DANIEL BURKE: Welcome to the Schiller Institute International Youth Conference, “Young People of the World Unite!” Thank you all for joining us. My name is Daniel Burke, and I will be your moderator. We will begin with comments from Helga Zepp-LaRouche, as well as Jacques Cheminade.
It’s my great honor to introduce to you our first speaker, the founder of the Schiller Institute, Helga Zepp-LaRouche.
HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Thank you. Hello and greetings to all of you. I think this is an unprecedented moment in history. You could say that every moment in history is unprecedented because it’s the newest one. But I mean this in the specific sense that we have, for the first time in my view, the possibility to completely change the world to a better system, where every country has the right to develop.
You have to know about how we as the Schiller Institute and the organization founded by my late husband, Lyndon LaRouche, got into this position. In 1971, my late husband—who was not my husband then—had a unique analysis no other economist had. He recognized that when President Nixon replaced the fixed exchange rates to flexible ones, that if the world continued on that path, we would necessarily at some point enter into a new war danger, a new danger of fascism, and a new depression. I can assure you that in 1971 and '72, when I joined this effort, at least in the so-called industrial countries, there was no sign of this. You had Europe still prospering; the United States was still in a relatively developing condition. Naturally, the developing sector was a different question, but if you were listening to Lyndon LaRouche in 1971, his prediction had to be based on an intellectual comprehension of what was wrong with the global system; because the empirical evidence in the immediate countries of the West did not give credibility to such an analysis.
But because Lyndon LaRouche, and myself and some others, who were in the initial phase of this organization, did have an idea of what the condition was of the countries in the Global South: For example, Lyndon LaRouche served as a medic in the Second World War in Burma and India. He was a live witness to the British Raj in 1946 in Calcutta, where he saw with his own eyes what British imperialism and neo-colonialism was capable of, because this was a massacre. He came out of that, back into postwar America with the solemn promise and commitment that he would do everything possible in his lifetime to remedy this incredible injustice in the world.
In a similar way, when I was a very young journalist, I took my first trip in 1971 on a cargo ship which took me to China during the Cultural Revolution. On the way, I stopped briefly in some countries in Africa; in particular Senegal and South Africa. There I also got a firsthand impression of how incredibly unjust the conditions were, and how easily they could be remedied if the political will existed to do so.
To make a long story short, out of these events came this organization. We spent the 1970s writing very concrete development programs including an industrial development plan for all of Africa. We worked with Indira Gandhi on a 40-year development plan for India; with President López Portillo on a plan for the economic integration of Latin America. We worked on a 50-year development plan for the Pacific Basin. And after the [Berlin] Wall came down, we worked on the Eurasian Land-Bridge to connect all of the Eurasian continent. And naturally, I should not forget the Oasis Plan and the reconstruction plan for the United States.
What we have been preparing for, since the moment of the forecast of Lyndon LaRouche in 1971, is that we would reach a new danger of fascism, war, and depression, but also the potential of having a new world economic order, which is what we have been working on in terms writing concrete programs for half a century. This moment is now here, and it is here with such an absolute violence that most people, who have not been thinking about the inherent mistakes of the present financial world system, are completely taken by surprise. They don’t quite understand how things can fly around the way they do, but they recognize that the old order—especially the so-called unipolar order which was attempted to be established after the end of the Cold War, is gone; it’s finished. Not only is there a huge rift between the so-called Global West and the Global South, there is now a huge break in the trans-Atlantic relationship. After the Trump administration published the new National Security Strategy, everything is in turmoil. The Europeans are in a complete state of frenzy. People who have been staunch Atlanticists for their whole lives are saying, “We can no longer regard the United States as an ally.” The Danish secret service even wrote a 62-page paper, saying that the United States is now a security threat to Denmark. Things like that are now happening all the time.
If you look at the content of this new National Security Strategy paper, which as I said has completely changed everything, it’s a very mixed bag. It has positive and negative elements. I would say the most optimistic one is that it definitely says that the continuous expansion of NATO should end; there should be no more NATO expansion. That is, I would say, the most positive thing in this paper. Also in the positive category is that it wants to normalize relations between the United States and Russia; it doesn’t quite say “normalize,” it says “cessation of hostilities,” that’s the formulation. That is good, because this reflects a wish to bring the Ukraine war to an end. Who in their right mind on the planet would not be very happy if the two most powerful nuclear powers—Russia and the United States—want to get back to a normalization of their relations? If this conflict between Russia and NATO in Ukraine—because that is what it is—would go on, it could lead to a global nuclear war which would mean the end of civilization. So, that’s definitely a positive element.
Also, a little bit in the positive direction is the fact that it replaces the previous formulation of China being a threat, to China being an economic competitor. That one can live with, but then there are some other elements which are not so good. I think the worst one is for sure that it declares the Western Hemisphere—Central America and Latin America—to be essentially the backyard of the United States. It even talks about a Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Now, one could say better a Trump corollary to the Teddy Roosevelt corollary of the Monroe Doctrine. But it basically says that the Western Hemisphere is the sphere of influence for the United States. This relates to the pending invasion of Venezuela associated with this, where the pretext is the war against drugs. But in reality if one looks at it, it is very clear that the real aim of this is to drive out the influence of Russia, China, Iran, and Cuba from Latin America. That forebodes a big destabilization, and while the United States does not have the land forces to invade and occupy Venezuela, they could do a lot of damage. It could throw the entire continent of Latin America into complete turbulence, where the aim obviously would be to favor those economically libertarian governments and are willing to use the famous chainsaw approach of Milei—also in other countries, like Bolsonaro in Brazil. This is a very troubled area in the world following this new strategy paper.
In respect to Europe, the paper says all hell has broken loose. It says there is a complete lack of democracy, and there is a suppression of the opposition—as if the United States would not suppress its oppression. Just look at what the ICE policy is doing against the migrants; but that’s just in parentheses. It says that if Europe does not shape up, looking down the road 20 years from now, there may be a “civilizational erasure” of Europe. That’s heavy language: It basically means that Europe as a civilization would disappear. I have said something similar, but not for the reasons given in that strategy paper. I have said if Europe does not change its present wrong economic and cultural policies, it may vanish as a civilization, and be a relic in a future museum. But the reason given by this paper is the migrant issue, saying that the influx of migrants to Europe may cause the European culture to disappear.
But the biggest problem right now is, what is the reaction of the Europeans? The Ukraine war, which from the very beginning was a proxy war of NATO versus Russia, which extended even further the five-time NATO expansions after the end of the Cold War, which it had promised would never happen. But it did proceed, and NATO did expand 1,000 km to the East to the borders of Russia; putting potentially offensive weapons systems into Poland and Romania, which reduced the warning time of any missile attack on Moscow to 5-7 minutes. When it was clear that this was even expanding further, Russia started the special military operation in Ukraine. That was almost four years ago, and as was clear from the beginning, this war could never have been won by Ukraine, given the fact that Russia has a vast military superiority. Even if NATO supplies all kinds of weapons systems to Ukraine, this does not compensate for the fact that the Ukrainian population is much smaller, and has decreased by half since the war broke out, due to emigration, desertion from the military, and casualties in the war. So, this war is now almost at the end. It has been a war of attrition.
But what do the Europeans do? Not all Europeans I have to say, but the so-called Coalition of the Willing. The countries of Great Britain, France, Germany, and you can add to that Poland and the Baltic countries and Scandinavia; but especially the big three—Germany, France, and Great Britain. They have formed this E3 Europe; namely a Coalition of the Willing intending to carry on the war until there is a strategic defeat of Russia. Now that is an impossibility; you cannot defeat Russia, for the very simple reason, that at this point Russia is the strongest nuclear power on the planet. Before Russia will allow itself to be destroyed, it will use these nuclear weapons, as it has stated very clearly in its nuclear doctrine, and has been repeated many times by President Putin and other Russian officials.
So, what does it mean when the Coalition of the Willing is saying that they still want to continue the war until there is a strategic defeat of Russia? It means they are risking nuclear war. The argument obviously is that Russia is not going to stop in Ukraine; that they will attack another European NATO country. Some people who are totally crazy say it may happen immediately; others say Russia needs five years to build up its nuclear and conventional forces. But Rutte, the General Secretary of NATO, just three or four days ago was in Berlin at an event of the Munich Security Conference, where he made a speech which was absolutely unbelievable. He said Russia is preparing an incredible war where total destruction will come to every European home; there will be mass mobilizations, millions of displaced people, unlimited suffering and extreme losses. Therefore, Europe has to get ready for the kind of war which was fought by our grandparents and great-grandparents. So, we have to be ready to do what our grandparents and great-grandparents did when they fought World War I and World War II. This is completely impossible, because if it ever comes to a war, it will be a nuclear war and not conventional war. It’s also a lie, because what is Rutte saying when he says we have to do what our grandparents and great-grandparents did? Who was the attacker in World War II? It was not Russia; it was not the Soviet Union, and it was also not China in the Pacific.
To get an idea of the mindset of these people, I want to show you now a video which amazingly is a PR video by NATO itself. You can find it on the NATO website. They obviously think this is a very motivating video for what they are up to. So, let’s listen to the video. ["From Foresight to War Fight”—You really have to watch it to get the full effect—ed.]
VIDEO NARRATOR: We have a pretty good idea of what the future of war looks like. Climate change will affect not just trade routes, food supplies, and infrastructure, but also our military equipment. Even more than in the past, technology will provide decisive advantages from AI to surveillance systems, from drones to hypersonic missiles. And yet, war will remain an essentially human endeavor. Manipulating the opponent’s emotions and understanding will be just as important as denying access to our spaces. The human mind will be a battle space in its own right. We will have to be ready to fight in cities, in space, in the cyber domain, in the Arctic, and on the high seas. We have to relearn the language of deterrence. We expect the outlines of this future to emerge from 2030 onwards. We are in a race against time. There is only one hitch—predicting the future of war is a flawed enterprise by definition. We tend to overestimate technology and underestimate our opponent’s capacity to adapt to it. We tend to forget that not everything about war will be new; quite a lot will, in fact, be old. We understand the trends, but not the timeline. And our opponents too have a vision of the future of war that suggests dangerous gaps on our end. For some, war in the anthroposphere is not off-limits, including psycho-pharmaceuticals, attacks on the eco-system, and weaponized bacteria. For other opponents, humans might not have to be in the loop of lethal decision-making by AI. Drone swarms coordinated by robot mother ships might sound like science fiction, but all good tech foresight does. And while all parties concerned—NATO and its adversaries—are aiming for short wars, reality often has the last word. For NATO, this means we have no time to lose; tomorrow starts today. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to take this foresight to war fight.
ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Now, in my view, the people who are putting out such a video as positive propaganda for their aims are insane, and should be put away behind the closed door of a psychiatric clinic. The image of man which comes across in such a video is that of a barbarian. It says that war will be forever a crucial element of human engagement. This is insane; it has an image of man which is completely barbaric. I completely object to it. It was this video, as well as the speech of Rutte, the General Secretary of NATO, that NATO may have to have a preemptive attack on Russia, which caused me to write this call to leave NATO and immediately move to form an international security and development architecture. Basically it is the idea of man being incapable of ever becoming human in a true sense.
You can ask yourself what is wrong with the Western elites that only 80 years after World War II, the memory of what war does is no longer alive in the minds of some people. Enough footage and films and things like that are there to give people an idea of what war is like, that they should not be ready to risk not only the war of the grandparents and great-grandparents, but to risk nuclear annihilation. Also the fact that the entire effort to build a unipolar world at the end of the Cold War when the Soviet Union disintegrated, failed so completely; it utterly turned into a blowback, whereby now you have the countries of the Global South together forming a new economic system with the BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Even NATO is split between parts of Europe that want to continue the war, while others absolutely do not want to do that. There is a rift in the trans-Atlantic alliance. And the fact that Europe is in an economic freefall; that the United States is also not in great shape economically at all. If you doubt that, just to American cities, and you will come to that conviction right way; infrastructure is collapsing, the suicide rate is high, the general outlook of the population is very polarized and full of despair.
So why is it that the Western elites are so absolutely incapable of reflecting on the fact that the condition of the world is the result of their own mistakes? I want to show you now a second video of the person who was the winner of the recent election in Austria. He was not able to form a government because the so-called majority of the center parties prevented this from happening. He nevertheless won the election. He made the following speech, which I want to show you now with subtitles in English to explain what I just said.
HERBERT KIKL [translated subtitles]: Now I have a question for the top brass of the established political parties. I ask you, who was the one who brokered the peace settlement between Russia and Ukraine in the spring of 2022? I’m talking about the Istanbul negotiations. Who was the one who brokered this peace settlement there? Who was that? I’ll tell you. Those were politicians who suffered the same moralizing delusion as you here in here; it was the great flawless European Commission. Those were the British, by the way, the Brexit Brits, whom all of Europe is now chasing after. Also an interesting phenomenon. And that was the American government under a certain Joe Biden, who, where the whole EU establishment had nothing better to do than to submit to him.
Yes, so much for independence, self-confidence, and a strong Europe. You’re allowed to laugh. And it was deluded people like you who issued the slogan that victory absolutely must be achieved on the battlefield; that there can be no peace. And for that, you bear partial responsibility for the hundreds of thousands of deaths since then, for the widespread destruction of parts of Ukraine, for billions in debt that will burden future generations, for billions that you are passing on to European taxpayers, and for the decline of the European economy. So much for that.
ZEPP-LAROUCHE: So, I think if you listen to this coming from an Austrian politician accusing the establishments of the pro-war factions in Europe of having caused the deaths of millions of people, of having prevented the peace when it was possible back in March 2022, this is just one voice. You can imagine that if the continuation of the present policies of the Western system lead to the inevitable collapse of the financial system because we are sitting right now on a financial bubble worse than that which almost blew apart in 2008 with the Lehman Brothers crisis, that you could have a collapse of the system of dimensions which are absolutely unimaginable. What is hanging over the heads of these people is the fear that they may be called to account for the policies they imposed on the world. This is the only explanation I have come up with for why they continue a policy which has absolutely failed. They insist on continuing with policies which have created the present havoc in the present world situation because all of their careers, prestige, and privileges are associated with that. That factor of irrationality is definitely part of the world situation.
As I said, when I saw these escalations of preventive war against Russia and this kind of propaganda coming out of NATO, I said it’s high time we declare NATO obsolete. This should have happened in 1991 when the Warsaw Pact dissolved. NATO has definitely outlived its legitimacy. We must urgently replace it with a new security and development architecture which this time must take into account the security and development interests of every single country on the planet. I think that is absolutely the only way out of this crisis. We have such an incredible crisis where not only the Ukraine war, but also several other regional crises could eventually lead to a global nuclear war. That’s definitely the case for the Middle East, where the genocide going on in Gaza is continuing despite the so-called peace plan of Trump. Just a few hours ago, there was a terrorist attack in Bondi Beach in Australia; 12 people were killed, and over 30 were wounded. This was at a Hannukah light festival of the Jewish community. Immediately, Netanyahu said this was an attack on all of Judaism, and it is the result of the fact that the leaders of the world have stopped fighting anti-Semitism. I would not be surprised if some military action in the Middle East could result, using this terrorist incident as an excuse.
If it comes to a larger war in the Middle East, including Iran, that also has the potential to lead to a nuclear war. Also, recent tensions between China and Japan, whereby Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi declared it would be an existential threat to Japan if mainland China tried to unify Taiwan into China militarily. This could lead to an escalation including larger powers in the Pacific. And naturally, if the Latin American conflict would escalate, that also would have such a potential.
If you have a world which is in such disarray, you cannot try to solve these problems one by one. Even if they have their historical and factual specificity—each crisis has its own reasons and dynamic—they are all part of this overall development where you have the end of the system of 500 years of colonialism, and the emergence of a new system whereby the countries the Global Majority are trying to create a new, more just system. That conflict is the deeper reason behind all these regional expressions of conflict. Therefore, you have to try to resolve this in totality. The only way to do that is to establish a new security and development architecture which emphatically cannot be partial. It must take into account the interests of every single country on the planet.
First of all, this is the lesson from the Peace of Westphalia. The 1648 Peace of Westphalia ended 150 years of religious war in Europe. The different war parties came to the conclusion that they had to come to a diplomatic end of the war, because if it would continue, everyone would be dead, nobody would be left alive. Today, in the age of nuclear weapons, this is all the more true. Therefore, we must earnestly and very seriously put this discussion on the table to replace the present structures—NATO and other such security structures, and especially the idea of so-called Global NATO—and have such a new Westphalian peace agreement which must take into account the interests of the other. That was the most important principle which was established in the Peace of Westphalia.
Now in the world today, there are already some countries offering similar ideas. One of them is China, where Xi Jinping has, in the last several years, offered four Global Initiatives—the Global Security, Global Development, Global Civilizational, and Global Governance Initiatives—which together have the exact same idea for a new system based on the UN Charter and the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence that is including all countries, like my proposal. President Putin has talked about a Eurasian security architecture several times; I’m just mentioning that there are similar ideas that you have to give the world a new order based on the development of all.
It is very clear that we are on the brink of World War III. That is something which has also been picked up on by Pope Leo XIV in several of his recent sermons and speeches. The most recent one was to the Italian diplomats at the occasion of the Jubilee, when he said that peace is the duty of humanity. He appealed to the famous intervention by Pope Paul VI 60 years ago at the United Nations, when Pope Paul VI said no more war, never again; calling for the elimination of war as the means of conflict resolution forever. I think that is definitely something the human species is capable of, because we are not barbarians. We are not like this NATO image of man. We are the creative species, and we can come up with solutions for every man-made problem. And war is a man-made problem.
That’s why I think the need to have a powerful international youth movement is the key to solving the present conjuncture in human history. Only if we have young people on all continents—in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and hopefully then inspiring the youth of the United States and Europe—who will fight for a new economic system, a new world economic order, and an end to war will this tragedy which is potentially facing humanity possibly be avoided.
I think that we are in an absolutely unbelievably potentially powerful moment of history, because it’s not just the youth movement. The majority of countries—the BRICS countries, the SCO, and many other organizations—are right now in the process of fighting for a system in which every country on the planet has the same rights to economic development and prosperity for its citizens. So the big task that remains is to prevent those people who still think in terms of war as a means of conflict resolution—the neo-cons in the United States and the war party in Europe—from succeeding in their aim. For that, we definitely need a lot of young people to make sure to get the message across that the future is yours.
I’m very optimistic that we have all the means at our disposal to open a new chapter of humanity. We can leave this present period, this era of imperialism and colonialism, behind and move to this face of humanity where countries relate to each other like members of a family; where each one wants the best for the other and vice versa. And that we are turning toward a future of humanity where we will devote our energies like how to get thermonuclear fusion power, how we can defeat diseases for which no cure has yet been found, how we can travel to the Moon together, how we can create the conditions for space travel among the stars, and have a bright future where the one humanity will become the common identity of us all. I want to say that that is what I think we should discuss, and that’s what I wanted to say in the beginning.
