Germany’s Future Lies with the New Silk Road!

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, chairwoman of the German political party Civil Rights Movement Solidarity (BueSo)

Heinrich Heine’s famous concern comes to mind: “When I think of Germany in the night…”

Indeed, where is Germany headed, or rather, where is it drifting? The fact that Angela Merkel is going to run for a fourth term is not reassuring. Contrary to the impression she is attempting to create, four more years of a Merkel government are no promise of stability, but the opposite.

Both the Brexit and the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. Presidency are expressions of the rejection of the entire paradigm of neo-liberal “globalization,” which is just a synonym for the Anglo-American empire. That “globalization” has led to the impoverishment of growing sections of the population, to the benefit of the financial oligarchy, in all countries that have been subjected to the rules of neo-liberal monetarism.

That “globalization”—i.e., the City of London and Wall Street’s demand for unipolar supremacy over the world—is responsible for an entire series of wars based on lies, from Afghanistan to Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, which together caused the refugee catastrophe. “Globalization” also means color revolutions, a policy of regime change against democratically elected governments such as in Ukraine; it means the eastward expansion and encirclement policy of NATO and the EU, and it likely would have brought us sooner rather than later into a global confrontation with Russia and China under a Hillary Clinton administration.

Chancellor Merkel and the shocked Ursula von der Leyen represent this losing paradigm, and the idea of four more years—with no change in policy and absolutely no vision for the future—does not mean stability, but escalating political divisiveness in Germany and the disintegration of an EU in rebellion. With the next financial crisis, which is bound to come, the Merkel-Schaeuble duo is sure to foist the costs on the citizens once again, and risk chaos by so doing. The fragility of the abominable refugee deal with Erdogan and various governments in Africa, promises that it will only be a matter of time before this crisis again explodes.

Merkel represents this paradigm which is irreversibly sinking. Just like the 304 members of the European Parliament who have just voted for a resolution accusing Russia of conducting massive anti-European propaganda, she supports an EU and NATO policy which does exactly what they accuse Russia of doing. We must put an end to the logic of the Cold War once and for all.

President-elect Trump has said that he wants to cooperate with Russia and China, and has already held conversations with Russian President Putin and Chinese President Xi to this effect. Trump has even signaled that the United States would like to participate in the AIIB and cooperate with China’s New Silk Road policy.

In the space of only three years, China’s Silk Road initiative has become the greatest infrastructure and economic growth program in history, twelve times larger than the Marshall Plan if measured in today’s dollars. Seventy nations are cooperating with it, and more than 30 international institutions. China alone has provided 1.4 trillion Euros in investments; 4.4 billion people are already benefiting from an unbelievably multifaceted array of them—high-speed trains, energy generation and distribution, water management, new science cities, basic scientific research, innovation, joint research for space exploration, and so on. Xi Jinping has offered cooperation with the New Silk Road to every country on Earth on the basis of “win-win” cooperation. More and more countries are swinging into this new paradigm which, instead of being a zero-sum game, helps overcome poverty and underdevelopment for the common advantage of all.

– Join Me in This Fight –

For more than 25 years, I have campaigned for the program of constructing the New Silk Road, a program which I, along with my husband Lyndon LaRouche, proposed for the first time as a response to the Fall of the Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. We have presented this concept at hundreds of conferences and seminars around the world since then, and now it is the policy of the majority of the human race. With your help, we can now put this program on Germany’s agenda—a program which would especially profit the Mittelstand (small and medium-sized industry), and from which many productive jobs would be created.

To create a real perspective and alternative for Germany, we don’t need an AfD [party] which has no solutions to offer, but, together with me, you can put cooperation with the United States, Russia, and China on the agenda in building the New Silk Road. It is only through such cooperation that we can develop the Middle East and Africa with a New Silk Road-Marshall Plan, and thus solve the refugee crisis humanely. That is, moreover, what General Michael Flynn, Trump’s new security adviser, had already called for in April 2015.

Germany must work for this peace policy for the 21st Century, a totally new paradigm which replaces geopolitics with the common aims of Mankind, and must make itself a part of a real “community of common destiny,” as Xi Jinping has put it.

Germany must also make an important contribution to the dialogue of cultures, which must accompany this new world economic order if we are to be successful. We in Germany have a rich heritage of humanist philosophy and Classical culture, which, wondrously, find an echo in the highpoints of other cultures. Only if we revive the best cultural expressions of all nations, and bring each other into a living dialogue, can we overcome the current civilizational crisis.

Join me in the fight to ensure that this extraordinary opportunity is seized in and for Germany—an opportunity for cooperation with the new, ready-to-cooperate administration in the United States, and the economic alternative which exists in the New Silk Road dynamic. If you do so resolutely, Germany can again become a nation of poets, thinkers, and inventors [a patriotic German expression: “ein Volk der Dichter, Denker, und Erfinder”], and future generations will enjoy progress once again.