[As heard, audio quality was poor]
Donald Ramotar: Thank you very much for your kind introduction. The first thing I would like to say is that at the time we are experiencing probably the worst dangers to mankind, in our world. At the same time, we are experiencing extremely hopeful scientific gains. You see the NASA program now, exploring the far side of the moon, and man is getting more and more knowledge of space. It is a pity that most of our resources, instead of going into wars and all of that, cannot go into these new scientific areas, like space exploration and so forth. But mankind can definitely benefit from it immensely.
For some time now, we have been heading to the right. This crisis did not come upon us overnight. It’s been there for a while, even longer than when the Soviet Union collapsed, but I would like to make it clear that that gave impetus to the ambitions of the United States, that they should never be challenged again militarily and in a way that they will remain the number one superpower, and they will subjugate the world however they like. That process started way back in the 1990s.
It began when Clinton started to expand NATO, and it expanded further. It accelerated under Bush in particular, and now we have the situation where we have a man in power who was elected largely because of a reflection of the masses in the United States opposing the status quo and looking for change. Instead of bringing about changes, we see him trying to actually entrench the status quo in a very decisive kind of way. That is part of the difficulty that we have.
In the process, they have begun to achieve their aim of 100% domination of the entire planet. They have targeted a lot of international institutions that have kept the peace since 1945, since the period of fascism, and they’ve repeated that. They’ve kept the peace, which has allowed our world to flourish in some ways, but now there is a very clear, deliberate effort to make them as ineffective as possible. The United Nations decisions are not being recognized. The United States and Israel seem to be doing exactly what they want to be doing.
What are all the links? We know that they are linked, in the sense that their image coincides along the way, but is that the only set of links? Or as we see with the Epstein files, there probably have been some type of other kind of links that are probably being used by the terrorists to get the United States to do more or less what Israel wants it to do. That is the reason for a lot of the problems we are having now. For that reason, they have been focusing a lot of attention on any government that opposes or can form a kind of coalition. We know that China’s policy, all the time, particularly from the late 1960s, has been emphasizing peace, because they want development. They want the opportunity not only to build their own country, but also to build relationships with other countries in the world. But China is now being despised the same way the Soviet Union was despised in the past, and the people of the United States are bombarded with all kinds of propaganda to try to make China the number one enemy. Now that the Soviet Union has passed, there’s a focus on keeping Russia too, on that same level, on par as being jointly the number one enemy with China against the United States and what they would describe as the way of life in the United States, and the Western world then expanded very much further.
Now we see in the Middle East, in order to control the Middle East, or to use Israel to control the Middle East, Iran is now being seen as an obstacle because Iran has been supporting the national liberation movements in Lebanon and in other parts of the Middle East. People who are fighting for their freedom in Lebanon, in Palestine, in Gaza, and so forth. Iran has been their main supporter. So Iran has fallen into that category of countries as being enemies, enemy number one, although there is no evidence they had any intention of killing anyone. The so-called national liberation movement was a legitimate support because people were fighting for their freedoms and they needed international solidarity.
But unfortunately, as I said, the citizens in the United States are fed a kind of propaganda that makes all of these people seem to be wanting to destroy the U.S., the Western world and so forth. And even if you look at election campaigns in the United States, for a long time, it’s not who has the better ideas, the ideas to build the economy and to end poverty, to build a better relationship with the world, peace, not war. Those are not the people who win elections now in the United States. The campaigns over the past few years have been focused on who is tougher, who is stronger, who can be more expected to take a tough stand against China and Russia, and Iran has fallen into that category.
So that is one of the reasons we have that kind of demonization taking place; and in the process, they’re destroying international institutions like the World Trade Organization, like the International Criminal Court, the ICC, the International Court of Justice, all of these are being undermined. The institutions are being undermined. The more we are being funneled into mass destruction in order to kill people, the less and less we are going into the area where it’s the most [audio loss].
And that also goes into the question of economics. Because the question is not only getting out of the depression, the question is, how do we sustain peace? And we see that there is a direct link between wars and poverty, wars and national oppression, and all kinds of oppression. There’s a direct link. So it seems that we have to tackle the problem on both ends: On the political end, from the social end, from the moral end, on the other hand, from the economic end, where we have to try to improve the quality of life. And in our modern day world, we see that capital has become international. It is moving swiftly all over the world, and moving very fast. Labor is not so efficient; it doesn’t move as easily as capital. But in order now to deal with the developmental issues that we have, we have to have infrastructure for that.
In that regard, the Schiller Institute has been moving forward for a while now with the Oasis Plan. It has tremendous possibilities in order to bring prosperity to other countries. And so too is the Chinese initiative, the Belt and Road Initiative, which is more or less focused on infrastructure to have sustained economic development with unlimited infrastructure for different continents, in a way that we will have a win-win situation, where the resources of the world can be used to the benefit of all the world.
And while we are struggling with that, at the same time, we are reforming the institutions that exist. It is true that some critics of the United Nations speak about the fact that it came about at a time when most of the countries of the world were not part of it, and it needs reform; it needs some changes. But it is also a fact that it is a very important and a very essential organization in our world. And therefore, we have to do our best to save it while trying to replace it, and to save this institution so that it can continue its original functions in the new circumstances of our world.
I think that a lot of work also has to be done in the propaganda area as well, in order to improve the minds of people who feel that the mass of the people in the West who are dealing with propaganda, feel that countries like China, Russia, and now Iran, and so on, are enemies of the West. This plays down the possibilities for cooperation and for development. That is what I would like to say in my initial opening remarks. And I can contribute to the discussion period.
