March 20—Schiller Institute Founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche delivered a speech “The Eurasian Land-Bridge Concept, the Answer to the Strategic Crisis” on March 22, 2003, just as the murderous U.S. invasion of Iraq had begun. In it, she identified the growing collaboration between Russia, China, India, and other countries as a hopeful force for the future. Her keynote address opened the second day of the Schiller Institute’s March 21-23, 2003 conference in Bad Schwalbach, Germany, titled “How To Reconstruct a Bankrupt World.”
Zepp-LaRouche: "You all know that the war has escalated in a major way, last night, with probably 1,000 bombs and 1,000 cruise missiles. And, I must tell you, I feel sick: Because, what is happening, is mass murder, and the whole world is watching it.
“So, if Friedrich Schiller would be alive today, and he would look at this strategic situation, and the historical moment, what would he say? I’m sure he would say something like, ‘You foolish people! Don’t you see that Nemesis is about to strike? That there is a higher lawfulness, which will come back and haunt you for what you are doing!’
“The crime being committed is enormous. The presumptuous arrogance of the present war-party is paired with an enormous guilt, which nobody will take away from them. The defiance of truth and justice is so gigantic, that Nemesis will strike. The higher lawfulness of the laws of the universe will assert themselves, given the fact that there is no case against Iraq, that there is no threat against any other country—not its neighbors and, for sure, not the United States. There is no proven link to al-Qaeda, and there was compliance, in the destruction of the weapons Iraq possessed. There is no UN mandate to use force. And therefore, given that all of these things are the case, this represents a war of aggression, which, as Lyn was pointing out, may trigger a global war.
“The doctrine of preemptive war, the incredible idea to use, in a first strike, nuclear weapons against countries that do not have nuclear weapons, if not stopped, means the end of international law and the return to barbarism. It could plunge the world into a Dark Age and international anarchy, which is why we have to work to reverse this, as quickly as possible.
“The crime of aggression is an international crime, even if the United States does not agree to the Den Haag court; and therefore, it is subjugated to universal jurisdiction in the statutes of the International Criminal Court, and it should serve as a warning to all political leaders, not to violate the UN Charter stand on the use of force against another state, except in self-defense.
“After the Azores summit, it was very clear: Whom the gods want to destroy, they first drive mad. Because, what you saw there, was three madmen, one more crazy than the other. But, one can also be confident about one thing: That Thursday, March 20, 2003, the day the war started, will be historically known as the day the American Empire started to decay. Because, what we are seeing, is with all empires, that when they engage in such immoral acts, they are suffering from a moral and logistical overstretching, which eventually will lead to their demise. And the only question is: How much damage will this empire inflict on the world, before it collapses?
“There are many historical comparisons, where empires behaved like that. One was Napoleon’s campaign into Russia, which ended with the known debacle, where hundreds of thousands of soldiers were killed and only a few thousand came back. There’s another comparison, which is the fall of Classical Greece, which was described by Thucydides in The Peloponnesian Wars, the first major historical work, in which he described why, without any necessity—when Greece had conquered the Persian Empire, and it could have been totally happy, living peacefully thereafter—it had to decide to become an imperial power, subjugating its previous allies, and making them slaves and subjects; and then continuing the war against Sparta, and eventually the campaign against Sicily; and that was the point where the overstretching had reached its limit. And, that was the end of Classical Greece.
“We have right now, a moment where the world financial system, and more than only the financial system, is coming to an end. And, this blowout of the system would also occur if there would be no war. So, this is the end of the system.
“The only good news, in all of this, is that the alternative to the collapsing, old system is already coming together. The new alliance between France, Germany, Russia, China, India, Iran, and many other countries, who are uniting for the Eurasian Land-Bridge, is coming together. And, we are seeing now, a very advanced stage of something which Lyn predicted in his famous press conference on Oct. 12, 1988 in Berlin: Where he proposed that kind of cooperation, at that time, in its germ form; that the soon-to-be-unified Germany should use Poland as a model case to be developed with Western technologies, as a model for all the countries of the East.
“Then, his proposal of the Productive Triangle in 1989, from Paris-Berlin-Vienna; our continuation of that proposal, in ’91, when Lyn proposed the Eurasian Land-Bridge; and, naturally, then, the entire ’90s, our fight to make this Land-Bridge a reality.
“Now, this all is, indeed, a very historical perspective, because it has been on the table for a very long time. This idea of uniting Eurasia through infrastructure cooperation was already the vision of Gottfried Leibniz. And, it was, for sure, the content of the political cooperation between Count Witte of Russia and Gabriel Hanotaux of France, by the end of the 19th Century.
“Now, the fact that the British imperialists, especially through the evil manipulations of Edward VII, and the stupidity of the last two Tsars, and of Kaiser Wilhelm II, meant that this Eurasian collaboration was sabotaged. And that sabotage led to two world wars, and this is why the entire 20th Century was a century, essentially, full of tragedies.”
