Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s keynote to today’s International Peace Coalition meeting provides a critical overview, and the basis for genuine hope. The full transcript appears in this briefing. Here are key excerpts:
Helga Zepp-LaRouche: Indeed, this past week was really an absolutely dramatic week with at least two events which I would call historic game-changers insofar as the fact that they occurred in the way they did means that there is a complete new chapter in world history.
The first one obviously is the presentation by the South African government, or rather six legal experts of the South African government at the International Court of Justice at The Hague, where they presented the case of accusation of genocide against the government of Israel…. This is something everybody absolutely should watch, because the fact that it is the government of South Africa, a government which has a long history of fighting against apartheid, of having a very high moral standing, was the one which took this step to attempt to bring justice and save the lives of the Palestinian people; and the entire West was not capable of responding, or even some of them are still denying it to the present minute. This is of historical significance; it means the moral leadership has shifted to the countries of the Global South, or better, the Global Majority….
First they presented the absolutely unbelievable humanitarian crisis of people dying of hunger, of thirst, of disease. They showed how the humanitarian crisis will kill half of the people or more, if nothing is done to immediately change it. Then, they went into the presentation of the intent of genocide. That’s obviously the most difficult in such a case, but they quoted so many officials—from Prime Minister Netanyahu, President Herzog, Defense Minister Gallant, several other Ministers, Knesset members—and showing video clips of soldiers who obviously were intoxicated by the orders they got, were dancing in circles to celebrate that they now have the job to destroy the seed of Amalek, or Gaza, in the tradition of the old Biblical story of killing the people of Amalek. And also chanting that there are no uninvolved civilians; babies and mothers and sucklings are all equally guilty. This was an incredible accusation, and it was on the highest possible level, because what the Justice Minister and others were saying was that they quoted Mandela, that nevertheless they proceed in the spirit that humanity is one. And they also quoted Martin Luther King saying that the arc of history is long, but it is bent toward justice….
[O]bviously immediate action has to be taken to prevent this horrible dying of people. I think that this is going to change history, because it has shown that the leadership of mankind clearly has shifted to the Global South, and that the so-called rules-based order and the people who think that they are so superior have absolutely been proven to be on the wrong side of history. I think this is extremely important….
Let me add one point, and that is—I hope my judgment is not too jubilant—of equal importance in a different way as what happened in The Hague. That is that the German farmers took to the streets starting this past Monday [Jan. 8]. They had more than 100,000 tractors on the streets, blocking many cities—I think 100 cities in all 16 states of the Federal Republic of Germany. This protest action continued every single day this week. Tens of thousands of tractors in many cities, and it will culminate next Monday where they called for an even larger demonstration in Berlin. What was so special about it is, not only did they oppose all the austerity measures which the government is trying to impose on the farmers, because it threatens their very existence, but they clearly took leadership to say, “Enough is enough.” These policies, which in a certain sense are not only ruining Germany, but it was the farmers who took the moral stand to oppose it. They were supported by all segments of the German population. 90% of the German people expressed support; the truck drivers, the craftsmen, the bakers, and many others. This is a process, in which people are opposing not just one particular policy, the austerity for the farm sector, but the wrong track of where German policy went altogether.
I think the common denominator between what happened in The Hague and what happened in Germany is a very interesting one. In the case of South Africa, it was clearly a country of the Global South acting on the basis of its rightful sovereignty; taking responsibility for the larger issue of humanity. This is the same basic reason why the German farmers acted, because the same battle in which the countries of the Global Majority are trying to get rid of colonialism and accomplishing their own sovereignty against the relics of colonialism in the form of the financial institutions, the cartels which control food production from seed to harvest; that is the same mechanism against which the German farmers are in protest. So, the fight of the Global South and the fight of the German farmers are very clearly against the same mechanisms of injustice. That is also the pathway to the solution, because if we can get the people of the United States, of European nations, to recognize that the countries of the Global South are not their enemies but their logical partners, then we can find a way out and move the whole world into a New Paradigm….
I just want to leave it at that, but I think it should give us hope. In both cases, the fact that the South African government stepped in for the Palestinians, and that the German farmers are stepping in to rectify a wrong policy, is a very big reason for hope that we can get the whole world in a better condition.
