In reviewing the aggressive diplomacy of Biden's Secretary of State Blinken in the last days, Helga Zepp LaRouche pointed to the collapse in relations between the U.S., NATO and the EU with Russia and China as an extremely "worrisome" situation. The push for a "global NATO" is fed by the ongoing lies, such as those about the alleged suppression by China of the Uyghurs and the "anti-democratic" attack on the British agent Navalny, which then become the justification for sanctions. While the west is touting its "shared democratic values" and support for a "rules-based order", the Russians and Chinese are moving closer together, as a point of opposition to the dangerous geopolitical provocations aimed at them. Mrs. LaRouche counterposed the ongoing anti-Russia, anti-China campaign with the conference held by the Schiller Institute, which was centered on a real dialogue among many nations and leading citizens seeking solutions, rather than seeking political advantage.
Transcript
HARLEY SCHLANGER: Hello, I’m Harley Schlanger, welcome to our weekly dialogue with Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the founder and chairwoman of the Schiller Institute. It’s March 24th, 2021.
There’s so much going on in the world which has to be looked at from the standpoint of the increasing war danger. The Biden team is being deployed around the world, and the latest is, Secretary of State Blinken was in Brussels today. Helga, what’s going on with those meetings?
HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE: The strategic situation is becoming increasingly worrisome, because you have a real collapse of relations between the U.S. and Russia, the U.S. and China, the EU and China, so all of this forebodes nothing good, and needs some urgent change in direction.
Now, Mr. Blinken, who is of a hawkish profile, is in Brussels, I think since two days ago. He met with the EU; he’s trying to revive the EU-U.S.-China dialogue so-called, which was initiated by Pompeo, but basically never really got active. And Blinken obviously is trying to increase the alliance, or the rebuild the alliance of the “democracies” against the “authoritarian states,” Russia and China. And this is all based naturally on the fact there is an effort to have a global NATO. Blinken also met with NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg, and the issue there is this paper, NATO 2030, which goes in the direction of a global NATO. And there will be an address by President Biden to the EU Council tomorrow. But all of that is really aimed to basically get the so-called Western alliance in line against Russia and China.
And this is really very stupid: It’s based on lies. One big thing is the so-called report about the Uighurs in Xinjiang, which this report says China is committing genocide and whatnot. We’ll come to this in a second, because it’s all based on a completely falsified report. Now, this has led to sanctions: The EU for the first time in a very long time, if ever, declared sanctions against China. Then China reacted very sternly, immediately declaring sanctions against 10 individuals of the EU and institutions.
So, if you look at this dynamic, it’s completely on a war footing. So I think this is really bad and we have to see how it plays out. Because Blinken also met briefly with German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, and he bluntly said that he insists that Germany and other European countries should stop the construction of the final parts of the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline from Russia. Now we have to see if that pressure if it leads to Maas submitting or not.
But if you look at this whole dynamic, it is really extremely bad, and I think we had to make an urgent intervention to change it.
SCHLANGER: Well, the line you keep hearing from Blinken and within the West is we have “shared democracy values,” and we’re upholding the “rules-based order,” but cancelling contracts, how’s that part of a rules-based order?
In the meantime, on the worsening of relations with Russia, you had Biden’s comments about Putin last week, and then the Russian ambassador was called back to Moscow. This should be sending some very serious signals about going into a very dangerous moment.
ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Well, for an American President to call the President of Russia a “killer,” when both of these nations have, I think, respectively 5,800 and over 6,000 nuclear warheads, this is really playing with fire. I think President Biden was trapped: I think the question by George Stephanopoulos was a trick question—one of these questions where you basically make a suggestion and then the other person says, more or less, “yes.” But this is terrible! It shows you where journalism has come to, that they’re not honest journalists any more, but they’re really intelligence operatives, trying to pursue a Cold War strategy. And as I said, if the Russian ambassador is called back to Moscow, and Foreign Minister Lavrov said that there is at this point no relationship between Moscow and the EU as a result of the phony Navalny operation, which is a British intelligence operation; then naturally, the sanctions. The sanctions are regarded as a way of warfare. I think we are really looking at the beginning, potentially the beginning, of what could become a Cold War—different characteristics than the Cold War with the Soviet Union—but nevertheless, no less dangerous. And with the present situation, this could quickly escalate into something more than a “Cold War.”
So, I think this is really extremely stupid, and people should wake up to the danger this really implies. Because we are talking about the relationships among the most important strategic players on the planet Earth, and this kind of a geopolitical confrontation is very dangerous.
So Lavrov who was in China yesterday,—I don’t know if this visit was planned or not—but it came in a timely fashion. So he met with Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, and they denounced this “zero-sum geopolitical games” and basically said on this question of the international “rules-based order,” you know, these are the rules of the strongest, as compared to an international order based on law, on the UN Charter which Russia and China say they are sticking to.
What we are seeing right now is the danger of a repetition of the “Thucydides trap.” This is something which has been mentioned several times by various authors, and what it refers to is that the first Greek historian, Thucydides, wrote a book about the Peloponnesian War, and in that book he describes how the rise of Athens was eventually leading to the war between Sparta and Athens, and that led then to an Athenian arrogance. So they eventually started the campaign against Sicily, and that led to the defeat of Classical Greece, which really has not recovered from quite to the present day.
Now, I think if there would such a Thucydides trap, that the rise of China is causing the United States, and by potential complicity and implication, also the EU, to try to contain that, including a military component, we are talking about nuclear powers in the case of the United States and Russia and China, so such a Thucydides trap must be avoided by all means.
SCHLANGER: You had mentioned the Uighur question. I’d like to know what you think about the Foreign Minister of Germany, Heiko Maas, calling in the Chinese ambassador. I assume this is related to the sanctions and counter-sanctions, again as part of this escalation?
ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Well, Mr. Maas has not proven to be a skilled diplomat and this is one other real stupidity. Because, if you look at the world economy, it would not function without China. China has become the locomotive of the world economy, and Germany, whose economy is in a terrible crisis as a result of the lockdowns, and COVID over more than a year, and if he is now risking the economic relationship with China, this is just completely against the interests of Germany. And it is submitting to the geopolitical pressure coming from the Biden administration; and naturally the Greens are on the same line, and that should leave people to think that the Green Party is exactly on the same line as Mr. Blinken.
But the key question I want to emphasize is that the whole thing is based on lies! There is a very useful article in the blog, called the Grayzone. [https://thegrayzone.com/2021/03/17/report-uyghur-genocide-sham-university-neocon-punish-china/] They do sometimes very useful investigative journalism. And they look at this report: The whole story about the Uighurs which is now everywhere—it’s the basis for the EU policy, and of the U.S., comes from something called the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy, and the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights. They have produced a so-called landmark report. The principal author is a guy called Jonah Diamond, and the expertise is all drawn from a person called Adrian Zenz, who is an extreme rightwing evangelical ideologue, and this is all financed by a “Fairfax University of America” which was shut down already in 2019, because it turned out that their teachers were not qualified, and there was plagiarism everywhere.
So this is a completely dubious affair and it completely contradicts what many other people are saying—we can come to that in a second, because we had some of these experts at our recent conference of the Schiller Institute. So the whole basis for this escalation, it’s like the Navalny case. You know, Navalny, as I said, is a British intelligence operation. We had the meeting of Navalny’s campaign manager several years ago, with a British embassy officer in Moscow, begging for money to finance street riots. And in the same way, this outfit, this Newlines Institute, it has support from the Interparliamentarian Alliance on China (IPAC), ex-State Department officials, so it really looks like an intelligence operation. And that is being used, then to hype up and ruin and poison the relationship among countries.
So this is extremely dangerous, and people should not fall for it. There were two representatives from the Schiller Institute in Xinjiang, on two separate trips; these were trips which included many diplomats and other journalists and so forth, and they all visited and carried out investigations on the ground in Xinjiang. And they came back and they said that all the lies are completely fabricated, and that what has happened instead in Xinjiang, is that China has brought development into this extremely, formerly very, very poor area of China, and gave people training and giving them a perspective so they would not end up being recruited by terrorists. That’s much better than dropping bombs on terrorists, or working with them, as the United States did in Syria, for example. So, it really has come to a point where the truth has to be straightened out.
SCHLANGER: The Grayzone has covered a number of these things, including the British Foreign Office funding BBC and Reuters to plant these stories, the way the OPCW, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, suppressed the real reports from on the ground on the so-called Syrian chemical weapons use. So it’s clear, when you mention this character Zenz, what we’re talking about is one source, who suddenly has become the leading source for the world in condemning China.
Now, one of the other interesting things about Lavrov’s trip to China was raising the question of whether Russia and China will decouple financially from the West. What can you tell us about that?
ZEPP-LAROUCHE: That is indeed what you get. If you have these attacks on Russia and China, then the natural thing is that they strengthen their already quite intensive alliance, because if they are together, then China has the benefit of the nuclear umbrella of Russia, Russia has the benefit of the strong economy of China, and it makes both of them stronger.
Now obviously, Russia, in particular, was all the time threatened with the sanctions that it would be cut off from the SWIFT financial payments system, which would really cause major problems for Russian trade; so now they have mooted the possibility that they will basically leave the Western payments system and become independent. And as things go, I mean, you can only muscle countries up to a point. If they do this, I think the potential exists that many other countries would align with them and not with the West, because the West can talk about “human rights” and so forth, all they wish to, but the economic benefit is with China and the Belt and Road Initiative.
So this is a very dangerous poker game which really should be stopped, and should be replaced with a cooperative approach, because the problems of this world are so big, that it does require especially the collaboration between the United States and China, and there is no good reason why the United States and the EU should not also have a cooperative relationship with Russia. So that is a very dangerous development.
SCHLANGER: This last weekend the Schiller Institute gave an open example of the fact that you can have dialogue, in fact, an open dialogue on these very difficult issues. Give our viewers a little report on that. They can watch the proceedings on the Schiller Institute website [https://schillerinstitute.com/blog/2021/03/19/world-at-a-crossroad-two-months-into-the-new-administration/] but I think your executive summary would be quite useful.
ZEPP-LAROUCHE: When we called for this conference, we gave it the title, “World at a Crossroad: Two Months Into the New U.S. Administration.” So this was a prescient title, because exactly at the time we had the conference, we had this clear aggravation between the U.S. and Russia, with Biden calling Putin a “killer,” and the Russian Ambassador being called back to Moscow. So, I think it was very important that we had, in the strategic panel [https://youtu.be/83Kzsg20gAo], very high representatives of Russia and China; in the case of the Chinese it was the Consul General of the New York Mission, and from Russia, the First Secretary of Mission to the United Nations in New York. And they obviously, despite the fact that the relations between them and the U.S. has reached such a low point, they made clear through their appearance, that they regard the Schiller Institute as an important platform to have this kind of strategic dialogue. And I think this is something we are going to expand on.
We decided this time, to have the cultural panel first, simply to raise the level of thinking to the highest standard, to access what my late husband has called “the fourth domain,” if you go by the categories of Vladimir Vernadsky: That you have the abiotic, the biosphere, and the noösphere, and the “fourth domain,” which he described as that area where you have the poetic method, statecraft, the level of which the poets are discussing strategy like Aeschylos, Shakespeare, Schiller, and also great compositions are taking place. In other words, accessing that part of the human mind where creativity really takes place, especially also in the artistic field. [https://youtu.be/KcduPjapbRc]
So then we had a beautiful, almost like a garden of flowers, different musical and poetic presentations: This was especially very moving, we had the fourth movement of Opus 96 of Beethoven, which was played on the occasion of the 65th birthday of my husband, performed by Norbert Brainin and Carlo Levi Minzi, in Bernkastel-Kues, in the beautiful vinocothèque which is also a concert hall in 1987. So this was incredible, because this was one of the many, many beautiful moments where we had the occasion to celebrate with the great musicians and artists of our time. And there was also a beautiful video clip of Lyn and Carlo Bergonzi and Piero Cappuccilli discussing the Verdi tuning, and many other things.
So I want you to encourage you to watch this, because to put the cultural panel in the beginning, set the tone for the entire conference.
Then we had a very important strategic dialogue, involving Russia, and China, but also Mrs. Bouthaina Shaaban, who is on the cabinet level from the Syrian government; we had the foreign minister from Yemen. And many people have commented that they have never heard the voice of somebody from the Syrian or Yemen government in the West, and people appreciated also that we gave this forum to these very important speakers. And we had a very important representation from Latin America, from Mexico, Argentina. They argued for the need to have a U.S.-China relationship in the development of Latin America, which I think is also a very important flank to get such an alliance.
And then we had a third panel on the development of Southwest Asia, with an Iraqi parliamentarian, and Pakistani expert, and our own Southwest Asia representative Hussein Askary, developing all our development proposals for Southwest Asia. [https://youtu.be/B1eaC6Iljas]
And then finally, there was a concluding panel on the Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites, with important representatives from medical associations, and farm leaders from the United States discussing the urgent need to address the famine and the pandemic through pilot projects, missions to train young people. [https://youtu.be/MRMsLajli84]
So you should just watch these things, because many people expressed that they have never heard such a roundness, such a condensed strategic discussion of where the world stands, especially, where there are solutions. So I think this was really an important intervention, and we plan to do a lot more of these things.
SCHLANGER: And you can see that at the https://schillerinstitute.com, the proceedings from the four different panels.
Now, Helga I want to take up a couple questions. First, the idea of “vaccine diplomacy,” vaccine inequality, the derision of the Russian and Chinese offer of their vaccines, and at the same time the fact that there are whole part of the world that have no access to COVID vaccines. What can you say about that?
ZEPP-LAROUCHE: It’s really a shame, you know. There was a report put out that the rich countries that represent 16% of the world population have hoarded more than half of all the COVID vaccines. In the case of the United States, more than they can use. There are 50 million doses of one vaccine which they don’t have the OK yet from the medical authorities, so they’re hoarding it, and other countries have nothing! Dr. Tedros, director of the World Health Organization made the absolutely important point that this is stupid, because epidemiologically it does not make sense, because if you do not try to inoculate the most endangered people, you have a chance, or the danger that these viruses mutate and develop strains which then make the original vaccines ineffective. So by not having a solidarity approach, you actually may undo your own efforts by being so selfish and egotistical.
I just want to contrast that for the many people, who all the time say things about China, which they don’t know from firsthand. That China, on the other side, does have the idea of a world health program. As a matter of fact President Xi Jinping said this already many years ago, but they are now acting on that basis, by providing vaccines to I think more than 50 developing countries already, and regard this as a health community for the common aims of mankind; and that is what Europe and the United States should join, because that is the only way how the pandemic can be defeated.
So this whole idea of vaccine diplomacy, you can also say that what the U.S. and Europeans, who have installed an export for vaccines, you can also say this is a negative diplomacy and it will be read by the world in this way.
SCHLANGER: Finally, we have a story which gets to a point that you’ve been making, that for the longest time the world seemed to be ignoring the spectacular developments of the Chinese economy. And yet, this last week we’ve had two indications in the public media that there is a recognition of this: From Bill Maher, who’s generally a very cynical guy; and then also from Tucker Carlson. What is the importance of these two little clips that you saw?
ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Well, I think that they’re funny, and in this world of terrible events and realities sometimes it’s good to have a little laughter. What this Bill Maher video clip, six minutes or so, really contrasts what China has been doing and what the U.S. and the West in general have not been doing, namely economic development, by just giving all the facts—the 40,000 km of fast train China built and that the Western countries don’t get anything done any more at all. If you go to Berlin, for example, this question around the Berlin airport is a laughingstock, but unfortunately, this is not so unique.
And then you also have a funny little clip by Tucker Carlson, who realizes that the Chinese are making fun at this point about white liberals, and they have even a special word for this, called the baizo, the white liberals. If you want to have a laugh you should watch these two things.
Because the world is serious enough, and I would like to end with an appeal that you would watch these conference panels from our conference, because it was an incredibly good conference. And once you have seen that, and agree with our approach, that we have solutions and that they can be put together on the level of the coincidence of opposites, you should join us and help our effort, because we are sitting on a powder keg, which is very dangerous, and needs a lot of people to help our efforts.
SCHLANGER: And as your late husband, Lyndon LaRouche often pointed out, Helga, having ironic juxtapositions that show the difference between the truth and the delusions is a very useful way to snap people out of their wrong-headed, delusional states.
With that, again, watch https://schillerinstitute.com, go to the website and watch the conference. And Helga, we’ll see you again next week.
ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Yes, till next week.
