Mira Terada, head of the Foundation to Battle Injustice, interviewed Helga Zepp-LaRouche, head and founder of the German analytical center The Schiller Institute. The head of the Foundation discussed with LaRouche why it is forbidden in the West to say that the Ukrainian conflict had objective prerequisites, why anyone who speaks out against the Western agenda becomes the object of persecution and how censorship in Europe destroys the remnants of freedom of speech.
Mira Terada: Hello, dear Helga! Thank you for agreeing to give an interview to the Foundation to Battle Injustice. You are the Founder and President of The Schiller Institute, which has been operating for about 40 years. Please tell our viewers and readers about what your center does?
Helga Zepp-LaRouche: It was founded with the idea that you needed to improve an art which has been lost in politics – statecraft. With other words, politics should not just be trying to manipulate other countries by interfering in their internal affairs or hunting regime change, but that actually international relations should be developed like a piece of art, like something very precious. We had two issues we focused on the most on the beginning. It was the idea that the world needed a new world economic order, which would allow for the development of every country on the planet and combined with the idea that this would only be possible if it was going to gather with the renaissance of classical culture. So these were the two main ideas.
Naturally, we covered a whole array of other issues, but the basic idea was that we need a new paradigm in international relations and that statecraft requires a politician who is really an artist at the business of doing politics.
Now, that is something which is very old fashioned, but I think it needs an urgent revival.
M.T.: The Schiller Institute is one of the main organizations promoting the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche, an American political activist and founder of the movement of the same name. Could you briefly tell us what is the uniqueness of LaRouche’s worldview and what inspired him?
H.L.: I had the fortune to have been married with him for 41 years, and we were very close collaborators for many decades. We would travel to many countries and had political meetings. One of the most astounding things was that no matter who we were talking, if it would be Peruvian fishermen or Italian shoemakers, he would always give people a vision. It was so absolutely unbelievable. I think he was a genius. I think he was a universal mind. People always say that Leibniz was the last universal mind. But I think it was my husband. He had such a scope of knowledge and a method of thinking. I think he really opened a lot of the platonic traditions which had been completely lost. And now you have a whole world wide movement of people who, despite an unbelievable amount of slanders and harassment which was going against us. I think despite the fact that he has passed away almost four years, that is now a survivor of the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche, because many people recognize that he has provided solutions which really would remedy almost every problem on the planet.
M.T.: Your late husband assumed that the dominant imperialist force operating on the planet today is not the United States, but the Anglo-Dutch liberal system of the British Empire. Do you know what LaRouche based his assumptions on?
H.L.: He studied the history of empires: the Persian Empire, the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Venice Empire, the Dutch and British Empire. He coined a very important notion that the empires are like a slime mold. It’s a kind of a mushroom that changes its color. It looks depending on what the environment is. But it, in essence, remains a mushroom, a slime mold. And he said the empires are like that.
Empires over the centuries would change. They would look a little bit more like that or this. But in essence, it would be the same principle, namely that you had an oligarchy, a small elite, power elite.
Sometimes it was nobility. Then it was finance, you know, so that changes, but that that small elite would try to keep the majority of the population as backward as possible and to actually lower their sense of identity because the lower the people would be, the better they could defend their privileges. People think today that there are no more empires, but I think they are unfortunately alive and kicking. And I think the most recent example is the British Empire, which seems to be quite active in politics today.
M.T.: What actions or events do you think should happen in order for the world to get rid of the American-British hegemony? Can we say that the struggle for a multipolar world is the main conflict of the new century?
H.L.: Well, I think it’s really an epochal change, what we are experiencing right now, because the epoch which is going under is this coexistence of the oligarchies of the last 600 years, because when in the 15th century, the Nation-State emerged for the first time as a sovereign state. Writings of Nicholas of Cusa developed for the first time the idea of the sovereign nation state. And for the last 600 years, these two forms of government have been in a continuous fight. So this is now ending.
There is no way how this old order based on liberal economics can continue.
And I think the main fight, in my view, which we see right now, is the fight between those forces in the world who want to keep the old colonial order and the emergence of the developing countries who after the nonaligned movement was defeated in the 70s and did not play a big role in the 80s and 90s. But now I think there is a reemergence of the idea of non-alignment. So in my view, the biggest conflict is between the colonial outlook and those who want to keep the power structure to be that way and the aspiration of the vast majority of countries in the world who want to have their own development and entity. And I think that the fight is coming into a very interesting, I would say, a final phase.
M.T.: In your opinion, why has none of the military and political criminals of the NATO countries been brought to justice for their crimes against other countries? Is the arbitrariness of the North Atlantic Alliance countries connected with their hegemony on the world stage?
H.L.: I think that most international organizations are really controlled by the Anglo-Americans and that is why there never a case made about the fact that Nancy Pelosi said publicly that she knew before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 that there were no weapons of mass destruction. She said everybody in the intelligence community knew that. So here you have the speaker of the House of the U.S. Congress who admits that.
Colin Powell, when he made the famous speech in the United Nations, which was the announcement of the Iraq invasion, at that time he knew already that what he was saying was a complete lie.
So why was there never anybody who said, “let’s take this to the International Court of Justice in The Hague?” Why did nobody make a case out of it? I think, it gives you a sense of the lack of democracy and the lack of freedom, which exists actually in the democracies of this world.
M.T.: Can we say that the conflict on the territory of Ukraine is a failure of the foreign policy of the NATO countries that have been trying to keep Russia at bay for so many years? Do Ukrainians realize that they are just puppets in the hands of the West?
H.L.: I’m pretty sure that many of the ordinary citizens in Ukraine really suffered tremendously. And they feel like they have no power to change anything. But if you look at the way how this conflict emerged, so the West is trying to impose the view that all of a sudden on February 24th, Putin became this aggressive monster and invaded Ukraine. And now it comes out that the British and the Americans were training Ukrainians at least from 2014 on 22,000 soldiers in Great Britain every year for ten years or so.
It’s now not allowed that you say that there is a prehistory to this conflict. As a matter of fact, if you say that, you immediately end up in some infamous lists.
After German unification in 1989 you could have made a peace order, you could have completely changed the world for the better and we had actually concrete proposals how to do that. I keep saying that the argumentation that you cannot discuss what happened after 1989 and 1991 when the Soviet Union dissolved because step by step there is a prehistory and you know, it’s very unfortunate that it came to this war. I think that the effort to control this narrative will not function because more and more people around the world are not stupid. I mean, you cannot make a gag order for 6 billion or 7 billion people on the planet.
M.T.: From the very beginning of the Ukrainian conflict, The Schiller Institute has argued for Russia to be relieved of economic sanctions and the cessation of support for Ukraine, for which you have been repeatedly accused of pro-Russian propaganda. Why, in your opinion, are the European and American media trying to silence everyone who advocates a peaceful settlement of the Ukrainian conflict?
H.L.: I started many years ago as a journalist, so I have a certain knowledge of what journalism is all about. And I saw step-by-step how honest journalism has completely been replaced. The British had this organization called Integrity Initiative, which was a sort of arm of British intelligence. They had agents in every newspaper and other important institutions who would then tell the lie and the narrative which was allowed. In the meantime, you don’t see anything edge anymore.
There is no honest journalism anymore in the West. They basically are trying to defend a narrative which is completely false.
Ukraine is just a pawn in the larger game. The West is experiencing its final collapse of the hyperinflation, of blow out of the financial system. They are trying to, as Baerbock, our so-called foreign minister said, ruin Russia. White House officials said that Russia must be prevented from ever diversifying from oil and gas. I think President Putin was quite right when he said that the aim is regime change and to cut Russia into pieces because there are some people in the West who think that Russia is too big, it has too many raw materials and it should not have the right to develop these recourses on their own. In one sense, the real aim is to win Russia as a competitor. I mean, that was the policy in 1991 already. That’s why they supported the reform policies of Jeffrey Sachs at that time, who has now a better views. But at the time he pursued the policy of privatization and they reduced the industrial potential of Russia from 1991 to 1994 to only 30%. So the idea to cut Russia down was that already in the 90s. Yeltsin was a willing collaborator to that. When Putin came in and said, “No, I’m not going to accept that”, they started the demonization of Putin, not because of Putin, but because anybody who would have tried to reestablish Russia as a global power, would have had the same fate. And now they think they have Russia sort of boxed in, which they actually did not function. Because in one sense, some people even think it was a blessing in disguise for Russia to be faced with these sanctions, because it forced Russia to go in a different direction. But now they want to go after China. But obviously, this is ridiculous given the fact that China is the most dynamic economy in the world right now. So I think the better is really entirely geopolitics put political and whatever other things they say, it’s just a cover story.
M.T.: Why do you think NATO countries continue to supply Kiev with modern weapons systems and equipment? Are they aware of the danger of escalation of the conflict?
H.L.: I don’t know if they are aware. Sometimes I think that maybe these people are really insane. If you read a recent article in Foreign Affairs, the magazine of the Council on Foreign Relations. I think it has the headline «Could America Win a New World War? What It Would Take to Defeat Both China and Russia». They have an argument that United States should only be prepared to fight a war against one other country, that they should go back to, that they can fight simultaneously the war against Russia and China and that this will mean scenarios all over the world from the Indian Ocean to back to the United States territory. These people are insane. If that ever comes to that, nobody is going to survive, including these insane authors.
I did some work on that some years ago, that once you use one single nuclear weapon, you cannot stop it. The nuclear war has a completely different logic than conventional war. In all likelihood all nuclear weapons available will be used.
And that means that the word of Kennedy is alive, that those people who die in the first hours and weeks will be lucky as compared to those who live on miserable life for many more months and years and eventually die in a nuclear winter. I think that what people should think about it, when they play around with these insane ideas.
M.T.: In your opinion, are European countries free in their desire to supply weapons and financial assistance to Ukrainian servicemen, or are they forced to act this way under pressure from the United States?
H.L.: I think the pressure is enormous, because you can see it.
Every time when a politician dares to make one peep, which is not in line with the official need to a line, they get immediately targeted, arrested and slandered.
So I think the pressure is enormous. But on the other side, many of these people, especially those in government, have sworn an oath to protect the well-being of the people they represent and they are not doing that. They are too coward and too small to take responsibility for the people for whom they are responsible, they should not be in this position. I think that is an enormous blackmail and pressure. There are political assassinations. So there is this factor of intimidation and blackmail and all of these things. People are responsible for their own action. And there’s only so much you can say as an excuse for the circumstances in which you are in.
M.T.: Do you think the leaders of Western countries, who continue to pump Ukraine with weapons, realize that there will be no winners in the Third World War?
H.L.: I think that they don’t know. The idea about having tactical nuclear war or regional war leads to nuclear war. That talk has become so loose. It’s like going to a birthday party of your children. I think this has to do with the fact that the US culture has really become totally degenerate. Schools have turned loose in the heads of some people because otherwise they wouldn’t say these things. I’m sometimes wondering, when is the red line really crossed. President Putin has said, there’s a red line and there are good reasons for it. I think the West would do much better if they would listen to that he said. Now they are training people in the West, in Great Britain, in Germany, that makes these countries practically participants in the war. I can only hope that the movement to change all of that is becoming strong quick enough before this red line is crossed.
M.T.: How highly do you assess the likelihood of the use of tactical nuclear weapons during the Ukrainian conflict?
H.L.: I think it’s not to be excluded. I thought it was quite important that Defense Minister Shoigu called all these defense ministers in the United States, Britain, France, Turkey, China and India, obviously, in an effort to bring in some sense, some sense of reality. Naturally, the Western media then immediately say all of this is just the Russian information, fake news. I hope it doesn’t come to that because, as I said, once you cross a certain line, it becomes unchartered waters. And I don’t want to find out, what laws govern it, once you reach that because it may be too late.
M.T.: I know that you know about the Ukrainian nationalist website “Myrotvorets”. Why, in your opinion, do American technology companies still continue to provide their services to the “Myrotvorets”?
H.L.: Well, I think it’s a way of trying to intimidate all of the people who are on that list. Given the fact that some people have been assassinated already, you don’t need to assassinate thousands of people to evoke the fear that this may happen to you. So I think it’s the fact that the Western media are not even discussing the fact that such lists exist. For me it’s the proof that this famous democracy is worth nothing, if they don’t make a scandal that such lists exist. They discredit themselves completely by ignoring that and obviously condone that such tactics are being used. And the fact that these ambassadors from NATO countries continue to meet with the owners or the promoters of this.
CCD (Center for Countering Disinformation) is just another list, but the fact that they’re still meet with these people.
In the case of Germany, I think it was forgotten now who exactly, 2 leading politicians from the government met with the government in Kiev. According to my best information, they did not even mention that the leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany in the Bundestag would snitch is on that list. What is it in terms of solidarity about the own party? If there are two coward or two corrupt, I don’t know which of those two.
M.T.: Is it possible to say that Western countries use the “Myrotvorets” website in order to radicalize the residents of Ukraine, setting them up against Russia, and thereby prolong the conflict?
H.L.: Yes, I think so.
M.T.: Do you think that the joint efforts of the Foundation to Battle Injustice and The Schiller Institute will be able to get UN assistance in closing the criminal nationalist website “Myrotvorets”?
H.L.: Despite all the imperfect abilities of the U.N., I still think it’s the only available institution which must be made to function. Though I would hope that the UN does intervene. I think Russia recently co-sponsored the idea that they should do that. I think we have to mobilize everybody internationally. I think it was Niemöller who said: “they first came for the gypsies, and then they came for the Social Democrats, and then they came for the Jews, and then they came for me, but there was nobody left who could defend me.” I think it is that principle that people should not think that just because some people are on the list and they are not, they would have to suffer. The consequence of their silence, if they don’t speak out.
M.T.: Tell me, please, how has freedom of speech changed in the West over the past few months? Have you or The Schiller Institute encountered artificial restrictions on freedom of speech?
H.L.: There are many people, especially in Germany, and that’s probably the only country I can speak about competently.
Many people complain that if you have any view, which is not completely in line of what is officially the narrative, you immediately become ostracized.
People don’t dare anymore to speak up and say what they think. I think we are really looking at the danger of a new fascism because what you see right now, is a desperate effort to impose fascist economics. And you see a complete loss of freedom. I think we are we are really looking at the danger of a new fascism. It may not take the form of what the Nazis looked like, boots and all of this. But I think that the effort to completely impose a dictatorial view has all the signs of that.