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NEW WEBSITE: FORUM FOR A NEW PARADIGM
The U.S.A.: Leni Rubinstein
The Eurasian Land-Bridge Today
This article appears in the November 22, 2013 issue of Executive Intelligence Review and is reprinted with permission.
 Courtesy of Edwin W. Walter
Leni Rubinstein. |
Here we have it: the World Land-Bridge (Figure 1), and what I would like to focus on when we look at this planet, this globe of ours. You see these blue lines, spanning from the southern part of the Africa, through Eurasia, to the southern part of Ibero-America. This is a world where man, and the welfare of man, is in the center. How do we take this planet of ours and treat it as our garden? How can we make this the most profitable, the most beautiful, the most clean, wonderful planet for human beings to be on, where every single baby being born will get the optimal possibilities for developing his or her capabilities? In other words, this is an anti-colonial, anti-imperial program. This is what the World Land-Bridge represents.
If you look at history, and what I want to do today is give a brief history of the ideas leading up to this World Land-Bridge of Lyndon and Helga LaRouche. What we have seen through the centuries, concerning empire, is, we look at Africa, still under the yoke of colonialism. You look at Europe, how, again, and again, and again, through the centuries, the countries were set up against each other, by the empire. You get people to fight, and sit and control them from outside. You had the period with the transport of slaves. You had the phenomenon in Asia, where nations were set against each other, to try prevent, by all means, that the nation-states would collaborate with each other for mutual development.
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FIGURE 1
The World Land-Bridge  EIRNS |
And what the World Land-Bridge represents is a complete shift that the world has never seen before, where oligarchism is wiped out, and where the nations collaborate with each other for the utmost development and prosperity that mankind has ever seen. Tremendous efforts by the empire have been made through the centuries to prevent this, and we know the crisis we are facing today.
It has always been a nightmare for the imperial forces, that the landmasses would be developed. Take the example of Adam Brooks, a descendant of John Quincy Adams—not a good descendant—who wrote in 1901, when there were some efforts to create collaboration for development: We must make sure that the land people, the Asians and the Europeans, never succeed in developing the land in-between. Because then we, the maritime powers, will have lost our power forever. And the oceans, they’re our lakes, and we must make sure that they continue to be.
So, this is what I would like people to have in their minds, because this [the Land-Bridge—ed.] is what this represents. This is what also the founding principles of the United States represent: “that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights,” namely, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” This is reflected in the Preamble [to the Constitution]: that we must secure the welfare of the people, and we must work for the future, for our posterity.
These principles are valid for every single baby in the world, whether you’re born in South Africa, in Denmark, in Nicaragua, or in the United States. People have those rights, these inalienable rights, all over the globe. And that is what the Land-Bridge represents. With us winning the war in the United States, to get the technicality of Glass-Steagall through, and getting Obama out, we are on an absolute edge, where we could have a complete shift for a Renaissance, and a development globally, that mankind has never, ever seen before.
The ‘Development Corridors’
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FIGURE 2
Schematic of a Development Corridor
EIRNS |
So, I just wanted to have that in the back of people’s minds, that this is the fight against oligarchism. You see these lines across the planet—we have termed them “development corridors” (Figure 2), because this is not just railroads, not just transport corridors. When you see these development corridors spanning from southern Africa to southern Latin America, you’re talking about 150-kilometer-wide (about 100-mile-wide) bands, with high-speed rail, cities, nuclear power plants, water management and so forth. You can think about a world assembly line on a very high level: of transport, energy production, water management, building of cities. Where you build such corridors, you make the land alive! You’ll be able to grow modern agriculture, you’ll be able to mine areas where we’ve never been able to mine before; we’ll be able to process it, and we’ll be able to transport the goods by rail and so forth, through these development corridors. That is, we will make land that today is totally unproductive and not used, productive.
Leibniz: ‘Novissima Sinica’
I would like to go through some of the beginning of an idea for really developing the landmasses, and here the Eurasian landmass, historically. Because 80% of the planet is landlocked. And therefore, for the maritime powers, if they could control the key chokepoints in the world, like Gibraltar, and control the oceans, and prevent collaboration among nations, then they could have their empire, and have easy control.
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FIGURE 3  EIRNS |
Many years ago, a good friend of Lyndon LaRouche and our organization, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, was in very close correspondence with missionaries in China. He was very engaged in China, in the last 30 years of his life (Figure 3). And in 1697, he writes in his Novissima Sinica: “I consider it a singular plan of the fates, that human cultivation and refinement should today be concentrated, as it were, in the two extremes of our continent, in Europe and in China, which adorns the Orient, as Europe does the opposite edge of the Earth. Perhaps Supreme Providence has ordained such an arrangement, so that, as the most cultivated and distant peoples stretch out their arms to reach each other, those in between may gradually be brought to a better way of life.”
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FIGURE 4
John Quincy Adams  |
This is one of my favorite Americans: John Quincy Adams (Figure 4). With the War of 1812, where Britain tried to crush the American Republic, and at the same time, Napoleon was urged to go into Russia, who had been our key ally earlier, John Quincy Adams, together with other key people in America, like John Jay, formed an organization that they called the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). This was a completely anti-colonial entity.
What did this Board of Commissioners have to do? The idea was, in 1812, to cross the continent of America—and we didn’t have a transcontinental railroad at the time—so cross America, cross the Pacific, and go to the distant nations of Asia, to spread the ideas of the very best of the United States, spread the ideas of the Declaration of Independence, and the Preamble of the American Constitution.
That is, it was not just to go out and convert people to Christianity. No, the idea was, to go and show people to do good. And what the missionaries would do—this is a big story, so I’m being very brief—they brought printing machines, they brought farmers with the newest farming equipment. If a people where they arrived, for example, had no written language, as was the case in Hawaii, they created a written language, and then began to write books, which they printed on their printing machines; they taught the newest farming techniques, and so forth.
The hub for the missionaries was Hawaii, and because of that, society was influenced by the missionaries, and Hawaii is not today controlled by Great Britain, but are American islands. That was the hub, that was the key point for going further into Asia.
Those missionaries went to Indonesia, to Thailand, to Japan, and to China. And if you go—a little fun thing—if you to Washington, D.C., to the Washington Monument, you will see there, inscriptions in Chinese, written by a Chinese guy who had been educated by a missionary; he was never converted to Christianity, but he was converted to the greatest of the United States, and he loved George Washington and the Founding Fathers of the United States. So the Chinese inscription on the Washington Monument is in praise of George Washington and the ideas of the American Republic.
Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles
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FIGURE 5
Dr. Sun Yat-sen  |
That movement, created by, among others, John Quincy Adams, created and laid the foundations for the overthrow of the Emperor of China, having a very deep influence on Sun Yat-sen (Figure 5). This is Sun Yat-sen, who, when he was 18 years old, decided that the Emperor of China had to be overthrown, and a republic be created; and he worked tirelessly, creating support groups internationally, raising the necessary funds; he travelled six times around the globe, organizing the Chinese Revolution. Indeed, 2,100 officers were trained in different Chinatowns in the United States, and it’s very doubtful that the revolution of China would have succeeded without those officers.
Sun got to know the highest principles of the United States and created something he called the Three Principles of the People, San Min Zhùk Yì, and he repeatedly would say, “This I have learned from Lincoln: of the people, by the people, and for the people.” He emulated the best of America, but as he said, “with Chinese characteristics,” as he also had studied the Chinese Classics of Confucius and Mencius in depth. And if you study Confucius and Mencius, you’ll see, that if you take the very best from America, and the very best from Christianity, and put that together with Confucius and Mencius, it’s like one big family, so to speak, of ideas. It goes very much hand-in-hand.
After the end of the First World War, in 1919, Sun Yat-sen, like Douglas MacArthur and others, warned, that with the Versailles Treaty after the First World War, the foundation was laid for a Second World War. In response, Sun writes a comprehensive program that I recommend to people, you can find it on the Internet: It’s called, On the International Development of China. He writes in the Preface, that with the Treaty of Versailles, the path has been laid for a Second World War. And therefore, he says, I wrote this program, that I call The International Development of China, but it is a program for collaboration across the Eurasian landmass, for mutual economic development, and that is the basis for peace.
His program is very detailed, and includes the corridors in Africa, the same corridors that we have proposed be built today. Indeed, many of the key features of our original Eurasian Land-Bridge were based on Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s program from 1919. And many of the things that the Chinese government is constructing today, like the Three Gorges Dam, the railroad developments and so forth, are based upon Sun’s program. It was a grand program, and it was a program for peace.
He wrote it in English, and, as we are doing today—campaigning for a World Land-Bridge and for a Pacific orientation as the antidote to the danger of war—Sun sent his program out to the different governments in the world, and said, “This is what we must have.”
He got a great response from Germany; the Foreign Minister, Walther Rathenau, sent people to Shanghai to collaborate with Sun’s people on an idea of collaboration with Russia, China, and Germany, around great development programs. The response from the U.S. at the time, was, also very similar to today: “We can’t afford it”!
You can’t afford not to do it, but they were total monetarists in the U.S. at that time.
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FIGURE 6
U.S. Postage Stamp (1942)  |
Unfortunately, Rathenau was killed. There was tremendous pressure from the largest drug bank, the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corp., which is still active today. It put up a big money award for killing Sun Yat-sen, in order to stop his efforts in China.
Just to give you an idea, this stamp is from 1942 (Figure 6); you can see in the background, a map of China, and then you have Lincoln to the one side and Dr. Sun to the other, where it says, “Of the people, by the people, for the people.” And then in Chinese with the same meaning underneath Sun’s picture, “of the people, by the people, for the people,” which expresses the sentiment of mutual interests and mutual ideas, during Roosevelt’s time and the Second World War.
A New, Just World Economic Order
I met Lyndon LaRouche in 1975, and at that time, he was calling for a new, just world economic order, and the first article by LaRouche published in Danish was his proposal for an International Development Bank, as a foundation for in-depth economic development. And it was mentioned this morning, that LaRouche was very much promoting the Strategic Defense Initiative for mutual collaboration with the Soviet Union for mutual defense, to get rid of Kissinger’s Mutual Assured Destruction [MAD] policy. And LaRouche’s proposal was adopted by Reagan for a short period in 1983.
It was also in 1983, that LaRouche wrote a comprehensive program for India, and the whole of Southeast Asia, his “50-year Development of the Indian-Pacific Ocean.”
But 25 years ago, in October 1988, there was an historic meeting in West Berlin, with Lyndon LaRouche. And I very much recommend to people—it’s all documented—to see it for yourself.
LaRouche had foreseen that the Soviet Union and the Comecon nations were soon going to collapse, and at that meeting in 1988, 25 years ago, he called for the reunification of East and West Germany, and he proposed that such a reunification would provide the necessary industrial and scientific base for a rapid development of, first Poland, and then other points east. In the same speech, LaRouche warned that the British oligarchy would try to prevent such a development, by creating a war; that such a war would take place in the Balkans, because Yugoslavia was created in such a fashion, to pull a string and start a war.
A year later, the Berlin Wall came down, exactly as LaRouche had forecast, and also a war was started shortly after in the Balkans, to prevent a good outcome, exactly as LaRouche had warned. Lyndon and Helga LaRouche immediately, as was mentioned this morning, issued a development program, the so-called Productive Triangle, among three cities in Europe—Vienna, Berlin, and Paris—because at that time, this triangle encompassed the most densely populated and industrially developed area in the world. The idea was for this triangle area to become an engine for developing large transport arteries to points east. This very quickly began to become the development of the idea of the Eurasian Land-Bridge.
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FIGURE 7  |
FIGURE 8  |
This is July 1992: You see here, on the cover of the Executive Intelligence Review, the beginning of the Eurasian Land-Bridge (Figure 7). Behind this were conferences, meetings, discussions with scientists of all kinds, to develop the ideas in-depth. I was in some of these meetings where some of the things on the maps were changed, including a meeting, which I will never forget. LaRouche was meeting with a Chinese gentleman who brought with him detailed maps, and he said, “We should change the corridor here, and this is why we should change it.” And LaRouche responded, “Yes! We should change it right here!” So, it was a live discussion process developing this program.
This is our Chinese newsletter, a mini-version of the Executive Intelligence Review (Figure 8). This is from 1995.
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FIGURE 9
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This is the Chinese newsletter from 1996 (Figure 9). This was published in French, German, Chinese, English, and other languages, with the lead magazine being our Executive Intelligence Review.
This becomes more interesting today, because of the recent [New Silk Road] proposal by Xi Jinping, the President of China.
This newsletter covered a conference on May 7-9, 1996, in Beijing, addressed by Helga Zepp-LaRouche. It was sponsored by the Chinese government, and it was called, “International Symposium on Economic Development of the Regions along the New Euro-Asia Continental Bridge.” The conference participants proposed to call this the “New Silk Road,” and the conference organizer, Mr. Rui, said at the conference, “It is imaginable, that future human society will neither be hindered by oceans, nor be frustrated by severe cold, altitude, and desolation any longer. Transcontinental high-speed trains and expressways will circle the globe, and bring unprecedented new opportunities for existence, development, and prosperity to human society.” Then, he said, “Two thousand years ago, the ancient Silk Road linked the two continents. Economic cooperation and cultural exchanges along the ancient Silk Road had a great impact, not only on the splendid ancient civilization achieved by human society, but also on the formation of modern civilization. Up to now, it is still one of the most important spiritual ties that links Asia and Europe,” And he called it the “Modern Silk Road.”
The ‘Silk Road Lady’
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FIGURE 10  |
FIGURE 11  EIRNS
Helga Zepp-LaRouche: ‘The Silk Road Lady’ . . . |
So this is 1996. We organized for it, we had discussions about it, meetings, and one of the things that really spurred the process, was an EIR Special Report we produced, that you can still purchase, and which I will encourage people to study (Figure 10). The Eurasian Land-Bridge Special Report is a very comprehensive report, including things such as the most efficient use of land and resources, regarding transport, for example, the most efficient being rail. It goes through in detail, every region of the world, what to do with it concerning water development, power development, transportation, building of new cities.
Because, when we build these transport corridors, we build new, beautiful, efficient cities, cities that hold 750,000 to 1 million people, and where you plan them out from the beginning, and where you can get anywhere in city within 20 minutes via free public transportation. And then you have science centers and cultural centers in the middle; tons of trees and flowers; just really habitable places for human beings. These things we can do, on the Eurasian and the World Land-Bridge, and that’s what we are going to do.
So, Helga LaRouche organizes for this like a madwoman. She travels to China again and again. This is from a meeting in New York in 1997, and she is called “The Silk Road Lady” (Figure 11). Here in New York, she is welcomed in the following fashion: The first character, ying, means “to welcome”; and the others si chou zhi lu nü shì, “The Silk Road Lady.”
Conference after conference, meeting after meeting—and I’m saying this because what Xi Jinping is now calling for, a Silk Road, today, is something that has been fostered and fostered, and discussed and discussed. And as Mr. Ding Yifan of China said [in his speech to this conference], we realize that LaRouche had great foresight, and that he was right (see EIR, Nov. 15).
In the beginning of 1997, Lyndon issued a warning that the Asian countries were going to be attacked by a financial tsumani before the end of the year. Helga LaRouche travelled to Beijing, I travelled to Taipei, and we warned people, we warned our Chinese friends, “This is what LaRouche says.” We warned them in Korea, we warned them in Japan—LaRouche warns Asia, this is going to happen. And people didn’t really believe it.
So, when it happened—I personally have examples where people, when they heard LaRouche’s warnings in 2007-08, Chinese people contacted me and wanted to meet, saying, “I heard LaRouche’s warning in 1997, and now, when LaRouche comes up with such a warning, I listen!” So in many different ways, LaRouche’s influence and teachings have been maturing.
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FIGURE 12  EIRNS
. . . and at Lianyungang, China. |
FIGURE 13
Sun Yat-sen: ‘The World Belongs to Everyone’  |
This is the eastern terminus of the Eurasian Land-Bridge, at Lianyungang, north of Shanghai (Figure 12)—you see that on the sign? This is Helga LaRouche at the eastern terminus, where she’s being interviewed by Chinese journalists in 1997.
This says, “tian xia wei gong” (Figure 13) in Sun Yat-sen’s handwriting; it is a saying from a very famous piece from Confucius about the great commonwealth, and depicts a future where old people are taken care of, sick people and children are taken care of, where nobody steals, you don’t have to lock your door, because it’s a future society in great harmony. And in there Confucius has the sentence, “tian xia wei gong” which can be translated in various ways, but tian xia means “under the Heaven,” so “the world belongs to everybody,” is one way to translate the whole sentence.
Recent Progress
I wanted to end here by touching upon China’s recent developments. They have made four high-speed rail-corridors from East to West, and four from South to North, “high speed” meaning 325-350 kph. I have been travelling on those trains—they’re fantastic. They don’t shake, they’re silent, you can write; and they serve spring water from Tibet—I don’t know if it is from Tibet, but it says so on the bottles! It’s very efficient. One example: To travel between Beijing and Tianjin in northern China, used to take three hours before 2008; today it takes a half-hour.
This development has had a great influence on the population, because it’s very normal for a student, or an old person who is not that wealthy, to take a modern train like that, the equivalent of which is not found in the United States or in Europe. These trains are more advanced than anything we have in the trans-Atlantic region. Such changes create a certain optimism and vastly improve the capabilities of the country.
There’s a tremendous development that has taken place. Massive water projects, the Three Gorges Dam, the transfer of water from the South to the North; massive work on power generation and so forth. To give a comprehensive picture would be a whole discussion in itself. In the last decade, projects have also been built in China, where the intention was not so much to create immediate profit for the country, but to lift up areas that were very remote and very poor, because they were completely cut off from transportation: For example, in the southern part of China, they built a railroad, between Nanning and Kunming, where they literally had to ram through mountain ranges along the entire stretch, constructing numerous tunnels and railroad bridges. This railroad immediately improved the living standard, because people for the first time could travel and transport their goods. But also, the connection is now ready to proceed from Kunming and farther, regarding the southern part of the Eurasian Land-Bridge.
Another example is, that you now can travel from Shanghai, all the way across China, and up to Tibet, to Lhasa, where, for a part of the trip, from Golmud to Lhasa, the railcars have to be pressurized. The ground is permafrost, and the air pressure there is so low, because the railroad is over 5,000 meters up. This meant constructing new machine tools, and the Chinese have developed whole new technologies concerning extreme weather: how to build a railroad in permafrost; how to build machine tools that can function in these extreme temperatures and so on.
And then, last but not least, exploration of space, which has inspired the whole world. When you visit China—this is like I could imagine the United States in the 1960s, with Kennedy’s launching the project of going to the Moon—people are super-excited about their astronauts. And if you want to have a good advertisement, you get an astronaut to be part of it—not a Hollywood star or something like that; no, you get an astronaut.
The Chinese want to have collaboration; half the population of the world lives in Asia, and the future is there. If we get a change away from the current imperial policies of the United States, back to what America really represents, then we have a future which is almost unimaginable, in terms of how beautiful and optimistic that can be. There’s nothing that mankind would not be able to do concerning conquering space, conquering disease, producing food, and with that, also with the earlier question of education policy, then the education policy will simply be driven and spurred by optimism for the future, and what we need to do.
On a last note, because I know there is a lot of “are you anti-Muslim?” or “anti-Chinese?”—this is all imperial propaganda, to set people up against each other, people that really naturally are friends. As LaRouche said at a conference in Los Angeles in 2007, “China and the U.S. are inseparable: The only thing they need to do is to get married.”
I want to end on the following note: Confucius said that the universe is lawfully ordered, it constantly develops in a lawful, harmonic way. Man’s relationship to the universe should be like that. And he said that the key to all relationships—man’s relationship to himself, and man’s relationship to his fellow human being—is the idea of love on the highest level. And with that, I will end.
