THE LEAD
Americans Must Know What Macron Has Done
January 10, 2018
Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) meets with his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron in Hamburg, Germany, July 8, 2017. (Xinhua/Li Xueren)
French President Emmanuel Macron, in his speech in Xi'an on the first leg of his visit to China, has unleashed a highly significant intervention into the nearly universal idiocy dominating the European Union. To make a transformation of this sort requires, first, the acknowledgment of the horror now dominating the political and economic conditions in the West, and the degenerate frame of mind of the elites, the media and much of the population in Europe and the United States. Secondly, it requires acknowledgment of the historic New Paradigm unleashed by China's New Silk Road. Third, it requires the vision to see that bringing Europe and the United States to fully join with China's Belt and Road Initiative, as nearly the entire rest of the world has done, provides the necessary basis for creating the new world order based on peace and development.
And Macron has taken a mojor step to accomplish theese three measures -- although you certainly would not know it reading the Western press.
On the first, Macron noted that China "has managed to lift 700 million people out of poverty in recent decades. This is true for France too, where we are confronted with mass unemployment, with the imperative needed to give future prospects to a whole part of our population, but it is a challenge of the world that lives today in a crisis of globalized capitalism, which has, in recent decades, exploded social inequalities and the concentration of wealth."
On the strategic side, Macron said the West must overcome the "unilateral imperialism" conducted by France and other European powers in Africa and elsewhere, adding: "we must draw the lessons of the past. Every time we tried to impose the 'truth' or the 'law' against the people themselves, we were wrong, and sometimes we have produced even worse situation. As in in Iraq, or Libya today. We need to work together to develop the respect of sovereignty of the people."
He spoke directly against the geopolitical paradigm dominating Western thought: "There should be neither a disguised supremacy, nor a conflict between competing supremacies. All our art, if I may use that word, will not be the art of war, but an art of cooperation balanced in order to ensure on the geostrategic, political and economic level, the harmony our world needs."
He referred to the West as a "tired, post-modern world, where the great epics were forbidden."
And most importantly, Macron identified the New Silk Road as the connection required between all peoples to achieve this new world order. "I think that the initiative of the New Silk Roads," he said, "can meet our interests, those of France and of Europe, if we give ourselves the means to really work together.... It is up to Europe and Asia, up to France and China, to define and propose together the rules of a game in which we will all win, or we will all lose. I have come thus to tell China my determination to have the Euro-Chinese partnership enter into the 21st century with this new grammar we must all define together."
He praised China its work in Africa, where "China has invested heavily in recent years, on infrastructure, raw materials, with a financial force that European countries do not have." He called for French-Chinese cooperation in Africa, to "carry out projects that are really useful for the growth of the continent, financially sustainable -- because the future is there, because we must not reproduce the mistakes of the past of creating political and financial dependence, under the pretext of development."
Most of the Western press, if they cover the visit at all, foolishly portrays it as "anti-Trump," or a lecture to China to open its markets. This again demonstrates that Western leaders and their media spokespersons are unwilling, or unable, to part with their geopolitical glasses, their zero-sum, Darwinian mentality.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche, reflecting on Macron's extraordinary visit, noted that those nations which fail to join in the New Silk Road will be left behind in history. Yet the winds of historical change are blowing in the direction of this New Paradigm. President Trump has embraced China's crucial role in history and for the future; Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has pledged to co-finance projects with China along the New Silk Road; and now France is breaking from the resistance to the New Silk Road coming from the EU, and from Germany in particular.
SUPPORTING MATERIAL
Macron in China: Europe must work with China's Silk Road
French President Emmanuel Macron chose to start his three-day official visit in Xian, very symbolically as he always does, because Xian is the city from which the Silk Roads left for the West. After visiting the famous buried armies of Emperor Qin (third century B.C.), he gave a very powerful hour and a quarter minute speech at the Daminggong Palace to those accompanying him, including the Vice-President of China and other dignitaries, and the full French delegation of 100.
In a very poetic but precise manner, President Macron defined his views of the contours, the rules and the content of a French-Chinese cooperation in the New Silk Road project, but also for a European-Chinese cooperation with the New Silk Road project, since he made of himself the interlocutor for Europe in this respect.
The key phrases which indicate a positive orientation and change are: Macron's rejection of the war paradigm and for a win-win world explicitly, his mea culpa for the West on Iraq and Libya; on Africa, his mea culpa on French imperialism; on the Chinese Silk Road, his praising of the Chinese for having contributed a "new epic narrative" for the "fatigued" Western world to envisage a new dream.
De Gaulle, looking at those who had joined him in London following the occupation of France, the General had this phrase: "I was expecting the cathedrals [i.e. the Catholics], and I got the synagogues [i.e. the Jews]! We could also say today: We were expecting the European sovereignists to join the New Silk Road, and we got Europeanists of opportunity!" Clearly opposing a geopolitical view, Macron made himself the voice of a Europe seeking with China to find a way to get the world back to a win-win multilateralism, criticizing implicitly the "unilateralism" of the U.S. (Jerusalem) and Russia (Ukraine). Note, however, that for Macron, the EU and the euro are not a dogma. During the Presidential campaign he declared that if his European bid did not work, he would skip it.
The other element which is omnipresent in his intervention is the fight against climate change and for a world respecting the environment. This does not in any way go against investments in infrastructure, industries and technologies, however. Both the Chinese, who have gone into a full mobilization against air, soil and water pollution, and Macron are pro-nuclear. This is more to pay lip service to the Weltgeist, and not a Malthusian greenie ideology per se.
Clearly, if France and Europe go fully into the New Silk Road perspectives they will rapidly be brought to a contradiction: The need for financial reform, and the reestablishment of national banks in order to emit national credit, for investments in infrastructure, industries, new technologies.
First North-South Korea Meeting a Success
North and South Korea held their first diplomatic meeting in more than two years, earlier today, and by all accounts, it was a spectacular success. North Korea offered to send a large delegation of athletes, officials and others to the upcoming Winter Olympics, South Korea proposed reunions of families separated by the 1950-53 Korean War, and North Korea re-opened the military-to-military hotline that had been closed since 2016.
"I came to this meeting with a thought to hand a 'precious result' to our fellow, who holds a great expectation," Ri Son-gwon, the chairman of the North Korean Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Country and leader of the North Korean delegation, said at the start of the meeting, reports the Korea Herald. Ri also said the rare meeting was arranged upon "the divine will," on the back of "the hearts of the Korean people" combined with the "current situation." For his part, South Korean Unification Minister Cho Myoung-gyon said that South Korean citizens want to reel Inter-Korean relations toward reconciliation and peace. Cho also underlined Seoul's wish for North Korea's participation at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics and Paralympics next month.
With respect to the Olympics, South Korean Vice Unification Minister Chun Hae-sung told reporters afterwards that South Korea proposed the two sides march together during the opening and closing ceremonies at the Olympics and form a joint cheering team.
On other matters, the South further offered to hold a Red Cross meeting to discuss the reunion of families separated by the Korean War and proposed holding military talks to prevent accidental conflict along the border. "We also raised the need to end acts that could escalate tensions on the Korean Peninsula and to resume dialogue to bring peace to the Korean Peninsula, such as (North Korea's) denuclearization," Chun said. "North Korea proposed resolving issues regarding inter-Korean ties through dialogue and negotiations for peace and unity on the peninsula," Chun said. "North Korea has guaranteed peace on the Korean Peninsula, talked about promoting reconciliation among the Korean people, and solving issues surrounding the South and the North through dialogue and negotiations," Chun said. The North apparently didn't respond directly on denuclearization but seemed attentive toward South Korea's remarks, said Chun.
Seoul has also proposed talks between representatives of the two countries' armed forces. According to a spokesman for the Unification Ministry, during the talks in Panmunjom, South Korea suggested arranging talks between representatives of the two countries' military command in the near future. This step should help ease tensions on the Korean Peninsula, he said without providing any details about response from Pyongyang.
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