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The New Silk Road, the Road of Peace and Development
Against Permanent War

Helga Zepp-LaRouche Addresses Schiller Institute
Conferences in Colombia and Mexico

November 2015

 

This video address by Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche was presented to events in Buga, Colombia in November 18 and in Queretaro, Mexico on November 28, 2015.  The Buga forum, on "Principles of Classical Art: A New Paradigm for Humanity! `Dare To Be Wise' "was co-sponsored by the Schiller Institute and the Universidad del Valle's (UNIVALLE) School of Music, where music teachers, students, community members from Buga and surrounding towns, and Schiller Institute supporters gathered to discuss how to create a New Renaissance. After the keynote (below) and discussion, the participants also viewed the Spanish-subtitled video of Megan Beets on the Principles of Classical Art and Classical Music as science, and a necessary power within society rather than a matter of "taste.” A special 40 page pamphlet was circulated to build the event, with a cover quoting Friedrich Schiller, "The dignity of Man into your hands is given. Its keeper be! It sinks with you! With you it will be risen!" and included articles by Lyndon and Helga Zepp-LaRouche, some selections by Schiller, a report on the Schiller Institute's battle for the Verdi tuning, the three Schiller Institute petitions (BRICS, WWIII and COP21) and more. An important dialogue and plans for future work inspired all the participants.

The Mexico conference, “The World Landbridge: An End To Permanent War and Financial Chaos” was sponsored by the Citizens LaRouche Movement of Mexico, and held in Queretaro, the city that was to have been the terminus of Ibero America’s first high speed rail line from Mexico City, built with Chinese financing and engineering.  A 26-page pamphlet was produced for the conference, containing the first Spanish language translations of the EIR Report “The New Silk Road Becomes the World Landbridge.”  After the keynote presentation by Schiller Institute Founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche (below), presentations were given on “China, The Silk Road to Development and Peace”, LaRouche’s Method and the World Landbridge: the Role of the Americas”, and “The Ecology Fraud Will Make Us Extinct.”  All the presentations were received with intense interest and enthusiasm, and discussion continued among the attendees for many hours. The video address was pre-recorded November 10, 2015.

 

The Promise and the Vision of the New Silk Road

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Hello, I want to send greetings to your conference.   And I want to talk to you about the vision which is embedded in the New Silk Road, the New Silk Road, which is the policy which was initiated by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013 and which is quickly unfolding to become the most promising dynamic on the planet.

But, let me briefly tell you why it is so extremely important that people start to look at this new model of economics.  Because the underlying dynamic behind all major crises in the world, from the wars in various parts of the world, to terrorism, to many other social crisis, the underlying dynamic is the fact that the Trans-Atlantic financial system is about to blow out in ways which will make 2008 look like the proverbial peanuts, if it comes to that and it is not prevented ahead of time.

Now you also have an unbelievable economic and social collapse in the United States. There was just a report published in the New York Times that the death rate of white Americans in the middle age of between 40 and 50 years, is increasing; it's by 10% average and it is increasing by 22% for the poor. Now, that's not supposed to happen. People are not supposed to die when they are in the middle of their lives.  And the only comparison to such an event, was what happened in Russia, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the '90s during the Yeltsin period, a condition were basically 1 million people disappeared from the demographic statistics every year, and this was only ended when President Putin came to power at the end of that period.

Now, what is causing these deaths among these middle age Americans. It's drug addiction, deaths by drugs, alcohol and suicides. And that is obviously reflection of the fact that the general mood in America, has shifted from the optimism of the Kennedy period, where now most Americans are pessimistic about the future, about the fact that coming generations will be much worse off that the present ones; which is the first time in the so-called advanced world, where such an idea would be accepted, because it used to be the basis of morality, that parents would say, "I want my children to be better off than myself."

Now, that has vanished. And if you look at it, you have in many areas people have lost income, the living standard is collapsing;  people have to work 2-3 jobs. The drug addiction in Baltimore, for example, is 1 in 10 is a heroin user. There's a heroin epidemic! A lot of it is coming from Latin America, it's being flooded, and many people become addicted, because it's 25% of the price of prescription drugs. So the whole country is really collapsing. 

And in Europe, it is no better. It is different, but not better.   Because, you probably have heard reports of about an unprecedented refugee crisis, which comes mostly from Southwest Asia, from these wars which are based on lies. Now you have people from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, but also from many countries in Africa. And there are presently 60 million people already in various states of being a refugee and many of them have the desire to go to Europe; and that is destabilizing the very foundations of Europe at this point.

Now, I could mention more of such horrible developments, but it also makes very clear:  We must have a paradigm shift. We must go to a completely different economic model. And that is why the New Silk Road is so extremely important.

 In 2013 President Xi Jinping announced the New Silk Road in Kazakhstan. In November, he announced the Maritime Silk Road. Then the BRICS countries, practically joined the New Silk Road movement, which was first demonstrated in the conference in Fortaleza in Brazil in 2014, and which was consolidated in the Ufa BRICS summit this year in Russia.

What is unfolding is a completely new dynamic, based on totally different principles than the casino economy of the Trans-Atlantic sector. Remember that the ancient Silk Road was an exchange not only of goods, porcelains, silk; but also of technologies: How to make porcelain, how to make silk, an exchange of culture and ideas. And that is exactly what is been revived right now, by President Xi Jinping, who has explicitly said that every country which participates in this Silk Road development, will have a "win-win" perspective, that it is in the interest of every country participating in it. Now with an unbelievably rapid pace, new trade routes have developed in the last year: from Chengdu in China, Yiwu, Chongqing, Xi'an and Lianyungang, you have now, every week trains, leaving full of goods to such places in Europe, as Duisburg in Germany, Hamburg, Madrid, in Spain, or Lyon in France.

Now, this development fever, one can say, has already caught on in Central Asia, in the Balkans; and countries in the Balkans are looking towards China for infrastructure development and not the EU. But the vision of the Silk Road, has also caught on in Europe. Xi Jinping was a couple of weeks ago in Great Britain, and the British being always very smart be first to smell the new wind, they had not only massive trade arrangements and trade deals with China, but they were saying that the "Golden Age" of British-Chinese relations is about to begin. Also the German Chancellor Angela Merkel just was in China. And she concluded many, many trade deals, but even more important, they combined the economic systems to become a complementary economic powerhouse. China just did the same thing, by the way with South Korea and Japan; obviously very, very important to overcome the conflicts in the South China Sea.

But this is not all, because in Spain there was just a very important forum on the Silk Road, where the leader of the most important development agency of China, used the beautiful image that the Silk Road can and must become Noah's Ark for all the countries in trouble around the world.

That is especially important for Southwest Asia and Africa, the origin of the big, big refugee crisis which is right now destabilizing all of Europe. Because obviously if one would take the Silk Road, which is now going from China through Central Asia, all the way to Europe, and would extend that into Southwest Asia, to basically build infrastructure, integrated systems of fast trains, of waterways, of highways, of declaring war against the desert by tapping into new fresh water sources through large amounts of desalination of ocean water, through nuclear energy; by ionizing the moisture in the atmosphere; by creating new rain and weather patterns to declare war on the deserts, and this way, create the precondition for new cities, for industry, for agriculture.

I don't want to use the word "Marshall Plan," because it's a slightly different conception, but it is a kind of a Marshall Plan, because that gives you the idea that it is possible through directed state intervention and economic policy based on physical principles to basically overcome any economic crisis,  like the Marshall Plan did for Europe.

If you would announce at this point, that all the great neighbors of the Middle East and Near East -- Russia, China, India, Iran, Egypt, and the European countries, which are now destabilized by refugees -- if they all would say: Let's make a Marshall Plan for the Middle East together and invite the United States to be part of it, I think that there is absolute reason to believe that not only the problem of terrorism could be overcome, but that by showing such a vision of hope, that you could convince many young people, especially young men, not to join the jihad, but to fight for a better future, to become a scientist, to become an engineer, and to create a family, and to have a future. And obviously the same thing is true for Africa, where now millions of people are fleeing, taking the risk of 50% not making it, by getting into little boats in the Mediterranean, where about 6,000 or more officially have drowned already this year; and people still take that risk to get to Europe.

Now if we would do the same thing with Africa, and say, "Let's extend the Silk Road together; let's join all the countries and develop Africa," I think we could eliminate poverty and create stability in a very, very short period of time.

Now, why I am so optimistic? Well, if you look at the China model of economy, China has done an economic miracle, which apart from the German economic miracle in the postwar period is really without any example. They have replicated in only 30 years, what America and Europe needed for 200 years. And with that economic method, they have eliminated poverty, they have elevated 600 million people out of poverty; and the intention is to use the Silk Road development to basically make the same thing possible for people in the interior regions in the west of China.

Why is this functioning?  And what can we learn from this Chinese model? Well, I have been many times in China, and I can assure you that I am convinced this is based on the Confucian tradition of China, which put a very high premium on the excellence in education.   Confucius said, rejuvenate yourself every day, develop a new idea every day; never the same thing twice, always improve yourself; perfect yourself every day. And that is the principle which China has applied and is applying especially to the education of the young, the students, pupils, also women. They have put a very big emphasis on achieving gender equality by having as many women participate in university education:  They are graduating this year, 2,000 students in the area of fusion economy alone, and I don't know of any European country or America which would be even close to such a rate of progress.

But they have not only created a "win-win perspective" with the Silk Road for other countries to join this, but they have also put up a new model of foreign relations, which is based on the idea of respect of sovereignty, of respect for the difference of the social model of the other country, of non-interference; and they have invited the United State and the Americas to join.  And here, you see behind me a world map of what we called: "The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge." So it is really a model how to transform the underdevelopment of every part of the world and create a completely new paradigm.

What this New Silk Road, World Land-Bridge policy really is, it's an effort to overcome geopolitics -- geopolitics, which was the cause for two world wars in the 20th century -- which is the idea that a group of nations or one nation has a legitimate interest which it must defend against other nations, if need be, by military means. And that kind of thinking has to be eliminated, because in an age of thermonuclear weapons, war cannot be a means of conflict resolution any more.

So, we have to replace the idea of geopolitics, with the idea of the common aims of mankind. And there are many common aims of mankind! For example the elimination of poverty, which would be very easy. We could get rid of poverty in a year, in two years, --  very easy. We have to protect our planet, which after all is only a tiny blue planet, in the big Solar System, in an even bigger galaxy, and our galaxy, is only one of billions of galaxies. So our very little blue planet really very precious to us, and it must be protected against asteroids, comets, and other dangers from outer space.

Instead, we should explore space. We should travel through space.  We should develop technologies which allow us to do that. And China, again, has presently the most advanced space program in the world. With their lunar missions, they are in the process to mining helium-3 from the Moon, and bring it back in a couple of years in large quantities, because it does not exist in that form, in big quantities on Earth, and use it as a fuel, for the future fusion economy on the Earth.  

And presently there are many reports, that fusion breakthroughs are very close, and if you reach fusion; then we can have raw materials security, and energy security, for a very long time, for tens of thousands of years.   And helium-3 will be already the second generation of fusion economy, basically changing all the physical principles, also allowing them to use fusion power for space travel.

So, there are many good things in the future.  But I think we have to really fight for this model. I think it is within reach, that every child on the planet, could have access to universal education. And if that happens, oligarchism will disappear.  And moreover, if every child can have all access to all areas of knowledge to develop the fullest potential which is embedded in each human person, more and more people will become truly human,  more and more individuals will become geniuses, and we are only at the embryonic age of mankind.

Just think, in the last 10,000 years  -- that's not a lot time, if you compare to the age of the universe, or even our planet--how much development did man make? Basically from a population potential of maybe a couple of million people, who were hunters and gatherers, and now we have 7 billion people.  And we have unbelievable technologies, you know, we can communicate, we can do all kinds of things. But the next 10,000 years, we can explore riches of our universe, where we presently can't even think about.

But we must have that kind of optimism, that we are on the verge that humanity is becoming the true creative species.  And I think that it's all the promise and the vision of the Silk Road. So, join it and study it.