The Crimes and Downfall of British Liberalism and the New Paradigm of the Future of Humanity

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By Helga Zepp-LaRouche

[Keynote presentation to Schiller Institute International April 25-25 , 2020 Web Conference]

The human species is confronted with an enormous, unprecedented crisis, which not only threatens to cost the lives of many millions of people through illness and hunger, to sweep away many of the institutions that have been taken for granted until now, and to plunge large parts of the world into a dark age, including culturally, but it can also lead to a thermonuclear war that would potentially wipe out humanity.

This crisis is more far-reaching than that of the 14th century, when the Black Plague wiped out one third of the population from India to Iceland, because it affects the entire world. It is more serious than the Great Depression of the 1930s, because it can potentially destroy more economic substance, and if war does break out, it will be more definitive than the world wars of the 20th century, because it would probably involve the deployment of thermonuclear weapons.

Due to globalization and the internationalization of many systems from nuclear weapons to the Internet, the world population is all in the same boat, and unlike previous epochs, when parts of the world collapsed while other regions were experiencing a cultural apogee, there will be no partial solutions this time. More than ever before in our history, we as a community are challenged to agree on new principles that can guarantee the long-term fitness to survive of our species. That is the point of this conference: How can we identify the causes of this crisis, eliminate them, and open a new chapter in universal history that leads our existence out of geopolitical conflict, out of the atmosphere of aggression and distrust of the current strategic constellations and raises it to a level of reason that befits the identity of mankind as a creative species?

Why do I bring up the danger of a nuclear war? Because the outrageous and malicious accusations against China made by the British secret services MI6 and MI5, and their propaganda outfit, the Henry Jackson Society of London, by the Atlantic Council and various “cluster agents” on both sides of the Atlantic, blaming China for the COVID-19 pandemic because it either delayed informing the rest of the world or is even waging biological warfare against the West, come down to building up an enemy image for such a war. The insolence with which the Henry Jackson Society, the hard core of the liberal neocons and British war party on both sides of the Atlantic, is demanding billions of dollars in compensation only for the G7 countries, can only be seen as a provocation designed to prepare the ground for a strategic showdown.

That is the hysterical but ultimately desperate reaction of an Empire that realizes that it’s all over, and that the world will never again return to the already unravelling strategic orientations of a unipolar world, the so-called “Washington Consensus” and the “rules-based order”, that it was able to maintain at least the facade of before the outbreak of Covid-19. The calculations of the war party were wrong; it over-hastily declared the “end of history” following the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was also linked to the illusion that China only had to be given membership in the WTO in order to almost automatically develop into a British-style liberal democracy, and that all other countries would also be transformed into western democracies via a regime change policy either through color revolutions or interventionist wars – including in Islamic countries.

China’s unique world-historical cultural achievement – that of not only lifting 850 million of its own population out of poverty, but also for the first time, of giving developing countries, with the New Silk Road, the prospect of overcoming the colonial policy that is still implemented to this day by the IMF, as well as poverty that caused – was met with disbelieving horror by the various mouthpieces of the British Empire. After the western media had ignored the largest infrastructure program in history for about four years, attacks on “autocratic regimes” — China, Russia, etc. — were suddenly escalated by the same media, which have profiled themselves since 2015 in the “witch hunt” against Trump, in collusion with the coup attempt of the British secret services.

But once the figures released in March and April showed that China had not only been able to curb the pandemic more effectively, but also to overcome the economic consequences of the crisis much more easily than the western countries, which the privatization of the health sector had left totally unprepared for the pandemic, the tone toward China became shrill. The “rules-based order” of Western democracies, the only one with “democratic legitimacy”, has been shaky for a long time, it was claimed, and it now threatens to collapse, while Beijing pursues a “strategy of unrestricted warfare”. The fact of the matter is that the liberal system of the British Empire has failed with a bang. But that does not mean that the forces allied to the Empire cannot still inflict enormous damage in their agony, for example by instigating a world war.

It is high time to rectify the names, as Confucius would say. If the idea is to draw up a list of guilty parties and compensation due for the current crisis, then it has to be the list of the effects of British liberalism, whose protagonist Winston Churchill carries the main responsibility for the lack of the most important aspect of the post-World War II Bretton Woods system that Franklin D. Roosevelt had intended — namely a credit mechanism for overcoming colonialism and industrializing the developing sector. Because of that lack, the British Empire’s control over the so-called Third World was perpetuated in the post-war period. This situation was then exacerbated after President Nixon terminated the Bretton Woods system in August 1971, which led to successive deregulations of the financial markets, the infamous outsourcing to cheap-labor countries and IMF conditionalities. The one and only purpose of this whole policy was to maintain colonial looting and prevent any serious development in those countries.

How could anyone in the so-called “advanced countries” — and we now see just how advanced they are – assume for even one minute that the brutal poverty in Africa, Latin America and some Asian countries is self-evident or even self-inflicted? If the West had done over the past 70 years what China has been doing in Africa for a good ten years now, namely building railways, dams, power plants and industrial parks, then all of Africa would enjoy the level of development of South Korea or Singapore or better today! Africa has virtually no health system, virtually no infrastructure network, half of the population has no access to clean water or electricity, because the British Empire deliberately suppressed them, working through the IMF and the World Bank, through the WWF, which considers the protection of an insect species in cases of doubt as more important than the lives of millions of people! If you take into account the overall effect of this policy, you will come up with a figure of millions of people whose lives have been shortened by hunger and untreated diseases! Contrary to the myth that the British Empire ceased to exist once and for all with the independence of the colonies and the handover ceremony of Hong Kong on June 30, 1997, it still exists in the form of neoliberal monetarist control of the world financial system, a control that has always been the quintessence of empires.

Another example of pure propaganda from the Empire is to say that “third world countries simply don’t want to develop”. The reality is that even the concept of the UN Development Decades was de facto eliminated with the end of Bretton Woods and replaced by the idea of population reduction, the Club of Rome’s crude ideas about the supposed limits to growth, and the misanthropic notions of John D. Rockefeller III. The UN Population Conference in Bucarest in 1974 or Henry Kissinger’s scandalous NSSM 200 from the same year were just vapid moulds of the assertions of the evil Pastor Malthus, the scribbler of the British East India Company, who in turn plagiarized the ideas of the Venetian “economist” Giammaria Ortes. Lyndon LaRouche reacted to this paradigm change when he began, in a series of studies in 1973 on the effects of the IMF policy, to warn that the growing under-nourishment, weakening of the immmune system, lack of hygiene, etc. would lead to the emergence of global pandemics. After the thousands of speeches and writings by LaRouche, which have circulated in the intervening five decades over all five continents, no one can say that the current pandemic was not foreseeable! Especially since LaRouche’s entire life’s work was dedicated, among other things, to working out development programs that would have prevented it!

The fundamental reason why the liberal paradigm underlying the current transatlantic “rules-based order” has failed and why its Establishment has proven to be so completely unable to reflect on the reasons for its failure, is linked to the axiomatic basis and the generally accepted assumptions of this paradigm’s image of man, as well as its concept of state and science.

After the initial emergence, during the Italian Renaissance, of ideas and forms of a State that consciously fostered the creative capacities of a growing proportion of the population and the role of scientific progress as a source of social wealth, the feudal oligarchy of the then-leading empire, Venice, launched a deliberate counter-offensive, in which Paolo Sarpi, as the leading thinker of that Venetian oligarchy, put forward his teachings, out of which the Enlightenment and liberalism ultimately developed. The idea was to control the scientific debate, but to deny the ability to know and to discover real universal principles, to suppress the Promethean potential – by force if need be, to reduce people to the level of sensual experience, and to turn the backwardness of “human nature” into a dogma.

From this tradition came the mechanistic scientific tradition of Galilei Galileo and Isaac Newton, the game and information theory of John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener, and more recently the algorithms that underlie the derivatives trading of today’s casino economy. The empirical and materialistic dogma and decadent image of man peddled by Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Malthus, Jeremy Bentham, John Locke and John Stuart Mill remain to this day the basis of British liberalism and the virus that has contributed more to the current state of the world than anything else .

The oligarchical mindset of the British Empire, which denies all men, but especially all colored men, the divine spark of creativity is expressed in full clarity in numerous writings and statements, if people only care to look for them, from Prince Phillip’s notorious wish to be reincarnated as a deadly virus, in order to help reduce the overpopulation of the human race, to the despicable outlook expressed by Adam Smith in his 1759 Theory of the Moral Sentiments:

“The administration of the great system of the universe … the care of the universal happiness of rational and sensible beings, is the business of God and not of man. To man is allotted a much humbler department, but one much more suitable to the weakness of his powers, and to the narrowness of his comprehension, they are of his own happiness, of that of his familiy, his friends, his country…. Nature has directed us to the greater part of these by original and immediate instincts. Hunger, thirst, the passion which unites the sexes, the love of pleasure, and the dread of pain, prompt us to apply those means for their own sakes, and without any considerations of their tendency to those beneficent ends which the great Director of nature intended to produce by them.”

Since these attributes all apply equally to animals, then it is obviously also okay to cull the herd periodically, just as the Spartans killed the Helotes, when they thought they would become too numerous. This misanthropic image of man is amplified through pure racism, as Bertrand Russell expressed it so unashamedly in The Prospects of Industrial Civilization:

“The white population of the world will soon cease to increase. The Asiatic races will be longer, and the negroes still longer, before their birth rate falls sufficiently to make their numbers stable without the help of war and pestilence…. Until that happens, the benefits aimed at by socialism can only be partially realized, and the less prolific races will have to defend themselves against the more prolific by methods which are disgusting even if they are necessary.“

Precisely this racist ideology was the justification for colonialism, the slave trade, the opium wars, and, to be honest, is ultimately also the reason for the monumental indifference shown by large parts of the population when they hear the news about the locust plague in Africa and in some Asian countries, which could have been eliminated two months ago for a cost of only 75 million dollars.

And that nothing has changed in the fundamental support for eugenics among representatives of the Empire, was emphasized once again by a columnist of the Daily Telegraph in an article in early March:

“Not to put too fine a point on it, from an entirely disinterested economic perspective, the COVID-19 might even prove mildly beneficial in the long term by disproportionately culling elderly dependents.”

It is these barbaric premises of the liberal dogma, although it is hardly fashionable to admit their existence in the so-called developed countries, that led Lyndon LaRouche many years ago now to stipulate that the combination of the four economically and militarily most important countries in the world – the USA , China, Russia and India – was required to carry out the urgently needed reorganization of the world order. This reorganization, however, must begin with the explicit and definitive rejection of the image of man of this liberal dogma and its political implications. The British Empire in all its forms, but above all in its control over the financial system, must be ended.

These four nations, the United States, China, Russia and India urgently need to convene an emergency conference and adopt a new Bretton Woods system that realizes FDR’s full intention, i.e., by creating a credit system that guarantees once and for all the industrialization of the developing sector. It should begin with the implementation of a world health system that builds up a health system in every single nation on this planet, first of all with a crash program to fight the Covid19 pandemic, but then reaching very quickly the same standards that were set out in the Hill Burton Act in the USA or in the German and French healthcare systems before privatization in the 1970s. As Roosevelt put it in his speech on the State of the Union in 1941, in the famous declaration of the “Four freedoms”, where he stated: “The third [freedom] is freedom from want – which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants- everywhere in the world.” First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt made it her personal mission to ensure that these Four Freedoms were incorporated into the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In Lyndon LaRouche’s 1984 “Draft Memorandum of Agreement between the US and the USSR” that defined the principles and the basis of the SDI he proposed, which was declared the official policy of the United States by President Reagan on March 23, 1983, and repeatedly offered to the Soviet Union to cooperate on a comprehensive nuclear disarmament program, he defined the conviction that represents an absolutely crucial aspect of his life’s work and the mission of this organization. The first article of this paper, the principles of which also apply to the cooperation among the four nations and all others who chose to join this new partnership, states:

“The political foundation for durable peace must be: a) The unconditional sovereignty of each and all nation-states, and b) Cooperation among sovereign nation-states to the effect of promoting unlimited opportunities to participate in the benefits of technological progress, to the mutual benefit of each and all. The most crucial feature of present implementation of such a policy of durable peace is a profound change in the monetary, economic, and political relations between the dominant powers and those relatively subordinated nations often classed as “developing nations.” Unless the inequities lingering in the aftermath of modem colonialism are progressively remedied, there can be no durable peace on this planet. Insofar as the United States and Soviet Union acknowledge the progress of the productive powers of labor throughout the planet to be in the vital strategic interests of each and both, the two powers are bound to that degree and in that way by a common interest. This is the kernel of the political and economic policies of practice indispensable to the fostering of durable peace between those two powers.”

In view of the escalating anti-China campaign, launched by the British secret services MI6 and MI5, which has people in President Trump’s entourage attempting to outdo each other almost hourly in their accusations against China’s alleged misdeeds in the Coronavirus crisis, including Secretary of State Pompeo, Director of Trade and Industrial Policy Peter Navarro, Senator Lindsay Graham and TV host Tucker Carlson, while various demonstrations of a show of force by the U.S. and NATO forces appear to be limited only by the number of Covid19 infections among some of their crews, the existential question is posed of how the world can get out of this dangerous escalation. Are we doomed to relive how the overtaking of the ruling power by the second most powerful leads to war, as has already happened twelve times in history?

The combination of the Corona pandemic, the world hunger crisis, the impending financial crisis and the depression of the global real economy is so overwhelming that it should be clear to every thinking person that mankind can only get out of this crisis if the economic potential of the United States and China – supported by the other industrialized countries – is jointly deployed and increased in order to create the capacities needed to ensure medical care, infrastructure, and industrial and food production. It is in the existential interest of every individual and every nation to work towards this goal. We have to create a worldwide chorus among all other nations and many millions of people to demands just that!

The conflict between the United States and China only exists if those forces in both parties in the U.S. prevail, that are in the tradition of H.G. Wells “Open Conspiracy”, i.e. if the U.S. accepts the model of the British Empire as the basis of an Anglo-American controlled unipolar order. This vision of H.G Wells was carried on by William Yandell Elliott, the mentor of Kissinger, Brzezinski, Samuel Huntington, up to the neocons of the Project of a New American Century (PNAC). If, on the other hand, the United States harks back to its true tradition of the Declaration of Independence against the British Empire and of the American system of economics of Alexander Hamilton, then there will be a great affinity with China’s economic model which contains many of the principles of A. Hamilton, Friedrich List and Henry C. Carey. In the same way, the father of modern China, Sun Yat-sen, was very much influenced by the American system.

At the urgent emergency summit of the US, China, Russia and India, and at the then immediately necessary founding conference of the New Bretton Woods System, the heads of state can take up on the spirit of the original Bretton Woods conference, at which the head of the Chinese delegation, H.H. Kung, sumitted Sun Yat-sen’s proposal for an “International Development Organization”. Kung, one of Sun-Yat-sen’s brothers-in-law, said in his speech in Bretton Woods:

“China is looking forward to a period of great economic develoment and expansion after the war. This includes a program of large-scale industrialisation, besides the development and modernisation of agriculture. It is my firm conviction that an economically strong China is an indispensable condition to the maintenance of peace and the improvement to the well-being of the world. After the first World War, Dr. Sun Yat-sen proposed a plan for what he termed ‘the international development of China’. He emphasized the principle of cooperation with friendly nations and utilisation of foreign capital for the development of China’s resources. Dr. Sun’s teaching constituted the basis of China’s national policy. America and others of the United Nations, I hope, will take an active part in aiding the postwar development of China.”

As I said, Roosevelt supported the internationalization of this development policy during the negotiations, and he considered the increase of a high standard of living worldwide as the key to global stability. And he saw the way to do so in the internationalization of the New Deal.

The four main nations of the world – the United States, China, Russia and India – must now establish, under a New Bretton Woods system and together with all nations that wish to join, a new paradigm in international cooperation among nations that is guided by the common aims of mankind. The fourth of Lyndon LaRouche’s four laws defines the qualitatively higher economic platform, the higher level of reason, of the coinicidentia oppositorum of Nicholas of Cusa, on which the contradictions of geopolitical confrontation will be overcome.

International cooperation among scientists who rely exclusively on verifiable universal physical principles must replace the primacy of politics based on ideology and interests. Research into the “life sciences”, a better understanding of what causes the characteristics of life and its origin in the universe, is the prerequisite for the fight against the Coronavirus and all other potential virological, bacterial and other disease processes. As part of the world health system, we need to build up collaborative medical research centers internationally, where the young scientists of all developing countries will also be trained. The profound experience of the Coronavirus- pandemic is that the provision of healthcare must be a common good, and not serve to maximize profits for private interests. The results of this research must therefore be immediately provided to all universities, hospitals and medical personal in all nations.

Another area in which international cooperation toward the common goals of mankind is indispensable, is the achievement of energy and raw material security, which will be possible with the mastery of thermonuclear nuclear fusion and the associated fusion torch process. The international ITER project in Cadarache in the south of France, a Tokamak nuclear fusion reactor and international research project already involving the cooperation of 34 countries, is a good start, but the funding of ITER and other models of nuclear fusion must be massively increased. One of LaRouche’s central discoveries is the direct connection between the energy flux density used in the production process and relative potential population density. The mastery of nuclear fusion is imperative for manned space flight.

Space research itself is the one area that would be unthinkable without international cooperation and which, more than any other branch of science, demonstrates in a positive way what the pandemic demonstrates in a negative way: that we are actually the one species that is determined by its future and whose long-term survivability will depend on our learning to better understand and master the laws of the universe – including the at least two trillion galaxies that the Hubble telescope has been able to verify. Defense against asteroids, meteors and comets is only one among many important elements of this. For developing countries, unlimited participation in research projects is the best way – through scientific and technological “leapfrogging” – to create the preconditions for economies that are able to provide all citizens with a good and safe life.

Nicholas of Cusa already wrote back in the 15th Century that all discoveries in science should immediately be made available to representatives of all countries, so as not to unnecessarily hold back the development of any one of them. He also found that concordance in the macrocosm is only possible when all microcosms develop in the best possible way. The new paradigm that we need to shape for cooperation among nations, must start from the common interest of all mankind, toward the realization of which all nations and cultures, in counterpoint as it were, as in a fugue, are intertwined and rise dynamically to higher stages of anti-entropic development.

Are we, as human civilization, able at this late date to avert the tsunami of pandemics, famine, financial crisis, depression and the danger of a world war? Then the world needs this summit of the four nations now! If such a summit were to announce all these changes: — a New Bretton Woods system, the four great powers joining hands to build up the global development program in the form of the “New Silk Road becomes the World Land-bridge”, a world health system, an international crash program in fusion and related research, a massive upgrade in international space cooperation,- and last but not least – a dialogue of the classical traditions of all nations with the aim of sparking a new Renaissance of classical cultures in a similar, but even more beautiful way than the great Italian Golden Renaissance overcame the horrors of the Dark Age of the 14th Century”, — a new era of humanity can be born!

Is there a reasonable hope that we can overcome the current profound crisis of mankind? Absolutely! We are the only creative species known so far in the universe, which has the ability to discover new principles of our universe again and again, which implies the affinity of our creative mental activity to these laws.

One thought that elucidates this optimistic perspective concerns one aspect of space research, namely, the seemingly accelerated process of aging in conditions of weightlessness and the change in this process in hyper-gravity. A better understanding of this “space gerontology” is obviously crucial for the future of manned space travel to Mars and in interstellar space, and it is expected that it will significantly increase the ability of humans to have a longer healthy life.

If you consider that Schubert only lived to be 31 years old, Mozart 35, Dante 36, Schiller 45, Shakespeare 52, and Beethoven only 56, then you have an idea of how much the geniuses of the future, with a life expectancy of 120 or 150 years, will be able to contribute to mankind’s development!

Let’s put an end to the British Empire! Lets create a truly human future for mankind!