Our Common Mission Is To Join The New Silk Road Principle
by Jacques Cheminade
October 2016
EIRNS/Chris Lewis
Jacques Cheminade. |
This article appears in the October 28, 2016 issue of Executive Intelligence Review and is re-published here with permission.
Edited remarks of Jacques Cheminade, French presidential candidate for 2017, at the Schiller Institute’s Essen conference on Oct. 21.
Thank you Helga Zepp-LaRouche; thanks to all of you who have invited me to speak with strong words responding to the challenge of the present world situation.
Who would have thought, forty or even thirty years ago, that China would become the leading factor in the world in the future? Who would have thought that more than 800 million human beings would be lifted out of poverty? Who would have thought that China’s concept of a “win/win” strategy for the common aims and the community of destiny of mankind would become a reality, and that the New Silk Road would become the paradigm for change, the potential alternative to the financial disaster of the predatory Atlantic system? Who would have thought that the center of the world would shift from Europe and the Americas to Asia?
Who? Certainly not the mass media and the technocrats in the West, who have been looking at their navels instead, and have still not realized the dynamics of this change, except when they are awakened from time to time by their fear of something foreign to their greed.
What we have before our eyes—and what those media and those technocrats do not want to see—is the largest plan for industrialization and development that ever existed at the level of our planet, far beyond the Marshall Plan in scope, for example, and far above it in intention and direction. Indeed, the New Silk Road, extended to the level of the “One Belt, One World Road,” is, whether we like it or not, the alternative to a nuclear confrontation between the United States and Russia, and to a global meltdown of the financial system on our Atlantic side. The proverbial “Mid-Atlantic man” of the last century has become a narcissist pirate, operating in the conditions of a crime-prone society, behaving like a son of Obama or Cheney.
Let’s look at it from above: the financial deregulation of the Thatcher moment, the opening of an era of open-ended looting, short-term thinking and obsession with immediate profit, was preceded and is now followed by the deregulation of moral behavior of a miscarried Woodstock and May 68 counter-culture. The problem is that it has happened both in the United States and Europe, but even much worse, nobody is doing much against it among the “respectable” circles of the prevailing powers, and much, much worse is the fact that “Thatcherism”—the source of the present evil—is presented as a solution. The cover of the October 6 French magazine Le Point says it openly, as it spreads the British Empire’s message for brutal austerity.
The New Silk Road, extended to a One Belt, One World Road, instead opens the way to long-term thinking and shared economic progress, and out of a system of financial looting and geopolitical confrontation. The New Silk Road, together with the new banking institutions of the BRICS, is a belt along and around a road, spreading development along its way. A linear transportation system of high-speed railways radiates negentropic development, and builds a bridge between China and the world. It is by definition antagonistic to the fictitious capital produced by our financial system, and it builds a platform for world infrastructure investments.
Concretely, Chinese President Xi Jinping outlined, at the Hangzhou G-20 summit, his proposal for a reform of the G20: “it has to be transformed from a crisis-response mechanism to a mechanism of long term governance” and “must play a leading role in dealing with any ensuing economic crisis.” It is not a reactive option; it is an initiative defining the environment for new options of mutual development.
A De Gaulle-Adenauer Community of Principle
Konrad Adenauer (right) receives Charles de Gaulle (left) in Bonn. |
In this context, there is a point of special interest for us, as German and French citizens. We have both lost the spirit of the de Gaulle-Adenauer community of purpose. Here is precisely the opportunity to recover our community of purpose though our joint participation in the road towards the future opened by China. For us, this mutual participation should be the opportunity both to free ourselves from the suicidal grip of finance, and to take part in a project to recover the best of our culture and our true European identity, as patriots and world-citizens speaking our languages with a sense of togetherness. Through the need to work together with China as Europeans, we in France would again have to learn and speak German, and you in Germany to do the same with French, especially to work in French-speaking Africa. To join the Silk Road principle does not mean to alienate our identities, but to mutually enhance them.
Is it a paradox that the Chinese initiative would give new resilience to our alliance? Not at all, because it has already happened in the past, and it has a name: Leibniz and the Leibnizian science of physical economics. In the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries, the great German philosopher—and also French, through his participation in Colbert’s Academy of Sciences—understood that the future of the world was based on scientific, cultural and economic cooperation between what he then called “the two most developed extremes of Eurasia,” inclusive of Russia and Central Asia. Leibniz worked with a group of Jesuit scientists, such as French Father Gerbillon, organizer of the Nerchinsk Treaty, the first Russian-Chinese peace agreement, and Belgian Father Verbiest, who had taught the Kangxi Emperor. Leibniz conceived that the sources of Christian evangelism were not only compatible with, but in agreement with the true Confucian tradition, in the accomplishment of what unites the moral nature of man with the universe, the true creative identity of man.
At that point, the British imperial forces and the agents of the British East India Company sabotaged those efforts. Lord Macartney, after coming back from an embassy to China in 1794, reported in his journal on the danger of “Chinese strength” to the “weight of the riches and the genius” of Great Britain. He nonetheless expected “rivalry and disorder” within the Chinese Empire which, if handled properly, would be “beneficial to our kingdom.” The official account of the embassy, written by Sir George Staunton, rings the same bell. Both warn that a Chinese population of about 350 million human beings, then involved in the advanced areas of science and mechanics, could be dangerously antagonistic to the British system of monetarism and monarchism. The British Empire, in accordance with its principle of divide and rule, then started promoting conflicts in Asia, and finally imposed the opium trade to destroy not only China but the connection between Chinese culture and the true European culture of Leibniz and his followers.
Today we have to confront the same enemy who has become Anglo-American—British brains and American muscle—and our community of interest with present-day China is again to revive the Leibniz approach, and free our Western world from its submission to the City of London and Wall Street.
It is not a dream or a scheme; it is a reality whose accomplishment depends upon our common will, as Germans, Frenchmen, and all European peoples and cultures. I am not suggesting that it will be an easy thing; it demands courage to tell the truth and fight for it from the top down. But it is only if we look from under the belly of history that the road appears to be a dead end. Given the circumstances of our deadly Western weakness, the Chinese government is demanding the status of a market economy to sell more of its products in Europe, at the same time that the United States is attempting to impose the TAFTA Treaty upon us to crush our independence. The only solution is to look at it from above.
It is not at the level of unchecked competition between European and Chinese products that the dilemma can be solved. It is at the level of government-to-government agreements that there is a solution, along and around the New Silk Road becoming a One World Road for mutual development of all. It is at the level of what we may and shall do together, that our common future lies: neither in deadly competition, nor in suicidal geopolitics, but in a shared development of joint projects, such as the Moon-Mars space project; the transformation of oceans and seas from areas of looting imposed by financial greed, into long-term “farming on water”; and our common development of Africa. The BRICS and we Europeans have to become united in purpose, mustering our energies to bring the United States into this mutually beneficial venture and out of the rule of imperial and geopolitical evil.
Solving the Migrant Crisis
 View full size The Irish Naval Service rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean, 2015. |
Let’s now put the finger where it hurts. You all know that there are thousands of migrants who drown in the Mediterranean, and that many more die on their way from central Africa to the sea, while crossing the deserts. But what you may not know, is that all the most sacred laws of human behaviour are violated along the way. And the oldest of them, the moral imperative to help people threatened with dying at sea, is the most often violated of all. My friends at the Médecins du monde NGO confirmed to me that both container ships and oil and gas tankers not only refuse to stop to help the migrants in danger of drowning, but even drive them off, sometimes with high-pressure water from fire hoses. It is one of the most horrendous crimes that one can imagine. Why is it committed? Because the captains and the crews of those ships work on the basis of an hour-to-hour schedule. If they arrive late, it means a loss of financial profit for their companies, and they are punished. Helping migrants in danger of dying therefore means they will be penalized for being late, or perhaps even laid off. All the more so, as they risk being quarantined with the people that they might have saved! That explains their criminal behavior, even if it certainly does not clear them from their responsibility.
But who are the ultimate criminals behind these crimes committed at sea or in the deserts of Africa? First the policies of the United States and our European countries: the NATO wars that have wrecked the societies of the Middle East, including the support given by our Saudi and Qatari allies to jihadi criminals. And behind them, the money of the British, American and also French not-so-secret services. The second and main criminal is our financial system, which puts the rule of short-term financial profit above the saving of human lives. In that sense, we do indeed belong to a “culture of death.”
Have I gone far from the New Silk Road in exposing this? Not at all, because it leads us to the alternative. If we want to stop such crimes, we need a world defined by something other than war provocations and the law of short-term profit. That is the principled approach of the Silk Road! To stop the flow of migrants that Europe is unable to cope with—since the same financial system under which those crimes are committed at sea also prevents us from creating employment here—we need a change of paradigm. First, we need first to stop the wars in the Middle East, second to eradicate the roots of those wars, and third, to rebuild the entire region to create the conditions in which the people could go back to their homes, or only leave them as a matter of choice and not out of despair.
For more than two years now, we, the Western countries, have allegedly fought Al Qaida, Daesh and their allies, on paper and from the air, without cutting their financial roots, and have therefore let their criminal influence spread, rather than stopping it. Our war on terrorism, as well as our war on drugs, have been fake wars. It is the intervention of Vladimir Putin’s Russia—considering our obliging attitude towards the jihadi gangs—which has now created the conditions for eradicating the criminals. But to prevent the coming fall of Mosul and Aleppo from spreading the disease out from around them, we need to rebuild the nations of the region as soon as possible, beginning with Iraq and Syria.
And China, with the perspective of the New Silk Road, has proposed a $30 billion fund for that purpose. It would be wise and just for our countries to join that with many more billions, instead of fueling the monetarist disease by issuing 80 billion euros of fake money every month to support our banking system, which amounts to giving drugs to dead corpses.
This perspective of real nation-building and nation-reconstruction in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world, would put an end to the rule of financial profit at the speed of light—that rule of financial profit which induces the captains and their crews to let the migrants die a horrendous death.
Again, is it a dream? “An angelic humanist dream,” as it is called by those who are only inspired by greed? Not at all. It is a process by which we can regain our humanity, and, by the same token, the principle of mutual economic growth. We Europeans should know that better than everyone else, because it is according to that principle, that we rebuilt our countries after the horrors of World War Two, with true human capital.
Let us then, as Frenchmen and Germans, who are losing our industrial and energy bases, rediscover this principle, with our minds located in a better, possible, future. Let us fight for the cause of our peoples and the cause of humanity as a single cause, because if we do not, our punishment will soon be economic chaos, in a crime-prone world, leading to a new world war. A wounded tiger is the most dangerous of all tigers—let us therefore stop behaving like tigers. Let us develop the partnership of our minds, together to build the beautiful world shown by the preceding speakers. Let us become patriots and world citizens, as Friedrich Schiller defined a true human identity.
