to bring the vaccines in place is to organize the cool chain. There is the necessity to bring food to Africa but at the same time the need to bring the Health Silk Road to Africa including vaccines. What do you think about the article? (https://schillerinstitute.com/blog/2020/11/05/china-working-out-logistics-for-global-distribution-of-covid-vaccine/)
SIDA (Swedish International Development Agency counterpart to the Danish DANIDA) is not doing any direct aid as it is all outsourced, so I think we have to go to the industry and ask them to get support from the governments and start this vaccine distribution.
Hussein Askary: Concerning the other question about the Coincidence of Opposites, I think that this is a wonderful concept. I think Helga is the best person to explain it, but it comes from her understanding of the work of Nicholas of Cusa in his De Pace Fidei, On the Peace of Faith, that wonderful dialogue. It was written when the Ottomans had just invaded Constantinople, and there were people in the church and in Europe, who were obviously calling for a new Crusade against the Muslims, but he realize that this would just end up in total butchery and bloodshed. So in this wonderful dialogue, he brings in people of all kinds of faiths, Christians, Muslims, Jewish, Greeks, atheists, in order to bring into the discussion, “What is a human, and what is universal? The end up discovering that what unites humankind is the love of truth, the love of wisdom, and that is what is the gift of the creator to all humankind. All humans are capable of reason, of rational thinking, of discovering truth and beauty.
And I think Helga’s proposal will solve some of the most problematic and dangerous things we see today, which the British and their friends in the United States, like Pompeo, are pushing. It’s the clash of civilization. Pompeo went to Indonesia to arouse the feelings of Muslims against China, calling for a new jihad against the Chinese, because they are oppressing the Uighurs in western China. This is the stuff world wars are made of.
Instead of doing that and also following the example of Nicholas of Cusa, what Helga is proposing, and it also exists in the Chinese tradition. It’s called the I Ching. Not Ying Yang, but it’s a Confucian concept which says when two opposite forces cannot reach an understanding, end up in a conflict on one level about questions like human rights, culture, ethnic questions, sexual questions, etc., they have to abandon this fight, and go up to a higher level to find what is common, not where they are opposing each other. They have to abandon the issues that create the conflict, and try to reach a higher level to find what unites the two parties.
And, in that sense, you get to the idea of universality, where each nation — what does each nation need, each family, each human, need as a human, and then find a solution on the basis of the common points, the commonalities, rather than continuing, head-to-head, about things we disagree on. I think, in a simplified way, this is the concept that Helga is pushing, but it goes much, much deeper than that.
But for the world today, we need to have that approach. You cannot impose your political, cultural, religious, sexual and other preferences on other nations. That’s their own business. This is the message the Chinese carry to Africa, because one of the criticisms of China in the West, is that when the Chinese go to and African country, they build projects, but they never discuss the corruption, the human rights abuses, etc. in that country. The Chinese say, “This is not our business. We are here to improve the living conditions. We know that is something positive. Something that can improve your living conditions, and, eventually, lead to solving all these other problems.”
No. Europe and the U.S.: “No. You have to fight corruption.” Well, corruption was created by people who work for the U.S. and Europe. “You have to fight this, you have to fight that.” The African nations need infrastructure, water, power, education, health care, and then discuss the other issues we disagree on. But they say, “We disagree about this and that, which is a lot of hypocrisy.
I mentioned the fact that one of the biggest crises in Africa was created by Obama-Biden, and NATO and the EU by invading Libya. Now, Libya is a big slave market. Now they say, “We are against slavery. We have to stop the slavery.” Well, you created the conditions for the slave markets. You make it possible by using this question of human rights to destroy the sovereignty of a nation.
So that’s, I think, a perfect approach, today, to respect the differences among sovereign nations, differences in culture, social systems, political systems, religious beliefs, etc. That these don’t become the issues of dispute and negotiations, and discussions. What should be the issues for discussion and negotiation is what do we do to lift humankind to the next level, to the next platform of economic, social, scientific and cultural development. And that, I think, is the priority. It’s a genius idea, which Helga brought forth. I think it will be very popular in most parts of the world, and we have to fight to make people in Europe and the U.S. understand that they are not the best kids in the class. You don’t have the highest levels of culture in the world. You don’t have the highest moral. Like here in Sweden, people have started calling Sweden “a moral superpower.” Sorry, you are not a moral superpower. Look in the mirror.
So, therefore, we have to stop that kind of nonsense, and start working with other nations on concrete solutions for the world’s problems.
(There was a last question which Hussein and Tom answered not about Africa, but more general, about if we have contacts, like any moral bankers, or others who we are in touch, with who could put out a proposal for reorganizing the system already now, before the collapse?)