Worldwide Spirit of Optimism Over the New Silk Road! - Part 1 | WPN World People News

At a conference on the centenary of the German-American space pioneer Krafft Ehricke on March 25, 2017 in Munich, Helga Zepp-LaRouche gave the following address.

The beauty of the Chinese music1 has, I hope, put us in the right mood to think about and celebrate Krafft Ehricke’s birthday. Krafft Ehricke is without a doubt—in my humble opinion—one of the greatest Germans who ever lived. That is because he developed a vision of where mankind can go, and I consider it a very great privilege to have been able to get to know him personally.

In 1982 I had the opportunity to give several presentations with him in various German cities, and I can confirm from personal experience the picture of him which his daughter Krista has drawn of him so incredibly lovingly.2 He was an incredible humanist, vastly educated in Classical culture; he was a genius so bubbling with ideas that it was really one of the high points of my life to have known such a personality. Fortunately, several of his presentations are available as videos on the Internet, and I urge you all to become acquainted with him yourselves.

I am also positive that if Krafft Ehricke were with us today, he would be incredibly optimistic that his vision, which was often contested in his lifetime, is going to be realized. It wasn’t just his vision, but the overall continuation of space exploration, that ran up against objections and resistance. He would recognize that we actually have the strategic constellation today to realize his vision in the near future. We have already heard about the Chinese space program, which is perhaps the “frog” that leaps4 because the Chinese have a vision of mining helium-3 from the far side of the Moon to fuel a future fusion economy on Earth. That goal has also been discussed by the European Space Agency, but I believe that China is educating the most scientists and researchers in the area of space exploration worldwide, and therefore I am optimistic that this “leap-frogging” will definitely proceed.

Look at the collaboration of the BRICS nations in the area of space exploration: It was mentioned that India has already carried out a successful Mars mission, and, as Prime Minister Modi said, it was done at a tenth of the cost that NASA needed. There are unbelievable developments underway.
Krafft Ehricke’s idea that the exploration and colonization of space is an evolutionary necessity, without which mankind cannot survive in the long term, is the other point. It’s not an option, not a matter of choice; we must do it because in two billion years, at the latest, our Sun will not be so pleasant, and thus we must have found other solutions before that time.

But the most important thing about Krafft Ehricke, the reason why he is so enormously relevant today and important, is that his vision, and space exploration as a whole, implies the idea of an open world, that the world is not a closed system with limited resources, but an integral part of the Universe, and that human creativity is a creative, physical force in this Universe.

Epochal Change

I maintain that we are now experiencing an epochal change, in which this idea is beginning to assert itself—that is, a revolution in worldview is in process. You have certainly not observed this if you only watch “Sonntags-Stammtisch” on Bavarian Radio, or read Bild-Zeitung or Spiegel or the FAZ, but that does not mean that it is not reality. This is my thesis: We currently have an epochal change underway, which is no less fundamental than the transition from the Middle Ages to the Modern Age.

Just briefly bring to mind the axiomatics of the Middle Ages—the axioms of the scholastics, the peripatetics, superstition, and so on—and then came a Renaissance, the Italian Renaissance of the Fifteenth Century, created by thinkers such as Nicholas of Cusa and Brunelleschi, a revival of Plato’s works which had been totally forgotten in Europe for 1700 years.

With the Renaissance came a totally new worldview, which understood the individual and the role of man totally differently, but also laid the basis for the emergence of modern science, Classical art, sovereign nation states, and similar developments, which have nourished us for the past 600 years.

We are now experiencing just such an epochal change, perhaps one even more dramatic, and I dare to predict that all the axioms associated with this old paradigm will land in the dustbin of history—the idea of limits to growth; the neoliberal idea that money is wealth; that man only represents a burden on the environment, and the fewer people, the better; the neoconservative idea of geopolitics, that foreign policy must always be a zero-sum game, in which, if one wins, the other loses. All of these ideas will go into the dustbin and a new paradigm will be established, namely, the ideal of a united mankind. And mankind, at least in large part, is now establishing a common ground of reason in which the common aims of mankind are placed before national interests.

There are currently two essential dynamics in which this new view is being realized.

One is—as I will discuss at length later on—China’s policy of the New Silk Road, which has become, within three and a half years, the largest infrastructure program in the history of mankind. It already involves 70 nations and 4.5 billion people. It is already 12 times greater than the Marshall Plan of the post-World War II period, and has unlimited growth potential.

This new paradigm of the One Belt, One Road Initiative (or the New Silk Road) has already led to unprecedented optimism among many peoples of the world. For example, in Africa, people for the first time have a justified hope that they will soon be able to overcome their underdevelopment with China’s help.

Precisely because this new paradigm is based on win-win cooperation—where one nation, China, admittedly benefits, but the other cooperating nations profit just as much—it is the basis for world peace in the long run. This is because it is in the interests of every state to have others develop, otherwise one’s own development is jeopardized.

The New U.S. Presidency

The second dynamic which gives cause for optimism—and this will surprise quite a few of you and quite a few will not agree with me at first. But I ask your indulgence because I must enter into the degradation of American politics: The second dynamic is Donald Trump’s election victory. I would really ask you, for a start, to forget everything that you have read in Bild-Zeitung on page 2, because that is psychological warfare; it is black propaganda of the sort that is only used against the enemy in the time of war. The representatives of the collapsing paradigm, the neoliberal paradigm—the media, the intelligence services, and the British Empire—are conducting total war against President Trump.

I would like to address just a few aspects of his latest speeches, given in Michigan, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Washington, in which he made an emphatic call for the United States to return to the “American System” of economy. He especially referenced the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln who, as a young candidate for Congress at the age of 23, in 1832, promoted the building of a railroad in America, although he had never even seen a steam engine at that time. Thirty years later, as President, he signed the law for the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, which linked the east and west coasts of the United States.

In a similar way, Trump cited President Eisenhower who, as an officer after the First World War, travelled in a military convoy along the Lincoln Highway across the country. This made such an impression on him that 30 years later, he signed the law establishing the Interstate Highway system. Then Trump said: We need the American System again today, the policy of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay, and Lincoln.

Most people don’t know what this American System is, but it was the fundamental American idea in opposition to the British Empire.

There are other ideas that Trump has mentioned—that he wants to invest a trillion dollars in infrastructure, that he doesn’t want to wage any more wars of intervention such as Bush and Obama did, that he wants to put relations with Russia and China on the basis of cooperation, and others. These are the basic goals—such as peace with Russia and China—that everyone in Germany should be glad about, and say: Finally there is hope that this danger of war can be overcome!

But then where does this unbelievable agitation come from? Why is the whole Establishment in such a state of shock? Although Trump was elected four months ago, a war is now being waged against him by Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party, and the neocons. They have invented a so-called narrative—a narrative or a concoction of lies—as to why Hillary Clinton lost the election, which says she did not lose because she represents the paradigm which leaves a large portion of the people behind, or because she was too arrogant to even travel to campaign among the “deplorables” in the Rust Belt. But rather, that Trump won the election because Putin helped him do so, by having Russian hackers tamper with Democratic Party emails.

What is naturally omitted is what was in the emails—namely, that the Democratic Party put Bernie Sanders at a disadvantage and gave preference to Hillary Clinton entirely illegally, and also the speech that Hillary gave to the Wall Street bankers, which only then was made known.

But several members of the intelligence community, the whistleblowers—such as William Binney, who developed the NSA surveillance program and thus knows exactly how it functions—have said: No, it is totally clear that if it was Russian hacking, the NSA could have identified the server from which it came with no problem. But these are leaks—that is, the disclosure of classified information to the public—and the question is, who could have done it.

The U.S. intelligence services have very obviously concocted dossiers on Trump, with the aid of British intelligence—and not just former MI6 agent Christopher Steele—that were then leaked to the public. The possibility that the British equivalent of the NSA, the GCHQ, did the work for the American intelligence services is now also being investigated.

Congress is now investigating everything, and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes, has just said that there is so far only one visible bona fide criminal act, and that is the illegal release of information—and not some hacking. If you read Bild-Zeitung, you read exactly the opposite—that a Watergate is underway and the like. But that will be further investigated. Nunes will hold a closed hearing with the cooperation of the NSA and the non-cooperation of the FBI and CIA.

A few days ago, a leading journalist from a public broadcaster told me that there is an internal watchword that no program on Trump may be presented without the inclusion of derogatory remarks.

Where does this whole dynamic come from? Is it, as the French intelligence services suspected after Trump’s election, that the old Establishment is afraid of losing its privileges, and thus its income stream? Or is there a deeper cause? Obviously I am of the second view, that the conflict concerns what Friedrich List—the German economist who spent several years in America—identified in his time as the total conflict between the “British System of Economy” and the “American System of Economy.” The British system is based on free trade, buying cheap and selling dear, control of raw materials, the cheapest possible labor force, the least possible social support, and control of trade.

Contrasted to that is the American System, which actually goes back to Alexander Hamilton—the idea that the real source of wealth is the creativity of the labor force, and that therefore an economy requires the defense of the internal market with protectionist measures, and the maximum development of its own labor force.

The American System also includes the national bank, created by Alexander Hamilton, and a credit system dedicated to the general welfare, which includes investments in the real economy, such as infrastructure and scientific and technological progress, with the goal of raising productivity. That is exactly the policy that was carried out by Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Quincy Adams, Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, and to which Trump just now explicitly referred.

You should remember: The American Revolution, or the American War of Independence, was fought against the British Empire, with the goal of achieving the right of Americans to have their own manufactures, a right which their colonial master had denied. And the British Empire has never gotten over the loss of its most important colonies, namely those in America, but has constantly tried with all means at its disposal to reverse this process, first through the War of 1812; then through the Civil War against Lincoln, during which Britain was tacitly allied with the southern states, and which was also financed by the British interest—General Lee got money directly from banks in Boston and Philadelphia [that financed the cotton trade for Britain].

After the British lost the Civil War against Lincoln, they considered it impossible to win the United States back militarily, but they now had to try subversion, in other words, the “open conspiracy” (as H.G. Wells called it) to persuade the American establishment to create a unipolar world on the basis of the “Anglo-American Special Relationship”—a world empire. That was the case between Churchill and Truman, Bush senior and Thatcher, Blair and Bush junior, and Cameron and Obama.

In Germany this subject is as little known as is the fact that Bismarck developed the German economy from a feudal state to an industrial nation within a few years on the basis of the American System of economy, because he had learned the theories of Henry C. Carey. This was due to the fact that the head of the German Industrial Association at the time, Wilhelm von Kardorff, was a fierce advocate of Friedrich List and Henry Carey; he took the example of American industrialization under Lincoln as a model for the transformation of Germany. He then wrote a small but very readable book entitled, Gegen den Strom [Against the Current], in which the difference between the American and British systems is very well explained.

The New Silk Road

There is also a dynamic that, if America returns to its roots and wants, above all, to put relations with Russia and China on a positive basis, essentially everything will be possible. And the potential is absolutely there, because, as I said, the New Silk Road is not only a link between Chongqing and Duisburg, or Yiwu to Hamburg, but there is considerably more in the pipeline. We are not passive observers. We claim the New Silk Road also as “our baby,” because it is based on the conception which we proposed after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and on which we have worked for the past 26 years.

The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge—that’s the name of a study which we have published in English, Arabic, and Chinese—and which will very soon be published in German. And if you look at how this concept, which Xi Jinping presented for the first time in Kazakhstan in 2013, has exploded over the past three and a half years, then you can see that a total transformation is underway.

Part of the Silk Road is the “Maritime Silk Road of the 21st Century” in the tradition of Admiral Zheng He, who travelled from the Asian Pacific to Venice and to Africa in the 15th Century. Today the ports of all of these Asian states are linked to each other, and further, are linked to Hamburg and Rotterdam. The Silk Road includes six economic corridors. More than 70 nations comprising 4.4 billion people are taking part, and $21 trillion in investments are planned.

The corridors are growing rapidly. This is an arrangement among China, Mongolia, and Russia, decided upon during the 2016 meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, that encompasses 32 projects.

Silk Road trains are going daily from Chinese cities such as Yiwu, Xi’an, and Chongqing, to Duisburg, Lyon, Hamburg, and Rotterdam. A train travels daily from Chongqing to Europe.

A corridor was the original idea for linking China with Central and West Asian countries.

Another corridor is through Bangladesh, India, China, and Myanmar, which means a total transformation of this region of the world.

Source: Executive Intelligence Review