Zepp-LaRouche delivered this keynote address to a March 22 Spanish-language EIR Schiller Institute international webcast, which included live audiences in Lima, Peru; Mexico City; and Hermosillo, Mexico. It was pre-recorded March 19. The transcript has been edited. Hello to all of you participating in this conference! The New Silk Road Spirit is a very powerful new dynamic in the world. As a matter of fact, it is already the dominating tendency of the whole globe, in which 140 countries are already participating. Not everyone is happy to cooperate with this new paradigm, however. There is a very strong, almost violent opposition coming from those who are defending the old, geopolitical, unipolar world order. As a matter of fact, they are proceeding from the axiomatic assumption that everything that is associated with the unipolar world, with the Pax Britannica, or the Pax Americana, is good; that liberal democracy and human rights protections are inherently good, while Russia, China, infrastructure, and credit-issuance without strings attached, are bad. You can see by the events unfolding over the recent days and weeks, that there is an incredible double standard, where those people who pretend to uphold all the good values are, indeed, precisely the ones who are creating havoc in the world. The best example-or not the best example maybe, but the most horrible, is what Theresa May, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, just did in the case of the so-called double agent Sergei Skripal, who was attacked with a nerve agent. Without delivering any proof, May gave an ultimatum to Russia, demanding that within 24 hours Russia must provide evidence on how this nerve agent came into Great Britain. Some experts doubt that this nerve agent even exists, and strongly doubt that the British have any sample to compare it with. Nor did the British follow the protocols of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which require that Britain furnish a sample of the nerve agent to this organization and to Russia, with the accused country-namely Russia- having ten days to respond. What Theresa May did instead, was create, in a single day, something which you could only call a war-time, or pre-war alliance, consisting of Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany; Emmanuel Macron, the President of France; and herself. She tried but failed to pull in President Trump, who initially was very reluctant to say that this was clearly the Russians. Craig Murray, a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, denounced all this, pointing to the fact that it follows the same script which was used in 2003, declaring there were "weapons of mass destruction" in the hands of Saddam Hussein, which was the pretext for the Iraq War. And as we remember, this script came from the MI6, the foreign intelligence agency of the British. As we know, that hoax led to a terrible catastrophe. Millions of people died in the aftermath of the wars against Iraq, Libya, and Syria. Therefore, this present accusation can only be seen as prewar propaganda, leading possibly to a nuclear showdown with Russia, or at least risking that. When Russia did not immediately respond to the ultimatum, the British expelled 23 Russian diplomats. Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, characterized May's stunt not as an "incident" but a full-blown "international provocation." The British never apologized for the lies and the consequences of the so-called weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, she said, but only "apologized" for having misspent some money from the British budget. Such an apology can never make up for the terrible destruction of the entire Middle East, and the resulting refugee crisis which has wreaked such havoc since.
