“Let a Garden amidst a Million Gardens Bloom!”

We provide here excerpts from the speech that Schiller Institute Chairwoman Helga Zepp-LaRouche delivered in Strasbourg. The full text will be published on the EIR website (larouchepub.com).

What a joy to welcome people from so many nations here in person, after circumstances forced us to hold our Schiller Conferences only virtually for over three years! But we used this time well to bring together so many new forces worldwide, with which we can intervene together at this crucial moment in world history to create a new paradigm for the future of humanity!

Let me say it straight away: Even if our continent is in an existential crisis, we will not allow its demise. Rather, we will revive the best of what European culture has produced, and what is now buried under the speech balloons of a decadent counterculture and the barbarism of the diehards of the past, and we will bring that into the shaping of the New Paradigm!

Unquestionably, we are now in the most dangerous moment the human species has ever faced, as we are extremely close to extinction as a species on this planet, because that would be the consequence of a global nuclear war. And contrary to what the propaganda of the trans-Atlantic mainstream media claims, the danger is not due to “Russia’s unprovoked war of aggression” nor to “China’s increasingly aggressive imperial power grab,” but to the trans-Atlantic forces who are unscrupulously playing with nuclear fire, while attempting by all means to exert unipolar dominance over the world when it has long since been moving in a multipolar direction. While the MSM [mainstream media] in unison slander as “Putin sympathizers” anyone who dares to think that history did not begin on February 24, 2022, and while NATO and the U.S. government fund organizations that put people on lists that put their lives in danger, the nations of the Global South have very much gained an independent view of things.

The sixfold expansion of NATO to the East, coming a thousand kilometers closer to the borders of Russia, despite promises to the contrary, can be as little covered up as the efforts of the Northern “ATLANTIC” defense alliance to expand in the Indo-Pacific region as Global NATO. Above all, with the increasingly blatant and arrogant appeals with which representatives of the “rules-based order” demand that the whole world submit to their intrigues and their “indulgences” in modern garb (such as a carbon tax or CO₂ emissions trading), they have crossed the Rubicon. But by such means they hope to prolong the existence of the hopelessly bankrupt neoliberal financial system at least a bit longer.

We are currently experiencing a change of epoch, albeit not of the kind that Chancellor Scholz referred to on February 24, 2022 and which amounts to the militarization of Europe as a protectorate of the United States. Rather, we are seeing the end of some 500 years of colonialism, which the countries of the Global South are determined to finally shake off with the help of China and the BRI….

The End of the Era of Geopolitical Blocs

More than 30 nations have applied for membership in the BRICS, which will then include the world’s most populous countries. The attempt, coming mainly from the U.S. and the U.K., to “decouple” from China, or to “de-risk,” as this foolish phrase has come to be called – when all these countries are closely linked with China – can only lead to economic suicide, or to an equally suicidal formation of geopolitical blocs, which would carry the seeds of a world war.

In the face of this tectonic shift of power, which occurs at most once or twice in a millennium, the European nations – but also America – must decide whether they want to cooperate productively with this emerging world order, or whether they (with NATO, the U.S., and the U.K.) will opt for total confrontation and the attempt to oppress the absolute majority of the human species. The decision between these two options will test at the same time our moral fitness to survive:…

(Mrs. LaRouche then referred to two papers pushing for a dramatic escalation of the conflict in Ukraine, which were recently issued by two leading think tanks of Berlin – Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP) and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik (DGAP), both of which are close to the government. )

What a nightmare! The largely destroyed Ukraine is to be transformed into a mega-armed country, a “hedgehog,” or rather into a permanent cash cow for the military-industrial complex on both sides of the Atlantic; it will become a “frozen” conflict that can be activated at any time, as a permanent crossing of the red lines defined by Russia which, in the meantime, is supposed to be “ruined” (according to German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock), or permanently weakened ([according to U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd] Austin, RUSI [Royal United Services Institute], [NATO Secretary General Jens] Stoltenberg, etc.).

There’s not a single thought about ending the war through diplomacy, no peace negotiations, no positive vision for the Ukrainian people, and certainly not a peace order for the world as a whole! What an ugly, destructive spirit rears its head here, no human emotion influences the thinking, it’s cold as a robot which is steered by a worm-eaten algorithm!…

Nevertheless, Josep Borrell, EU High Representative for Foreign Policy… recently stated… that Europe is a garden, while most of the rest of the world is a jungle that could intrude into it….

Hearing Borrell’s misplaced comparison of a garden, one is reminded of Scene 10 in Act II of Schiller’s play Don Carlos, when the Marquis of Posa, who sees himself as a citizen of the world and carries the liberation of Flanders from the Spanish yoke in his heart, confronts King Philipp II, the absolute ruler of Spain, on whose “empire”, it was said, that “the sun never sets.” Philipp says something very similar:

“Behold my Spain, see here the burgher’s good blooms in eternal and unclouded peace. A peace like this will I bestow on Flanders.”

And the Marquis answers:

“The peace of the graveyard!.. And do you hope to end…

The universal spring, that shall renew

The earth’s fair form? Would you alone, in Europe,

Fling yourself down before the rapid wheel

Of destiny… Vain thought!”

The absolute majority in Germany, for example, has lost confidence in the government, and according to recent surveys, 79% are not satisfied with the government’s policies. Here in France, we have just seen what state the social fabric in this garden is in. No wall can be built high enough to protect the garden, Borrell says? Well, we see at the external borders of the EU, what these walls look like. Pope Francis described the reception camps for refugees in the border countries of Europe as concentration camps, which are surrounded by high walls topped with NATO barbed wire, and are repulsive enough to deter people from venturing in small boats over the Mediterranean Sea, which has long since been turned into a horrendous mass grave.

Joining the New Paradigm Will Be Beneficial for Europe

No, Mr. Borrell, this Europe is not a garden, it is a continent that competent politicians, such as Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer, wanted to bring out of the rubble of the Second World War into a better future, and that a thoroughly decadent political caste, having thrown out of the window its duty of peace, is now leading into a renewed catastrophe that threatens to far surpass the horrors of the Second World War.

And if large parts of the world outside Europe resemble a jungle, it’s because Europe has not developed Africa in the past centuries, but well-known families in the trans-Atlantic world have built their fortunes on the slave trade, drew profits from the opium trade, or are profiting from the modern successor of colonialism – the casino economy – in which the wealthy determine the rules of our oh-so-fantastically-organized rules-based order.

Or maybe other regions are a jungle because the trans-Atlantic interventionist armies took up residence there, as NATO did for 20 years in Afghanistan, during which time nothing was built, and then left the country in ruins. Or as in Iraq, where a country rising to modernity was bombed back into the Stone Age, and concerning which Madeleine Albright said the death of 500,000 Iraqi children was a fair price to pay for the right to continue ruining the country. And the list of why some countries of this world are not gardens could go on: Syria, Yemen, Libya, Haiti…, etc.

But there is a way out. The nations of the Global South, whose existence was just recently discovered by the G7, and which represent the overwhelming majority of humanity, have long been shaking off the shackles of modern colonialism and creating a new international currency, new development banks, a new credit system….

We in Europe, and even in America, have to give up the already doomed attempt to contain the rise of these countries by decoupling or “de-risking”. We have to replace confrontation, which in any case only benefits the military-industrial complex, with cooperation. Germany, France, Italy, and all other European nations must become part of the new paradigm in international relations; our middle class, now bankrupt under the old paradigm, can not only help build the Inga Dam, but realize the Transaqua project that will provide electricity to twelve more nations in Africa. We can cooperate with China to provide the entire Global South with a high-speed rail system, we can build ports and waterways, green deserts through large-scale desalination of seawater, and build new cities.

Yes, and while we’re at it, we can also modernize our own ailing infrastructure; instead of enriching the defense industry and impoverishing the population,…

To bring Europe, and America, onto this path, is our commitment. And let us remember what Posa said to King Philipp, and what we, together with Schiller, say to the many Borrells of today:

Give up the unnatural deification that destroys us!…

You would plant for all eternity, and yet the seeds

You sow around you are the seeds of death!

This hopeless task, with nature’s laws at strife,

Will ne’er survive the spirit of its founder….

Give back all you have deprived us of,

And, generous as strong, let happiness

Flow from your horn of plenty, let minds

Ripen in your vast empire. give back

All you have taken from us, and become,

Amidst a thousand kings, a king!

Today, we no longer need a king, but as a variation on Posa’s words today, let us say:

“Let a garden amidst a million gardens bloom!”