An Interview with Helga Zepp-LaRouche on EU-Ukraine Relations and the European Debt Crisis

(Helga Zepp-LaRouche is founder and Chairwoman of the Schiller Institute. She is the wife of Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr. She visited IES on February 20, 2014.)

Q: Why is the EU so interested in Ukraine?

A: In the last two days the result of this policy became evident: what is happening is a Neo-Nazi-Coup by groupings that include Svoboda and Right Sector, announcing that they are carrying out a national revolution under such slogans as “Ukraine for the Ukrainians”, “Glory to the Nation”, “Death to the Enemies”,“Knife the Muscovites and Hang the Communists”， etc.  The US, the EU and most mainstream media have been claiming that the events of the Maidan is the expression of freedom-loving people, who want the join Europe, and have been consciously covering up the kinds of Nazi, extreme rightwing and terrorist forces they have mobilized in order to carry out their regime change policy in Ukraine.

They bear the full responsibility if the situation now turns into a full fledged civil war, splitting of the country or even into global thermonuclear war.

Before President Yanukovich cancelled the agreement at the Vilnius Summit, the EU had offered Ukraine only an Association Agreement, that would have meant a cut to the ties with Russia and, according to some experts, also included a clause that would have integrated Ukraine into some form of military integration with NATO. Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, both NATO and the EU were engaged in a steady eastward expansion which however always excluded Russia. In effect, it has led to an encirclement of Russia, which is further aggravated by the establishment of the U.S. missile defense system in Poland and Romania, of which the recent deployment of the Aegis destroyer Donald Cook to the U.S. Navy base in Rota, Spain is a part.

Russia has made unmistakably clear that it regards this system as a  threat to its strategic nuclear arsenals and second strike capabilities, and that it will not allow it to be built to completion in all four phases, because somewhere in this process comes a point, after which Russia becomes indefensible. Both the US missile defense system and the associated Prompt Global Strike doctrine are in fact based on “first strike” doctrines.

If Ukraine were to fall under the influence of NATO, be it through the orchestrated regime change, as was revealed by the taped conversation between U.S. Assistant Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland, and U.S. Ambassador Jeffrey Pyatt, or through the now threatening civil war, whereby Russia would lose its naval bases in the Black Sea in Sevastopol and Odessa, it would also render Russia indefensible. This has been recently pointed out both by such Russian organisations as the Izborsk-Club, as well as by Western think-tanks, such as the American Stratfor.

This policy of regime change has been adopted by the British and American governments since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the period between 1989 and 1991, where the neocons around Bush Sr. adopted the “New American Century Doctrine” , which represents essentially the idea of dominating  the world as an empire based on the Anglo-American „special relationship,“ and eliminate every government that does not submit to this empire. It is noteworthy, that Robert Kagan, one of the authors of that doctrine, is the husband of Victoria Nuland. Regime change of one form or another has been carried out in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, is now being attempted in Syria, and has been earlier in Ukraine with the heavily foreign-instigated Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Rose Revolution in Georgia, the attempt of a “white revolution” in Russia and much of the Arab Spring. The Financial Times made it very clear in an article on February 2 that in line with earlier announcements by The Economist that the destabilization in Ukraine is supposed to be carried further to Russia in order to oust President Putin from office.

From an economic standpoint the association of Ukraine with the EU would have brought advantages to the EU and significant disadvantages to Ukraine. It would have submitted Ukraine to the usual structural reforms imposed by the EU on new member states, including the privatisation of state industries and the opening of the domestic market for foreign products. Already in the past the Ukrainian export to the EU consisted of only 16% in finished products and the rest in raw materials, whereas the export to Russia was 60% finished goods.  It also would have led to a land grab of the extremely fertile Ukrainian soil and its agriculture by the large food cartels. All in all, it would have represented yet another form of primitive accumulation against the assets of the real economy of the Ukraine and its population, which would have fallen under the dictate of the Troika. Ukraine would have soon become the new Greece at the Russian border.

Q: What will be the result of the current crisis in Ukraine?

A: With the developments of February 22, there is the immediate danger of a civil war and a coming military confrontation between NATO and Russia, which given the nature of the overall strategic situation can lead in a very short time to a global thermonuclear war.

The policy of regime-change backed by the U.S., the EU and the German Government, has created a monster, where in the last 23 years 2200 NGOs, financed by anywhere beween 5 and 20 billion dollars, have created an activist network of people, who were recruited on the basis of their anti-Russian profile. Organisations such as the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, the Soros Open Society Fund, the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, just to name a few, have built up a Western-controlled network, which represents the most active part of the opposition.

The violent parts of the opposition consist of a variety of hard-core Nazi groups, from the Svoboda party, the Right Sector and other groupings, who all are in the open tradition of Stepan Bandera, who helped to prepare the Nazi invasion in Ukraine in the 1940s.  These fascists were taken over by British intelligence after 1945 and also worked for the Gehlen organisation of the BND in Germany. They have party logos modeled on the swastika, are singing the old Nazi songs, are antisemitic and xenophobic, and have not the slightest interest in joining the EU. They have robbed various weapon depots, use sharp ammunition, throw Molotov cocktails, have occupied a ministry and have killed policemen.

It is a total and complete scandal, a sign of the utmost hypocrisy and proof of their real intention, that the US, the EU and the German government have backed these Nazis under the name of „democracy“ ,“Western values“ and „human rights“. The deal negotiated by Foreign Ministers Steinmeier and Sikorski demanded the return to the constitution of 2004, but left the fascist criminals unpunished. The Russian envoy, Vladimir Lukin, returned in protest to Moscow. Until very recently, for a period of over two months, the Western media covered up the existence and role of the strong Nazi component in the Ukrainian opposition, which caused Russian general Leonid Ivashov to accuse the West of having learnt a lot from Dr. Goebbels, by starting the war with an information war, demonizing the Russian government as the first phase of the war to come.

If the situation turns into a civil war, if the Russian Black Sea Fleet would be threatened, of if NATO were to attempt to intervene for „ humanitarian“ reasons, this will be the trigger for a war with Russia.

Q: Two years ago many people were concerned, that Greece would exit from the Eurozone. Now the fear is gone, Latvia entered the EU. Does that mean that the Euro is becoming stronger? Will it challenge the dominance of the dollar in a more powerful way?

A: It will be a miracle if the Euro survives 2014. Iceland just broke off negotiations to enter. The universities of Oxford, Cambridge and London just published a study saying that the austerity policy of the Troika against countries such as Greece and Spain is an utter and complete violation of human rights and dignity. Infant mortality has gone up by 43%, youth unemployment is at 65%, the suicide rate has gone up dramatically, half of the pensioners are starving, millions have no access to medical insurance at all, the real economy has been shrunk by more than a third, the population is in a condition of total despair and hopelessness. That is the “success story” of the troika.

As for the challenge of the dollar, all the “Too Big To Fail” (TBTF) banks of Europe and the US are bankrupt.

Q: How do you view the process of European integration and EU enlargement?

A: The official line that the Euro is supposed to guarantee “peace in Europe” forever and strengthen the Eurozone against emerging markets and other major powers is just propaganda. The hostilities among the nations of Europe as a result of the EU policies have never been as acute since 1945. There is no “European people”, and one cannot put 27 nations with 27 different languages, cultures and histories into an economic and fiscal straight-jacket. The Euro has first created a bubble in the southern European countries, and led to a stagnation of the domestic German market. Now that all the states are totally overly indebted and the banks are bankrupt, the EU Commission and the EZB want a trans-border resolution mechanism, which would make Germany the paymaster for the whole of Europe, which is obviously resisted by the Bundesbank.

If the present plans to implement the bail-in, i.e. the Cyprus- model for the entire Euro-zone (and the US), it will lead to a dramatic economic collapse and a social explosion beyond imagination.

The EU enlargement is, according to Robert Cooper, the advisor of Lady Ashton, the largest imperial expansion in history. Since the treaty of Maastricht it has become an empire, whose supranational structure and bureaucracy has lost all connection to the interest of the member states. The oft-mentioned “democracy deficit” is a euphemism, there is no democracy. In Spain for example, people who criticize the EU can be punished with up to half a year of jail!

Q: Is the European debt crisis over?

A: It can come back at any moment with a vengeance. The monetarist austerity policies of the Troika in the tradition of German Chancellor Brüning and Hjalmar Schacht have destroyed large industrial capacities of the southern European countries and France, where the fear exists, that the recent riots in Bretagne will spread to all of France. The only country which is still relatively functioning, is Germany, which could compensate its export losses within the EU through increased exports to Asia and especially China.

Q: Lyndon LaRouche believes that the financial system is collapsing. Do you agree with him? Why?

A: Mr. LaRouche has a record as being the only western economist, who has never been wrong in his prognoses and who forecast correctly every major development of this crisis since August 15th, 1971 when President Nixon ended the Bretton Woods system and Mr. LaRouche made the forecast that the trend which was thus started would inevitably lead to the danger of a new depression and to fascism. He also forecast the 1987 crash, the Asia crisis of 1997 and made a famous forecast on July 25, 2007 warning of the breakdown crisis, which is now unfolding one week before its eruption.

Today the Transatlantic system is by 30-40% more indebted than the Lehmann Brother crisis in 2008. The policies of the bail-out and Quantitave Easing have served to increase the bubble, and there are 1.4 quadrillion outstanding derivative contracts today. There has been a debate in the US Fed and elsewhere, that the tapering out of the QE would be impossible, since it would set into motion a process of reverse-leveraging. Since the Fed reduced the monthly amount of QE from 85 to 75 to 65 billion dollars, that reverse-leveraging has began and has led to a plunge of the currencies of the emerging markets and capital flight out of them back to the dollar and the Euro.

The entire transatlantic system is about to blow out. If one of the TBTF banks collapses, the entire system will evaporate.  The intended bail-in will not remedy the situation, but lead to the mentioned result.

The war danger results from the fact that the transatlantic system is collapsing, and the Asian countries are on a vector upwards, and there are leading powers in this system of globalization, which are still thinking in the old geopolitical mode and rather risk the extinction than allow their loss of power.

The only hope for a solution to this systemic crisis is a return of the USA to a rule on the basis of the Constitution, and an end to the casino economy through the immediate implementation of the Glass-Steagall Act for banking separation exactly in the form as it was implemented by Franklin D. Roosevelt, and not in the watered down form of the Volker rule, or Vickers Commission or any other such proposal. This must be followed by the creation of a credit system based on the American system of economy in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton. This credit system must be directed exclusively to the reconstruction of the real economy, such as the Eurasian Land-bridge, the New Silk Road, and fundamental infrastructure programs aimed at the increase of the productivity of labor.

In the US Congress there are presently more than 80 congressmen, 11 Senators supporting the reintroduction of Glass-Steagall, and 28 of 50 states have introduced or passed resolutions supporting Glass-Steagall. Also in Europe in several parliaments legislation has been introduced for the separation of the banks according to the Glass-Steagall Act.

To answer your question, I agree with Mr- LaRouche. We are facing presently not only the danger of an immediate collapse of the transatlantic financial system, but the threat of thermonuclear war and with that the possible extinction of civilisation.