Second part of our extensive interview with Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the founder and President of the Schiller Institute.
And what is your view about the Joe Biden and the previous Donald Trump governments? Do you think there are noticeable differences between these two? And if so, what is/are the main difference(s) between the Democrats and the Republicans?
Biden as the main force in the Anglo-American combination
Yes, I think there is a difference. The Biden administration is the main force in the Anglo-American combination that wants to preserve a unipolar world by all means. That naturally does not function because unipolarity does not exist anymore, nations have since quite some while started to develop a multipolarity. We can see how that policy reflects itself in the present war between the US-NATO and Russia and the drive to contain the rise of China.
Trump’s right impulses
Trump on the other side started with right impulses because he initially said that he wanted to have a good relationship with Russia and that’s why they started ‘Russiagate’ against him. And the media that ran Russiagate did not have the decency to apologize for lying to the public for several years during the Trump administration, despite it having completely collapsed and been exposed as a fraud.
I think that Trump became so much beleaguered and attacked that he somehow did not fully grasp the potential he would have had as a president. For example he could have just ordered that all the documents of the FBI and the CIA should be published, and I think that would have stopped the whole affair quite nicely. But in the final analysis, he did not have the stamina to endure it.
‘America first’ vs. ‘humanity first’
I cannot agree with Trump’s idea of ‘America first!’ because I believe it should be ‘humanity first’. If every nation says ‘my nation first’, then you still have the problem of geopolitics and geopolitics is the one evil which cost two world wars in the 20th century. I think it should be overcome because geopolitics belongs to an oligarchical mode of policy.
Trump had, as I said, had some right impulses, but you know, they were also mixed. The big mistake Trump made is when he blamed China for the COVID pandemic – I think it was Steve Bannon who suggested to him to do that. And then, Trump jumped on that and blamed China for everything which went wrong in his own administration. At that point, I started to lose any hope that he would really be a good president because you cannot build foreign policy on such a line. So that I could probably say a lot hope for just starters.
‘Deplorables’ of Hillary Clinton supported Trump
Is it accurate to claim that Donald Trump couldn’t gain the weight of intellectuals in the US? Most of the academics and human rights movements, black rights movements etc backed Joe Biden and they seemed to be totally against Donald Trump.
No, I think it works a little bit different. The problem is that the so-called intellectuals in the US are, for the most part, liberal. And they have liberal or neoliberal values. That sort of defines the way they look at the world and Trump. Trump’s appeal was more toward the ones whom Hillary Clinton called the deplorable, which shows the cynical world outlook of Hillary Clinton. For her the people who are not going with the imperial world outlook are deplorable. That’s a totally cynical and really disgusting image of man, which is reflected in that. And these people basically responded to the fact that Trump was not part of the inner beltway establishment of Washington.
Trump’s election and worldwide rebellion against liberal system
I think that Trump’s election was part of a worldwide phenomenon of rebellion against the liberal system. It was the American expression of what led to Brexit in Great Britain. It was the refusal of the Italians to vote for a change in the constitution. It was the Yellow Vests in France and so many of the mass demonstrations in other parts of the developing sector protesting the unjust conditions of the economic system. I see all of that as part of a world phenomenon which is, despite that they are not coherent and take different forms in different countries, in a certain sense the rise of the Global South.
Take BRICS countries for example. There are seventeen countries that are now applying for memberships in the BRICS. That is part of the same phenomenon. It’s the expression of the fact that more and more countries and in part governments do want to be part of an economic system which allows the development of their own nations, and they are rejecting the control of the liberal system as it is existing with the World Bank, the IMF, the central banks and the regime they are conducting. So I think this all is effective in the election of Trump.
‘MICIMATT’ replacing ‘military-industrial complex’
Do you think that the military-industrial complex, as Eisenhower once put it, still rules in the US or was it replaced by any other one?
Ray McGovern is one of the founders of an organization called Veterans for Sanity in Intelligence -these are decent people who all belong to the different intelligence services of the US at one point, but then left these institutions because they did not agree with their policies. Ray McGovern, who is quite known also in Europe, said it’s no longer the military-industrial complex; it is now what he calls ‘MICIMATT’ which stands for The ‘Military-Industrial-Counter Intelligence-Media-Academia Complex’. I think that is more accurate because if you look at the actual control of the US, Wall Street and the City of London and the corporations which they represent are interwoven with the large military weapon firms, but also the banking system, the think tanks who are in line with the them, the media which is unfortunately totally controlled.
Media control undermining democracy
This media control really makes clear that the whole question of democracy is in serious trouble. For example the EU, they have put out guidelines to teachers who are supposed to tell the pupils what they call ‘prebunk narratives’. So it’s not that they want to debunk what they call let’s say ‘Russian narrative’ or ‘Chinese narrative’, but they are inoculating the pupils even before they start to have any idea. By prebunking they are supposed to automatically reject anything but the official narrative from day one.
When I listen to German media these days, it is really absolutely incredible. Every single news item has a spin. If you compare this news with what we do as a news service EIR (Executive Intelligence Review) which was founded by my late husband almost 50 years ago -we know how to evaluate news, how to make analysis that is part of our profession- you can clearly see the generation of news and the twist which is given to it to create a certain opinion or a certain attitude, is scary what is going on in the so-called West at this point.
To be continued…