As Biden left for Europe yesterday for meetings with "allied" leaders in NATO, G7 and the EU, there were numerous statements from U.S. officials, including Biden, announcing an escalation against Russia. With talk of Russian "war crimes", and nuclear war as a "possible contingency", what is reflected, Zepp-LaRouche remarked today, "is zero capacity" to think through the strategic crisis.
Zepp-LaRouche countered the "lock-step" narrative which dominates the west by identifying the goal of this language as regime change against Putin -- but toward what end? As a result of the escalation of sanctions, it is now estimated that food shortages will soon threaten 1 billion people -- Who is actually committing war crimes, and violating human rights??
She discussed the irony of the nuclear war talk breaking out on the day of the 39th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's promotion of the SDI, for which her husband Lyndon LaRouche had been a leading architect. LaRouche's idea, which was the kernel of Reagan's proposal, was not simply a military policy of defense against nuclear war, but an economic approach of sharing the most advanced technologies, for the benefit of all nations. This idea is at the center of the upcoming Schiller Institute conference for the creation of a new security and financial architecture, to replace the neocon, neoliberal system which is imploding today.
Transcript
Strategic Webcast with Helga Zepp-LaRouche
Thursday, March 24, 2022
HARLEY SCHLANGER: Hello, I’m Harley Schlanger with our weekly dialogue with Schiller Institute founder and chairwoman Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Today is Thursday March 24, 2022.
It’s a very busy day as the war hawks are gathering in Europe; Joe Biden just travelled there, for a meeting with NATO heads of state and government, G7, EU, and the planning goes on for the escalation of warfare against Russia. Helga, why don’t you give us a summary from your vantage point of where things stand, and what’s the intention of this?
HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Well, if one sees what these people are saying and what they are actually intending to do, one can have very serious questions about what is going on in their minds? The minimum you can say, and I’m trying to be very friendly, is that their capacity to think things through goes toward zero. Because, they’re putting statements into the world, which, if they are acted to the fullest consequence can only lead to a catastrophe for human civilization: Let’s start with the statement by the State Department yesterday, where they, in preparation obviously for the NATO summit, put out the statement that they have evidence that Russia has committed war crimes in Ukraine, and that that will require that every tool be implemented including criminal prosecution. And Biden basically said something similar, and that the nuclear option is a contingency, the U.S. nuclear posture has not changed, but it remains a contingency he is talking about with the allies about.
Now, these are quite incredible statements. Remember, that it was only on June 16 last year, when Biden and Putin met in Geneva and they reiterated the absolute, crucial statement that “nuclear war cannot be won and therefore it must never be fought.” And this was then also repeated by the permanent five of the UN Security Council, reiterating what several decades had been stated between President Reagan and President Gorbachev—I mean, sort of an obvious truth. And obviously this is no longer the basis of operation of NATO, or at least of Biden, and we have to see.
So NATO then came out, absolutely predictably, also with a statement, condemning Russia for war crimes, promising more support for Ukraine, saying that they will put permanently more troops at the western border of Russia. Then they also warned China—I mean, this is obviously a continuation of why this war occurred in the first place. And I really would urge people, rather than going with this complete lockstep Western media, which is amazing, that people should listen to such people who are also a mainstream established voice, namely, Professor Mearsheimer from the University of Chicago, who says the guilt for what is happening in Ukraine is entirely that of the West and primarily of the United States; and that if one looks at a possible solution, a resolution to this conflict, one has to think about the causes. And the causes were—and I made a video about that already immediately after the war in Ukraine started—the 30 years eastward expansion of NATO, which left Putin in a situation where he said, I have no place to retreat to.
Now, I think that also the entire war propaganda which is now coming out about so-called atrocities and war crimes in Ukraine, well, there is another article in Newsweek from an analyst, William Arkin who says there is absolutely no evidence for such activities from Russia. They did not commit a “shock and awe” operation, but they on the contrary, when in in a very measured, targeted way, only targetting military targets, and naturally what they perceived as holdouts of the Azov Battalion, like in Mariupol. And what Arkin then points to is that in the 24 days since the beginning of the war, and when he wrote this article, Russia made less sorties and deployed less weapons in Ukraine than the United States and its allies in one day in the Iraq War. [https://www.newsweek.com/putins-bombers-could-devastate-ukraine-hes-holding-back-heres-why-1690494]
So there has to be a proportionality in the reporting, but obviously, this is not any longer the case.
SCHLANGER: Helga, one of the interesting things is that it’s becoming increasingly clear that the NATO policy, the Biden policy, the Boris Johnson policy has nothing to do with protecting people in Ukraine. There’s no encouragement coming from them for deescalation: Instead, they’re sending in more weapons, more troops, more sanctions. This should be increasingly obvious to people, if it weren’t for the media psychological warfare, wouldn’t it?
ZEPP-LAROUCHE: I think it’s interesting, the deputy foreign minister of Greece, Miltiadis Varvitsiotis, he spilled out the truth: He said the aim of the sanctions is to topple Putin and to bring in a different regime. Now, the former Prime Minister of Russia Dmitry Medvedev, who is now deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, he said, what is the result if this policy would succeed, and you would have a breakup of the largest nuclear weapons power in the world, with the most warheads, if it would split into six or seven countries? You would have chaos. If you would then continue that policy toward China, you would have a complete collapse of the world economy internationally, and then you would have the “big nuclear bang.” And he said, I congratulate the strategists in Washington and the White House and Capitol Hill—Congratulations, you’re really doing a great job.
And I would like to say the same thing to all these strategists in Brussels and NATO and the EU and the G7. I mean: What is the aim of it? The idea to replace Putin with an unforeseeable event in Russia, to try to smash the rise of China—which I’ve said many times will not function anyway—this is a pure policy of madness and destruction. And I think the more people start to realize that, the better.
SCHLANGER: As this economic warfare is continued, Putin seems to be developing a counter strategy. In part, the strategy is the continued economic integration with China and the Eurasian Economic Union. But now he’s ordered ruble payments from countries that are buying oil, and this has fairly profound implications for the future, doesn’t it?
ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Well, it’s clearly aimed to make the sanctions policy inefficient and also the fact that the Western central banks confiscated more than $300 billion of Russia’s assets abroad, so if people want to buy gas, they have to buy rubles with dollars or euros, so one has to see what is the result of this, but it’s a smart countermove, for sure.
More fundamentally, as the Russian economist Sergei Glazyev has pointed out in a variety of statements, there is already a different financial system emerging. Many countries, including Russia and China, are having trade in their national currencies. Russia has basically under the conditions of the sanctions, implemented capital controls; they have basically changed the economy to a war economy; and Glazyev has stated that he is quite optimistic that even under these conditions, Russia can have an economic growth of 10% this year, and 10% on a steady basis in the future.
I think the attempt to blackmail countries into choosing sides, to come into the alliance of the so-called “democratic states” against the so-called “autocratic states,” it’s not functioning. It’s not functioning with the OIC [Organization of Islamic Cooperation]. They just had a big conference in Islamabad, where the Prime Minister of Pakistan Imran Khan made a passionate speech that Pakistan does not want to be pulled into a decision, and he suggests that the OIC and China should work to mediate between Ukraine and Russia. And India is also not taking sides; they did not vote against Russia in the UN General Assembly, and also did not half of the African states, because they all recognize the advantage in working with China and Russia and other countries of the Belt and Road Initiative for their real economic development, and that is not what the West is offering.
SCHLANGER: One of the interesting commentaries on this came from Russia Foreign Minister Lavrov, who brought up the Brzezinski doctrine; and of course, this fits in with the geopolitical bloc politics, the war in Afghanistan and the attempt to divide countries against each other. I’m sure this was very resonant with you, because you’ve been very critical over the years of this plan, the Clash of Civilizations, and so on. But it’s clear that Lavrov sees this quite clearly, and I think that’s why a lot of countries are moving against the so-called “Western bloc.”
ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Well, there is also a Chinese economist, whose name is Liu Zhiqun, from the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, and he pointed to the fact, which I think is really underneath all of this, that already with the COVID pandemic, 200 million are threatened with famine; but now, with the sanctions and the effect that has on wheat exports, on fertilizer, on all kinds of raw materials, that now 1 billion people are threatened with famine in the immediate future, as a result of the sanctions policy. And I think that is—I mean, that is the issue why many of the developing countries are thinking twice, because this is now becoming an existential crisis for 1 billion people. And I think that is also a question of who is committing human rights violations, and who not? The sanctions are causing a billion people to be in danger of starvation, contrast that with China having lifted 850 million out of extreme poverty—that is exactly the opposite direction. And I think that directionality of the policy is what starts to become known worldwide.
SCHLANGER: This gets to one of your initiatives, the initiative for Operation Ibn Sina, which, while it’s specifically related to Afghanistan, and the importance of addressing the deliberate imposition of famine on Afghanistan, it does spill over into the broader question of the necessity for modern healthcare systems, financial and economic aid, food aid, and so on.
ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Yes. The West has completely abandoned Afghanistan: That’s another one of these great human rights “victories” of the West, because it was their leaving Afghanistan, without a budget, without donor money, but now it is also clear that this was a big subject at the OIC foreign ministers’ meeting I just mentioned. They created an Afghan humanitarian fund. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi immediately went afterwards to Kabul. There will be a big meeting in Beijing, I think in a week or so on Afghanistan. And we are still pushing the idea of Operation Ibn Sina, the idea that you need a renaissance around a beautiful historic reference: Ibn Sina was one of the great physicians of world history, and he was a remarkable philosopher who inspired not only the Islamic world, but also all of Europe. He influenced Albertus Magnus, Nicholas of Cusa, Dante and many others. And this is still being promoted by many forces in the region, so we will pursue that.
So, the West is not looking good! I think it’s important to reflect that.
SCHLANGER: It’s also a notable irony that on the day of the 39th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s endorsement of the Strategic Defense Initiative and the announcement that that was U.S. policy of developing anti-ballistic missile systems of energy beams and new physical principles, which was largely the outline that your husband Lyndon LaRouche gave him, that on the day of that anniversary we have all this talk about nuclear war. But I think it’s also important to note that, what Lyndon LaRouche had at his conception, was not just a defensive or a weapons capability, but also one that addresses the need for bringing online new technologies for an economic renaissance.
ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Well, the SDI was the closest we got to establishing a world peace order: The media naturally characterized it, idiotically, as “Star Wars” which it had nothing to do with that. Just to remind people, at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, when we had the intermediate-range missile crisis, a lot of people were acutely aware that we were close to nuclear war. Then German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt at that point had said that, and actually blamed, especially Brzezinski for being one of the authors of that war policy, because you had the Pershing 2 and the SS-20 either a very short distance and a warning time was just a few minutes; as a result, these two systems of NATO and the Warsaw Pact were on a permanent launch-on-warning condition, which meant that the danger of an accidental launch was extremely high—as it is now. Because if one side would only see one missile on their screens, they would have no time left think about it, it would go practically into an automatic reaction pattern, which is what we are at now. The only difference is that the pace movement right now is—if it has awakened a little bit, is quite confused about what is actually going on.
But at that time, my husband, Lyndon LaRouche developed a conception which we were back channel discussions for one full year with representatives of the Soviet Union, with the agreement and encouragement of the Reagan administration, to explore the possibility of changing the system. And that would have meant the potential dissolution of NATO, dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, and then, after one year of back and forth—because it would have meant to use weapons of modern physical principles, to make nuclear weapons obsolete, and to develop an anti-ballistic missile system which would have worked and would have made the defensive less expensive than the offensive, it would have really worked.
This was what President Reagan declared on March 23rd in 1983 and he made it official policy. He made it in a five-minute TV address, and offered that to the Soviet Union. However, the Soviet Union at that time, declined with the argument that it would bring the West more advantages than for them—which was not true, because President Reagan two times offered in a public letter that the United States would help the Soviet Union to overcome their bottlenecks in infrastructure in other areas by helping them to apply the technologies of these new principles in the civilian economy, and that way get a tremendous increase in productivity.
Now, this would have functioned, because the idea was to then boost the economy of the Soviet Union, boost the economy of the West, but then use it for a gigantic technology transfer for the developing countries, by trying to overcome the underdevelopment together. It was a revolutionary plan. My husband also wrote a platform for the superpowers, in which he laid out what was the conception of such a cooperation. The first, most important principle was to overcome the underdevelopment of the developing countries, through such a cooperation. That was repeated by President Reagan after eight months in a letter to the Soviet Union, offering such a cooperation, because at that time, the Ogarkov Plan and similar policies were obviously what prevented the Soviet leadership at that time to take up this offer. And then, my husband made the forecast, and he said, if the Soviet Union remains with their then-existing policies, they would collapse in five years. And that’s exactly what happened.
And therefore, to equate now Russia with that Soviet policy is just a complete blunder! The end-phase of the Soviet Union was not a threat to the West. That was absolutely known to anybody, to Secretary of State James Baker knew that at that time in 1989; that’s why he promised NATO will not move one inch to the East.
And if the West wants to get out of this situation, there has to be a very serious review of all of these policies and one has to really go back to these ideas and say, we need a new security architecture today, which takes into account the security interests of every single country on the planet. And that is what the Schiller Institute is trying to put on the agenda right now: We have a petition. I’m urging all of you to look at it, to sign it if you agree, and we are conducting a major international conference on April 9, about this subject, which is being discussed now in many, many circles around the world. Because contrary to the Gleichschaltung, the lock-step reporting of the Western politics and media, there are a lot of people who realize we are about to crash into the wall and that we need a completely different approach and a new paradigm.
So I want you to look at this petition, and to register for the conference, and help us to organize for it, because we cannot continue on the course of confrontation, or else the danger of a terrible catastrophe could happen at any moment.
SCHLANGER: Just to reiterate the fundamental point you just made: What your husband always insisted, is that economic development is the real basis for peace. And if you look at what’s going on right now with the Belt and Road Initiative, with the Eurasian-China potential integration of economic policy, China’s role in developing Africa, what you see is that this is what is threatening the Great Reset and the economic policies laid out by the City of London, to subordinate all countries, including Russia and China, to a form of imperial or colonialist existence under a new, post-Cold War order. So I think the point of the strategic and financial architecture having to change, which you’ve emphasized about this conference, is probably the most significant change that could happen.
ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Yes. I have reminded people of the Peace of Westphalia conference, which ended 150 years of religious war, and people nowadays are so hardened and so ideologically fixated that it’s hard to imagine, but one of the principles of the Peace of Westphalia, was not only the interest of the other, but also that foreign policy from then on had to be based on agapē, on Love. Now, that—can you imagine some of these NATO generals and other such people, the idea that you could have Love as the basis of your relationship to other countries and other cultures, seems to be so completely alien; remember, Churchill saying countries don’t have friends, they only have interests. And then they pursue these interests with geopolitical means, coups, subversion, regime-change, color revolution, which is obviously the opposite of Love.
But I think that’s not the nature of human beings. That’s the nature of oligarchism, of imperialism, of colonialism, of the intent of a small elite to defend their privileges at the expense of the interest of the majority of people. But I think, we are at a historic change, a time change, but not of the type which Biden is talking about or some of these other so-called leaders. We are at a time change, where the rightful demand of all people on the planet to have a happy life, a happiness in the sense of Leibniz, in the same sense of a fulfilled life, I think that is the present trend in history. And therefore even if some people think it’s hopeless to expect a change, I’m absolutely certain that we will see, unless we destroy ourselves in a nuclear war, that we will see a new order based on the aspiration of all people on this planet, and that this British system of empire, is coming to an end.
SCHLANGER: We’ll post on the bottom of the description section of this video the invitation of the conference: You should register, but you should discuss it with people and you register your friends, register your coworkers and others. Because this is a moment where an outpouring of public recognition of what Helga was just saying about the necessity for change, becomes a force for change in itself. So Helga, thank you for joining us today, all things working out well, we’ll see you again next week.
ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Yes! I hope so. Be good.
