Helga Zepp-LaRouche: ‘It’s Worse than You Think: The Attack on Venezuela and How To Bring the World Back from the Brink’

Jan. 12—The following is the transcript of the opening of the Jan. 12 EIR Emergency Roundtable. Subheads have been added.

DENNIS SPEED: We want to welcome everyone to today’s international emergency forum, “It’s Worse Than You Think: The Attack on Venezuela and How To Bring the World Back from the Brink.” Today’s forum is sponsored by Executive Intelligence Review, and as we have said, our meeting is an international meeting. We are transmitting this meeting in Spanish, French, and German.

The international community needs to hear voices of sanity and clarity. And Executive Intelligence Review has therefore assembled today’s panel of distinguished individuals from throughout the world. We would ask that those persons, to respect the fact that there are people on from many different time zones, including 11 and 12 hours away, please keep that in mind as you’re giving your remarks and be as brief as possible. We’d just like everyone from around the world to know that we deeply respect the fact that we are here today to deliberate in a way that has been made unavailable in general to the international community.

We’re going to begin today with Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the founder and chairwoman of the Schiller Institute. She’s also the executive Editor-in-Chief of Executive Intelligence Review. Helga, welcome.

HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends of the Schiller Institute, I welcome you. We have assembled here today not to lament the unprecedented situation which can only be described as a threat to the existence of the entire human civilization, but to discuss, analyze, and catapult an international response to restore international law.

In an interview with the New York Times Jan. 7th, President Trump answered the question if there was anything which would limit the carrying out of his global power, by saying, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality, my own mind; it’s the only thing which can stop me. I don’t need international law.” Indeed, that seems to be true. International law has been officially terminated and has been replaced by the “might makes right” principle. In the first ten days of 2026, the United States has unilaterally attacked Venezuela, Syria, Somalia, and Nigeria; and threatened to attack Cuba, Colombia, Iran, and Greenland. To all of that, the response by NATO—of which the United States is the leading part—has pretty much been nonexistent, or called “too complex” to comment on.

At the same time, basic constitutional rights are being eliminated. The First Amendment in the United States, the freedom of opinion, speech, and press in the European Union—as the case of Jacques Baud and 58 other individuals sanctioned by the EU demonstrates. Laws are being made for total surveillance of innocent citizens under all kinds of pretexts. President Trump announced that he wants to increase the U.S. military $900 billion in 2026 to $1.5 trillion in 2027, which is a two-thirds increase. There is a military build-up in Europe which has not been seen since approximately 90 years ago, under the pretext that Russia would prepare an attack on another NATO country, for which there is no proof, but lots of counterarguments. These unprecedented military buildups can only have one explanation: namely that they are a preparation for a coming world war. There are automated killings based on algorithms and AI software. This is taking place without any public discussion. And naturally the genocide officially registered by the highest courts on this planet, but without any consequence. Of all the many abuses going on, in all likelihood the most dangerous event gets almost no public acknowledgment and is at best discredited as being fake news, is the attempted assassination of the President of the technologically most advanced nuclear power in the world, with the attack of 91 drones, which were repelled.

It should be clear to any thinking person that if that attack had been successful, we would not be convening here, but civilization would probably have ended already. The answer to that attempt was an attack on the second largest gas depot in Europe in the west of Ukraine. It was done with an Oreshnik missile which achieved a speed of Mach 10, which, together with other systems, knocked out what amounts to 10% of the entire European gas reserves. Neither the attempt on the residence of President Putin nor the deployment of the Oreshnik missile has found much mention in the Western media at all.

Today, we learned that last Friday, the Department of Justice threatened the head of the Federal Reserve Jerome Powell with criminal indictments. Powell denounced this as an attempt to interfere with the right of the central bank to set interest rates according to their financial considerations, which in the recent period was the refusal by the Fed to accept Trump’s demand to lower interest rates. What if the threatening blow-out of the trans-Atlantic financial system, which is sitting on a $2 quadrillion financial bubble of essentially non-payable financial debt, including a U.S. debt of $37 trillion and an equally unpayable derivatives package, is the main engine which causes all their desperate activities, including the effort to attempt to set up a de facto world dictatorship?

Avoiding Catastrophe

The most urgent question is, can mankind act in time to avoid the looming civilizational catastrophe? Given that we are the only species gifted with creative reason known in the universe so far, can we change the course of action and create the means of self-government, which allows not only overcoming the actual strategic crisis, but to create the conditions for the durable survival of humanity? We have convened this emergency seminar to formulate a plan of action for the consideration of governments to which I have contributed my Ten Principles, and to which other speakers of this conference will be contributing their ideas.

The Ten Principles of a New International Security and Development Architecture are, very briefly, and I have shortened it here for purposes of time: First, the partnership of perfectly sovereign nation-states; secondly, alleviating poverty in every nation on the planet; third, prolong life expectancy by creating a modern health system in every country; fourth, promote creativity, access to universal education for every child and adult person living; fifth, productive credits—implement Lyndon LaRouche’s Four Laws for a reorganized international financial system; sixth, create a new economic order—build the World Land-Bridge of infrastructure tunnels and bridges connecting all continents; seventh, sovereign nations must eliminate geopolitics.

Our aim is to approach all governments that are members of the United Nations, and suggest to them that they should convene an emergency conference of the UN General Assembly or an equivalent appropriate institution with the intention to restore international law based on the UN Charter and in line with the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence; welcoming the discussions of contributions of individual governments such as the four Global Initiatives introduced by China in the recent years.

Such an international conference must establish the framework for a new international security and development architecture which, for it to succeed, must take into account the interests of every single country on the planet. In the tradition of the conference which created the Peace of Westphalia, the national representatives must first agree on the principles upon which this architecture must be based, and only then proceed to discuss all the distinct regional, historic, ethnic, territorial, economic, financial, etc. conflicts and their solutions. The only way it will be possible to solve the extremely complicated array of conflicts in the world today is by first establishing a completely New Paradigm in international relations. This must be the agreement that we have reached a point in the universal history of mankind, where we must agree to always put the interests of mankind as a whole first, before we define any national or other particular interests. This is to acknowledge the fact that we are, for the first time in history, all sitting in one boat; that because of the existence of nuclear weapons, the use of which would end civilization, the existence of pandemics which can expand over the entire world in a matter of days, the existence of the internet, etc., we are interconnected as one human species and must act accordingly.

A New Way of Thinking

The New Paradigm requires a new method of thinking. We must absolutely abandon thinking in terms of geopolitics or any other form of thinking in terms of Aristotelian contradictions and instead adopt the method of thinking of the great thinker of the 15th century, Nicolaus of Cusa. Cusa developed the method of the coincidentia oppositorum, the coincidence of opposites. It involves the idea that the human mind is always capable of thinking on the level of the higher One that is of a higher order of power than the Many; and in which all contradictions on the lower level are superseded. It is actually that method which informed the Peace of Westphalia Treaty to come up with the principles which successfully ended 150 years of religious warfare in Europe. This method of the coincidence of opposites corresponds to the greatest power of the human mind as the most developed geological force in the universe, as Vladimir Vernadsky called it. It is the driving force of scientific discovery, of quantitatively new principles of the physical universe, and as such, the motor of innovation and the related increase in the relative potential population density on Earth and beyond sometime in the future, as well as the increase in the living standard of all people.

It is, therefore, of the highest strategic significance that recently in his Jubilee speech, Pope Leo XIV evoked exactly that method of the coincidence of opposites of Nicolaus of Cusa as a way to supersede contradictions which must be held together as a method of conflict resolution for actual political problems in the world today. He contrasts Nicolaus with those of his time who were arming themselves for the Crusades, because “he understood that contradictions exist which must be held together, and that God is the secret in which all that exists in tension finds its unity.” It is obvious that in this unprecedented civilizational crisis of humanity we must evoke the best concepts of all great thinkers of the past, such as Confucius, Plato, and Leibniz, as well as those conceptions in the present which can constitute a platform for that higher unity of mankind. Examples of this are not only the reference by Pope Leo XIV of the coincidence of opposites, but also conceptions like the Global Governance Initiative of President Xi Jinping.

Let us therefore evoke the best of what humanity has produced over time and in all civilizations in ourselves and bring it to bear. We are truly tested for our ability to survive morally, and if we can realize the beautiful potential that is only characteristic of our human species. For that, we have to actualize a tender love for humanity—apapē. Thank you.