Article Search

The only possible outcome of the October 31-Nov 12 Glasgow 26 “Halloween” Climate Summit, will be the mutually- assured self-destruction of the nations of the transatlantic world, as well as others intimidated enough to be compliant with the Conference’s unattainable goals. Russia, China, India, and several other nations have already made known their intent to ignore many of the daft draft proposals. The antidote to this ghoulish outlook is contained in the book {There Are No Limits to Growth} written by Schiller Institute co-founder Lyndon LaRouche and published by the Club of Life. A panel will engages in a symposium-style discussion. Speakers include scientists and academicians Dr. Kelvin Kemm, Dr. Maria Assunção Arraújo, Prof. Jacob Goldsmith, as well as organizers Anastasia Battle, Kynan Thistlethwaite and others

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov announced today that Russian President Vladimir Putin would not be traveling to Glasgow to participate in the COP26 international climate change conference. Peskov would not even confirm that Putin would speak remotely, by videoconference connection, when asked by the press. He only offered: “The Russian side will be [represented at the conference], of course, we are in contact with the organizers, which is why we will tell how it will be [organized] later…. We should understand the format, in which it will be possible to speak at the videoconference, at which moment and so on. There are many factors here that we have to discuss with the organizers.”Reuters headlined its account: “Russia Says Putin Won’t Fly to Glasgow, in Blow for Climate Talks,” and commented ruefully: “The no-show by the leader of the world’s fourth-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases is the latest setback, with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi also uncertain to attend.” But it gets worse for the Green New Deal Malthusian gang. NPR reported (to their chagrin) that the same governments that have made “lofty commitments” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, “are still planning to extract huge amounts of energy from fossil fuels,” according to a new report from the United Nations. The report published Oct. 20 details how the largest fossil fuel producers plan to carry on using coal, gas, and oil. According to this report, it will more than double the amount of fuels in 2030. Nor do they have the U.S. in their pocket. Although President Biden is bending over backwards to “show the flag” as an “environmental warrior” at Glasgow, he is being stymied by the steadfast resistance to his attempt to abandon coal by two Democratic senators, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and now Montana’s Jon Tester, both of whom are opposing Biden’s tax on carbon dioxide and methane emissions. “I’m not a big fan of the carbon tax. I just don’t think it works the way it was explained to me,” Tester said.

“All Moral Resources of Humanity Have To Be Called Up: Mankind Must Be the Immortal Species!” Following the dismantling of the Bretton Woods system by President Richard Nixon on August 15, 1971, Lyndon LaRouche, the late statesman and economist, warned that continuing on the path of the same such monetarist policies would inevitably lead to the danger of a new depression, new fascism, and a new world war—which this time would be thermonuclear—unless a just new world economic order was constituted.Now, fifty years later, we are exactly at the point that LaRouche’s prescient forecast had warned against. The signs of the hyperinflationary blowout of the financial system are evident in the explosion of energy and food prices, and even leading officials, such as Raphael Bostic, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, have stated, as recently as October 12, that the inflation is not “temporary,” as they had once claimed. The financial oligarchy, being aware that their speculative system is finished, is trying, with one last gigantic effort, to prolong the mad casino game for yet another round, under the ruse of the “Great Reset.” The oligarchy hopes to create another last bubble by “Shifting the Trillions” into green technologies, which means turning the clock back to the development level that existed before the industrial revolution. With the level of energy flux densities mandated for a decarbonized economy, the population density would also drop precipitously to those pre-industrial levels—which is what they in fact desire. The form is different; the content is the same: It is the fascist policy of Hjalmar Schacht. It is from that deranged point of view that those (primarily Asian) countries which are rising are dubbed “rivals,” “adversaries,” and “enemies.” And that is where the danger of a new world war arises. Fortunately, the alternative of a just new world economic order is already developing. China’s BRI (Belt and Road Initiative) has become the rallying point for some 150 nations, all determined to follow the Chinese model of overcoming poverty and underdevelopment with the help of scientific and technological progress. This policy is very much in cohesion with the vision of Lyndon LaRouche and his movement, which he initiated in the 1970s, working out concrete development plans for Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the United States. These development plans have been put forward and published by the Schiller Institute beginning in 1991, first in the form of the Eurasian Land-Bridge, and then in 2014 with the report of “The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-bridge.” It is more urgent than ever to put politics back on the basis of natural science and classical culture. The basis for a new paradigm in international relations will be created, if it is based on a dialogue of the best cultural traditions of mankind. These subjects will be discussed in four panels. Panel One: Saturday, November 13, 10 a.m. EST “Can a Strategic Crisis Between the Major Powers Be Avoided?” This panel will address: • The U.S.-China conflict, AUKUS, Taiwan; • U.S.-Russia relations; • LaRouche’s “Four Powers” conception (U.S.-China-Russia-India); and • A new paradigm in international relations. Panel Two: Saturday, November 13, 2 p.m. EST “The Science of Physical Economy” This panel will address: • The motives behind the Great Reset; • Hjalmar Schacht today; • Afghanistan and Haiti as game-changers; • The global role of London’s “Dope, Inc.;” and • The need for a World Health System. Panel Three: Sunday, November 14, 10 a.m. EST “There Are No Limits to Growth in the Universe” This panel will address: • The science involved in climate change; • The revolution unleashed with a fusion based economy; and • Mankind is becoming adult: In space! Panel Four: Sunday, November 14, 2 pm EST “The Beauty of True Human Culture” This panel will address: • What is more destructive? The squid game or drugs? • Drug legalization and the New Opium War; • Why China is winning the “system competition” with the “West;” • Aesthetic education; and • Dialogue of classical cultures.

Fireside Chat with Dennis Small and Dennis Speed, host Thursday, October 14, 2021 DENNIS SPEED: Welcome to tonight’s Fireside Chat with Lyndon LaRouche, of The LaRouche Organization. We are involved, as I think people know, in a day of action today; this is worldwide. Our focus was specifically around Afghanistan and the releasing of the funds of the approximately $8-9 billion being withheld from the government of Afghanistan by primarily the Treasury Department of the United States, as well as the IMF and World Bank, and other related institutions in Europe. We have reason to believe that the State Department today has reiterated its policy to not release those funds. But we’ll hear more about that and other such matters when we get into our briefing. I’ll also just indicate that for those of you who might have been involved in that day of action today, I would ask you to get in the queue when we get to that part of the presentation to give us whatever report or reflections you have on what happened today.What we are going to do is go right to Dennis Small with a little preface from me. What’s been happening for the past week is that there’s a kind of comeuppance that reality is becoming to bonk the trans-Atlantic world with. It’s come out in various forms, for example, the Prime Minister of China made it clear that at this point, China is not intending to try to abide by the dictates—although they’re fantastic dictates—of this sort of Green New Deal mafia globally. They’re not going to try to fulfill the coal reduction requirements, CO₂ emissions reduction requirements related to coal. President Vladimir Putin is wondering whether he’s going to attend, I don’t think that means that we know the Russians are planning to not participate. But we also know that from the nation of India, which is the second-largest consumer of coal in the world, they have been clear for months that they have serious questions about the entire conception of the COP26 Glasgow, Scotland set of initiatives, if you want to call them that. Meanwhile, the royals and others are making statements which are almost Romanov-like in their detachment from reality, with Prince William talking today about how people should not be going into space, but there should be an Earth shot, not a Moon shot; trying to talk about how wonderful his father was, and how prescient he was—Prince Charles, that is; the weird and wacky Prince Charles. So, there’s a kind of comeuppance with reality. Some people in Britain noted that the British response to COVID, in which they had attempted to talk about herd immunity, was—they didn’t use the word “inhuman,” they simply said it was grossly wrong, and the talked about how the approaches coming out of China or what they called Asia and Southwest Asia were far superior to what happened out of the trans-Atlantic world. But with that said, it doesn’t mean that reality is going to prevail. You have a Malthusian outlook, and that Malthusian outlook is not merely toward other nations, it’s also something that has infected the trans-Atlantic world itself; the United States and various countries in Europe. Therefore, there’s a kind of detachment that is self-destructive and even suicidal. In order for that to be turned around, something new has to appear on the horizon. Now, that something new is something that has actually been written about by this organization and acted upon by this organization for well over 45 years. Sometimes that comes through candidacies, and I’ll note that 45 years ago, there was an election in 1976, and at that time we were running a third party—the U.S. Labor Party. We had candidates for Congress and Senate in Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Washington, Michigan, all over the country, wherever we were. We were doing that in tandem with Lyndon LaRouche. This was not a campaign for votes, this was a campaign to put forward what we called the International Development Bank. It was an idea of a complete alternative to what the institutions of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund were putting forward. And similar to the situation we see right now with Afghanistan and what is being asserted as what should be trans-Atlantic policy, that madness has to be directly opposed by a force which is vigorous, insightful, insouciant, irreverent, and happy about its role. There will be some other things we’ll reference; there was a statement that came out from the Schiller Institute which we’ll probably refer to during the course of things which exemplifies that, co-written by Guus Berkhout of the Netherlands, the initiator and cofounder of what’s called CLINTEL, or Climate Intelligence Group, and Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the founder and head of the Schiller Institute. So, there’s a lot going on. We want to get right into what that is. We’re going to begin with Dennis Small giving us a briefing, an international perspective. Then we’ll go into some reports and reflections on what has happened today. DENNIS SMALL: The topic that I want to address, because I think it goes to the heart of the explanation of the cause behind the other things happening in different areas, is the hyperinflation and depression which is now exploding around the planet. To look at its cause, and of course, its cure. I’m doing to do this by describing a couple of key situations. I’m sure you’ve all heard the reports in the press of how what really causes inflation is supply or demand effects. If the supply drops, or the demand increases, that supposedly will cause prices to increase, and so on and so forth. You can read about this in all the textbooks on economics. You can go to Harvard authors, and they’ll basically tell you that there are two kinds of inflation. There’s cost-push inflation, there’s demand-pull inflation; all of which is a bunch of poppycock. It’s simply absolutely not true. The situation we’re facing is a lot more stark than that. If you were to wake up tomorrow morning, or Monday morning of next week, and find that you could not get any money out of the ATM machine. And that when you thought that it was just a broken ATM machine on the corner, and you went to the bank, the doors of the bank were closed. And you went to another bank, and there policemen in front of it, and crowds gathering. When you went to the drugstore to buy your medicine you need for your urgent cardiac condition or high blood pressure medicine or what have you, the pharmacy is not open, or it has supplies which are being rationed out in tiny doses. Would that sort of a situation concern you? You may think that I’m exaggerating and that this is just sort of a hyperbolic situation, an exaggeration of what’s going on. But it is not, because this is exactly the barrel that we’re staring down at this moment. I think that after I finish reviewing a few situations, a half-dozen situations internationally, I think you will realize that this evaluation—which is Lyndon LaRouche’s evaluation as to the systemic nature of this crisis—is actually far more accurate than anything anyone else is saying, and that therefore it points us in the direction of a solution. If you look at 2021, and look at what’s been happening with certain prices, which are always explained away in the media as the result of supply and demand, the price of cotton has risen 47% over the course of this year. Is that because there has been a 50% increase in the demand for cotton? That many more people want shirts? Or, you have to get cotton for other purposes? The index price of fertilizers has risen to the point that it is double what it was one year ago; a 100% increase. Is that because all of a sudden nobody is producing any fertilizer, and therefore, the supply dropped and the price doubled in a year? Let’s look at the energy situation in the United States and in Europe. The cost of oil in the United States since the beginning of 2021 is 65% higher than it was. The price for Brent crude is about $83 now; the highest in years. But that’s only a 65% increase. The cost of natural gas in the United States has risen 112% this year. So, we’re talking about an increase of these basic energy inputs—oil and natural gas—of 1.5 to 2 times over the course of less than a year. Is that because OPEC stopped producing oil all of a sudden? That the 1% drop in oil production—I’m just making that number up, but it doesn’t make much difference. That that 1% drop in the supply of oil has led to a doubling of its price, a 100% increase of its price? We are told that we are rebounding so rapidly from the COVID pandemic and that production is just whizzing along in many parts of the world, and therefore, the cost of electricity has doubled? Do they really think we’re that foolish? Maybe they do. In Europe, the cost of a megawatt-hour of electricity—I’m switching units here, because these are just the sample numbers that we have, but I think you’ll get the idea. The cost of a megawatt-hour of electricity on average in Europe in December of last year was 43 euros. In March of this year, it had more than doubled to 100 euros; and as of today, October 2021, the average cost of a megawatt-hour of electricity in Europe is 389 euros. It has risen from 43 to 389 euros in less than a year; that’s a ten-fold increase. Has there been a ten-fold increase in the demand for electricity? Has there been a ten-fold collapse of the supply line of electricity? One starts to wonder, maybe this doesn’t have anything to do with supply and demand and other fairy tales. Citibank has issued a projection of where things are going to stand by the end of this year, in terms of the situation in Europe. They’re saying that the cost of millions of BTUs [British thermal units] will rise to a level of anywhere from $30-100 per million BTUs. I apologize for the switching around of units, but Citibank itself does a conversion of this. They say if $100 per 1 million BTUs is hit, that’s the equivalent of a barrel of oil costing $580 per barrel. It’s now breaking the roof at $83. This is a projection for what could be happening by the end of this year. Break it down into specific situations. Italy: the cost of people’s electricity bills is going to be increasing by as much as 900% by Christmas time, according to Italian accounts. Is that because people are going to be consuming 900% more electricity? Give me a break! In Spain, the megawatt-hour of electricity rose from 40 euros in 2020, to 200 euros now; a five-fold increase. India, which uses a large amount of coal, as Dennis was just reporting a moment ago, imports a large amount of their coal from Indonesia. The cost of a ton of coal imported from Indonesia has risen from $86 per ton in April of 2021—this year—until today it has gone from $86 per ton to $162 per ton. It has doubled in six months. Half of the coal plants in India have less than a 2-day supply of coal on hand. They may run out and stop producing electricity. In Lebanon, this is already happening. It’s lights out in Lebanon. The two major government electricity companies, which produce the majority of the electricity in the country, have been forced to shut down. The drop in electricity supplies has been so drastic that they are estimating that there is an immediate danger to the actual engineering integrity of the grid itself. This has everything to do with the IMF policies and banking policies imposed upon them. You might be beginning to get the idea that none of this is explained by all the reasons which are provided. It so happens that the cost of energy is not determined by supply and demand; not cost-push inflation or demand-pull inflation. The cost of energy is determined on the Amsterdam spot market; it’s a speculative spot market. When speculators jumped into it, and started speculating on the future price that they will be able to sell their barrel of oil, or their kilowatt of electricity, or what-have-you, then you know damn well that people are going to withhold the supply that they may have on hand, because they know that the price is going up, according to the speculative markets. So, if you have a speculative market which is fed by countless trillions and a quadrillion and some of dollars, this is going to drive the price of everything up as this speculative feeding frenzy goes ahead. Which is why you have a situation across all areas where you have these massive increases in prices. It has nothing to do with supply and demand, or rebounding from the pandemic—which isn’t happening—going on anywhere. That’s energy; one major sector. Let’s look at another major sector which affects everything everywhere else in the economy, as happens with energy. Let’s take the case of cargo; shipping things around the world. The basic unit for shipping is a container, which is known as a TEU, a 20-foot equivalent unit. The cost per TEU of shipping from the United States to China each one of these units, was about $2000 one year ago. Today, if you can find one of these things, the cost is $20,000. It’s a ten-fold increase in one year. Because there’s all of a sudden a shortage of TEUs? The cost of shipping from Chile in South America to the United States, the TEU unit to ship which was $1500 a year ago, is now $18,000; a 12-fold increase. Chips; 90% of the world’s supply of electronic chips—not potato chips, electronic chips—are produced by one company in Taiwan. There are reports in the technical media dealing with the chip industry, that there is documentation that substantially more supplies of chips are being shipped to companies than are being released in the products of those companies. More in than out. What does that tell you? People are hoarding. Why would hoarding be going on? Because there is speculation on the price of chips. An engineer colleague of ours in Mexico reported on a recent organizing phone call just like this one that we had with supporters of our movement in Mexico, he’s an expert in the field of plastics and petrochemical plastics. He was ashen-faced, reporting that the cost of PVC tubing has gone up from 28 pesos just a few months ago to 60 pesos; more than a doubling. He said the cost of aluminum is four-fold more than it was before. But it can’t be bought; there is no aluminum to be had, there is no steel to be had. The cost of shipping cargo from China to Mexico or back? Two times what it was; they can’t even import stuff from China for that reason. And, you may be interested to know that there is a spot market on cargo, just as there is on energy. It’s not a question of going to the corner or going to the 7-11 and saying I need 6000 TEUs. No, it’s bid on, on a speculative market, and there are three major shipping companies around the world that have the corner on this market. And it works exactly the way all raw materials markets work, which is not supply and demand, it’s a speculative spot market, a forward market. So, let’s say you have in your possession, or you have bid to have delivery in your possession 10,000 TEUs. There’s no way in the world you’re going to rent those out at a mere $20,000 today, when you have every reason to believe that three months down the line you can make a killing at $30,000. So, you’re going to withhold that from the market. So, you have an in-built speculative process going on here. This isn’t the cause of the crisis, because what’s happening is not price inflation. What I just described to you isn’t what’s going on. What’s going on is that there is a massive shock devaluation of the value and the worth of the U.S. dollar. That’s why, the dollar being the unit of measure internationally other than the places that have been driven out of it like China, or increasingly Russia or other countries—Iran and so forth. But with the dollar being the international reserve currency, when the dollar no longer can buy what it did before, this takes the form of drastic increases in prices—a two-fold increase, a four-fold increase, a ten-fold increase. What’s happening is, the dollar is being turned into the used toilet paper it has, in fact, been increasingly for the past 30-40 years; exactly as Lyndon LaRouche described. That’s why it’s very possible we will all wake up one morning, very possibly during the fourth quarter of this year, and find that you can’t buy anything for love or money; especially not money. Love might work, but the dollar is not going to be worth anything. You cannot find anything to buy. You will get runs on banks; you will get runs on ATMs. Paper money will disappear. It will go up in smoke. The $1.8 quadrillion in speculative assets will go up in smoke in the form of the equivalent of a financial nuclear chain reaction. A nuclear chain reaction does not go like dominoes falling down, one knocking the next, knocking the next, and so on. That’s not how it works. One blows out two; two blows out four; four blows out sixteen; etc., etc. It’s a chain reaction, and that’s what we are seeing signs of going on in the world today. The cause of this is not the speculation per se; the cause of this is systemic. The cause of this is explained by Lyndon LaRouche’s Triple Curve function, which I’m going to—of necessity—assume most of you are familiar with, since we don’t have a screen to show it on, or for you to look at. If you don’t know what is, look it up: LaRouche’s Triple Curve, or his typical collapse function, which describes the process of what happens in an economy as an inter-linked single function which includes on the one hand, monetary and financial aggregates and their rate of growth, which are increasing hyperbolically as we’ve seen. As against a physical economic process of the actual physical economic requirements of a society which is plunging. LaRouche repeatedly explained that the Triple Curve—he didn’t call it the Three Curves—it is a single function. It is a single, inter-related function which is not arithmetic, it’s not geometric, it’s not hyperbolic, because the physical economic process is a non-linear process either of growth—where you have technological leaps; where you have discontinuities because of advances in technology. Or, in the alternative, in a collapse it is also non-linear. That’s why, when you see a collapse beginning, like we’re seeing today, this is not a gradual slide. It happens by a ratchet-type plunge. And people look around and say, “Where the Hell did this come from?” The answer is, "If you’d been listening to Lyndon LaRouche, you wouldn’t be asking that question, because he warned of exactly this process that we’re now seeing and is underway. It is the systemic collapse that’s going on. On top of that, you have two other processes that are directly related to the systemic collapse and are pushing it in the direction of a complete collapse. But it’s because we have this systemic breakdown going on that these things have the effect they do. One is the Green Reset policy, which is inducing a situation of forced cutbacks in energy and industry, and everything that’s required to keep a society going. So, this is exacerbating the physical economic collapse at an accelerating rate. The other related process is the one of speculation which we were just describing, where you’ve got $1.7 or $1.8 quadrillion chasing around the world speculating. Therefore, it’s having the kind of effect that we’re seeing here today. Mark Carney, who is in favor of the Green Reset, has stated very clearly yet again earlier this week that the policy is straightforward. We have to change what he calls “the plumbing” of the international finance system to make sure that the plumbing takes the funds and the resources into a Green speculative bubble of $150 trillion—those are his numbers. And that makes sure as well, that plumbing does, that nothing goes to actual productive activity. That’s the policy, and the Federal Reserve is in the process of making a major policy shift as well, adapting to this hyperinflationary blow-out going on with a depression collapse. There’s no way they can adjust anything that’s going to actually function in any event. I want to conclude by reading a paragraph or two from Lyndon LaRouche from remarks he made on October 22, 2001. This is 20 years ago. I meant it when I said that people wouldn’t be asking silly questions if they’d been listening to LaRouche for the last 20 years. Almost exactly 20 years ago, LaRouche said the following: “The reason that I’ve been so successful in forecasting, is because I think systemically. Therefore, I understand how a systemic collapse unfolds, as opposed to a stock market prediction, which is what every idiot likes to talk about. I make forecasts, not predictions. Forecasts which are based on the systemic characteristics and the boundary conditions within which the system operates. That’s why I have always been right, and every one of my critics, whether inside the organization or outside—has always been wrong.” Then he turns to explain very succinctly 20 years ago, what’s going on: “So, you have a situation globally in the United States and outside, in which the total amount of debt service being extracted from the economies is increasing cancerously, and the debt service payment requirement accordingly. This is collapsing the actual productive power of nations and their populations precisely at the time that the amount of debt to be paid is increasing. So, there’s no possible way that the present international monetary financial system could be continued without collapsing civilization into a generalized and prolonged New Dark Age, out of which most nations will disappear and the human population will drop rapidly during the course of this century to below 1 billion. And the first drop-down will tend to be a big one. “So therefore, we’re in a situation in which anybody who doesn’t support my proposals on bankruptcy reorganization of the international monetary and financial system, does not support the measures which I’ve proposed for this purpose, has to be an idiot.” The good news, of course, is that the solutions are at hand, once this causal systemic process is recognized. Lyndon LaRouche’s solutions, which we can discuss in the period that follows, are readily available and can be implemented. In fact, the Russians, the Chinese, and others are already on board. We are in a situation where—well, I was going to say, “We can turn on a dime.” We’re not going to be able to turn on a dime; we’ll have to turn on a dollar, because of the deflation of the dollar’s value. But the change can be made, and it can be made quickly. And that’s precisely what we’re intent on bringing about.

As its Sunday newsletter said, throughout this week The LaRouche Organization was out in force. It had activists in front of the UN building in New York City, the Treasury buildings in Washington, D.C., and the Federal Reserve building in Houston, Texas. They were wielding a Schiller Institute leaflet titled “UN ‘World Food Systems Summit’—Is Global Depopulation What’s Really on the Agenda?”Schiller Institute founder, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, has been urging that the withdrawal of NATO troops from Afghanistan, burying a decades-long British geopolitical policy of regime-change wars, creates a turning point in history and a tremendous opportunity. It can become merely a step in NATO turning to total confrontation with China and Russia. But Afghanistan’s urgent development needs—for which the United States, having destroyed the nation’s economy, bears responsibility—can be a lever to cause a dramatic shift in foreign policy coming from America and the West in general. Helga Zepp-LaRouche is not the only one to recognize the necessity and potential for such “unexpected” policy changes. Two former U.S. Surgeons General, Dr. Joycelyn Elders and Dr. David Satcher, endorsed Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche’s initiative on Afghanistan. She was also interviewed on Pakistan’s “PTV World” broadcast on her insistence and fight to achieve a paradigm defined by peace through development. Over the past several days, by putting forward the steps necessary to build a new economic infrastructure in Haiti and allow it to arise from its imposed poverty, the Schiller Institute has begun a discussion with and among the Haitian diaspora who want to lift up their country. As Lyndon LaRouche proposed a decade ago, his movement has again proposed now, that the United States and Haiti should make a treaty between them, and which other major economic powers may enter as well, committing not just to promise help, but to achieve economic development and security over a sustained period of time. So the Institute’s Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites is showing again that this terrible moment of global pandemic, famine and war can compel a shift to a new paradigm, engaging at least the United States, China, Russia, and other major powers to cooperate against those evils which are now causing human numbers to decline across the globe. Acknowledging the possibility of swiftly moving in Afghanistan to create healthcare systems and everything that goes into supporting them, is the first step to awakening a new moral character in the populations of the trans-Atlantic nations. These populations are being told that human deaths due to floods, earthquakes, poverty, or otherwise, are simply inevitable, attempting to deepen a depraved indifference. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, speaking to a conference of French colleagues and co-thinkers in the Solidarité et Progrès party in Paris, put it this way: "When it became known that Biden would go ahead with the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, I said, this is a unique chance to change the paradigm: If we get the neighbors of Afghanistan, the Central Asian republics, Pakistan, Iraq, Russia, China, and India, all to agree to develop and really reconstruct the economy of Afghanistan, and then get some European nations and the United States to all collaborate in the reconstruction of Afghanistan—which is the moral obligation of those forces which conducted the war for 20 years—then, in the very small, we can start the beginning of a new paradigm of international cooperation. And that can become the first step in overcoming the geopolitical confrontation between the United States, the British, the EU, and Russia and China, which otherwise will lead to World War III. “What is needed is a change in thinking. The neighbors, those neighboring countries which I just mentioned, they all are already thinking in this way…. So, now, the big task for us in Europe, and in the United States, is we have to find support from these nations in the West to participate.”

By Helga Zepp-LaRouchePDF of this statement The catastrophic failure of NATO in Afghanistan, and with it the policy of 20 years of wars of intervention, couldn’t be more dramatic. It is not only that the war was lost; it is paradigmatic for the whole spectrum of misconceptions of the Western liberal system. It is therefore to be welcomed when President Biden announces that the withdrawal from Afghanistan marks the end of the entire era of the use of American military power with the aim of “remaking” other countries. But if this reorientation only means that we will no longer busy ourselves out in the boondocks with the “endless wars,” but instead will concentrate all forces on the “new challenges”—namely the confrontation with Russia and China—then the lesson from this shameful disaster has not been learned and we are embarking on an even worse catastrophe. But the wound is still fresh, the shock of defeat has shaken the whole Western world and the chance exists for a completely new approach.A Brown University project to ascertain the costs of U.S. wars since September 11th, for which we are about to mark the 20th anniversary, has calculated that the total costs for the military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, etc. are $8 trillion and at least a million people have lost their lives. This breaks down to $2.3 trillion for the Afghanistan war, $2.1 trillion for the Iraq/Syria war zone, $355 billion for military operations in Libya, Somalia, etc., $1.1 trillion for Homeland Security programs, and $2.2 trillion for the upcoming care of U.S. veterans who were deployed in these wars, a large number of whom suffer from secondary physical and mental illnesses. At least 15,000 U.S. military personnel and roughly the same number of international NATO troops were killed. Around 70 million people are refugees from these wars. Hundreds of thousands of troops were deployed, an unknown number of civilians perished, and the majority of the troops were essentially occupied with protecting themselves in a hostile environment. They had just as little idea of those people and their culture at the beginning of the 20 years, as at the end of it, as was known to the public no later than with the publication of the Afghanistan Papers in 2019. The humanitarian situation in Afghanistan is appalling. World Food Program Director David Beasley, who visited Afghanistan last week in August, announced that 18 million Afghans are starving—more than half the population—and 4 million are at risk of starvation next winter without massive help. The WHO fears a medical disaster in view of the scarcely existing health system in the midst of the COVID pandemic, and only around 1 million people are vaccinated so far. Can the people of Western countries have any idea what kind of suffering the Afghan population has had to go through in the past 40 years of war, and must still endure at this point in time? In view of this almost unimaginable tragedy, it is downright absurd and deliberately misleading that in the context of the “endless wars” one still speaks of “nation-building.” What was built in Afghanistan when half the population is starving? If the U.S.A. and other NATO members had invested only 5% of their military spending in the real economic development of Afghanistan, this horrific debacle would never have occurred. Modern Health System and Agriculture So far it has not been apparent that there is any real rethinking in the United States or Europe. Because this would not mean merely that one is willing to “talk to the Taliban,” but that one is correcting the entire premise of the policies of the last 20 years. If Biden is serious about ending the entire era of the wars of intervention, then U.S. troops must finally comply with the vote of the Iraqi Parliament, which demanded their withdrawal in January 2020. Then the murderous Caesar Act sanctions of the U.S.A. against Syria must be ended immediately, which to this day contribute to holding over 90% of the population to a standard of living below the poverty line. Beyond that, especially during a pandemic, we must end the policy of sanctions against all countries; they have no UN mandate, and they only strike at the poorest sections of the population and often kill them. What the U.S.A. and the European nations have to do now, if they ever want to regain credibility with respect to “values” and “human rights,” is to offer real help to the Afghan government that is being formed, e.g. by building a modern health system. One of the things that is urgently needed now is a whole system of modern hospitals, in connection with a system for the training of doctors, medical professionals and a training program for young people who can help the population in all rural areas to familiarize themselves with the hygiene measures required in a pandemic. With the help of partnerships, such a system could be linked to medical centers in the United States and Europe, as is already in place with other countries in the developing sector. In view of the famine, in addition to the airlift that David Beasley of the WFP is setting up from Pakistan, which can bring food into Afghanistan, a comprehensive offer of agricultural support is needed urgently. If we are to stop the farmers from falling back to the cultivation of poppy plants for the production of opium out of sheer necessity, then the development of agriculture, integrated into the general economic structure, must be supported. With the agreement concluded with the Taliban in 2000, the former UN drug commissioner Pino Arlacchi demonstrated that the abolition of drug cultivation is possible and that the religious convictions of the Taliban can be met. Provided that the sovereignty of Afghanistan and the new government is absolutely respected, and it is guaranteed that such aid in building up agriculture is not mixed with a political agenda, various pilot projects based on the model of Jawaharlal Nehru’s green revolution could be started with the regions that are ready to do so. There are committed young and older farmers in the United States and Europe who would be willing to participate in such a peace mission to improve agricultural production in Afghanistan in such a way that the famine can be permanently eradicated. In view of the repeated droughts, such programs would of course have to go hand in hand with irrigation programs and general water management. An Aid Coordinator Who Is Trusted It must first and foremost be about helping the Afghan people in a gigantic emergency that they did not cause themselves, and this is only possible if a basis of trust is established with the new government, regardless of all ideological reservations. The Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites therefore proposes that the U.S. and European governments choose the person to coordinate such an aid program, who has shown in the past that such a policy can work: namely, Pino Arlacchi. It would guarantee that Afghanistan’s sovereignty would be respected and that no attempt would be made to impose Western standards, since he has already won the Taliban’s trust in the past. Such a redefinition of policy towards Afghanistan naturally also means completely turning away from thinking in geopolitical categories, rejecting the idea of politics as a zero-sum game in which the rise of China and Asia are automatically understood as the decline of the West. With his visit to Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, the new head of government, Abdul Ghani Baradar, signaled that his government is counting on cooperation with China and the integration of Afghanistan into the New Silk Road. The Russian Ambassador to Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, has proposed an international conference for the country’s economic development to discuss which projects must have absolute priority in order to overcome the emergency. If the West has learned anything from the millennium defeat in Afghanistan, then it must cooperate impartially with Russia, China, and neighboring countries in Central Asia, Pakistan, Iran and India in building not only Afghanistan, but all of Southwest Asia. The slogan “to end the endless wars,” which got Tony Blair so excited, is not imbecilic—what is imbecilic is the policy of colonial wars of intervention he proposed. This was not only moronic, but criminal and murderous, and has destroyed the lives of millions of people or plunged them into unspeakable suffering. The architects of this policy should be held accountable. But if the cycle of violence and revenge is to be overcome, then a new policy must be on the agenda: The new name for peace is development, as Pope Paul VI once said. Afghanistan is the one place where the United States and China can begin a form of cooperation that can be a baby step toward strategic cooperation putting humanity’s common goals in the foreground. Ultimately, its realization indicates the only way that the end of mankind in a nuclear Armageddon can be prevented. In any case, German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer does not seem to have learned anything from the “severe defeat,” if all she can think of is the demand for “more military independence for the EU.” The “lack of skills” of which she speaks does not only refer to the failure of European resistance to the U.S.-driven withdrawal from Afghanistan. If the self-induced decline of the West is to end, we need an honest analysis of why the neo-colonial liberal social model has failed, and above all we need a renaissance of our humanistic and classical culture. Our attitude towards the construction in Afghanistan is the test case of whether we are able to do so.

The final flights bringing foreigners and Afghan refugees out of Kabul are now in process, with President Biden sticking to the Aug. 31 deadline. A second U.S. drone attack today, in Kabul, claimed to take out a car with several intended suicide bombers inside who were heading to the airport. The profound issue facing the world today is whether or not the U.S. will join with China, Russia and the countries in the region to begin an economic development process for this war-torn nation, to become the prosperous crossroad of Eastern and Western civilizations, or to become again an impoverished center of terrorism and drug production. If the former, such a transformation would serve as a model for the development of the other nations destroyed by the Anglo-American regime change wars over the past 20 years, establishing the notion of “peace through development” as the necessary new paradigm to replace the failed geopolitics of British imperialism.In Iraq today, the government held a ten-nation conference entitled “Conference for Cooperation and Partnership,” including France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Qatar, Turkey, Kuwait, U.A.E. and Jordan. Like Libya and Syria, Iraq’s industrial infrastructure was utterly destroyed by the insane and illegal regime change war, falsely justified through lies by Tony Blair and the Bush-Cheney administration. While China has offered to bring the Belt and Road process into Iraq through an oil-for-infrastructure plan, this has been repeatedly sabotaged by foreign interests and manipulated intrigue within Iraq, just as the reconstruction of Syria has been prevented by the vile U.S. “Caesar Sanctions,” punishing any country which offers to invest in Syrian reconstruction. These imperial sanctions policies must be ended if the current descent into a new Dark Age is to be reversed. The Schiller Institute has provided the framework for the world to come together behind Afghan development in a series of conferences and publications (see “Afghanistan—A Turning Point in History After the Failed Regime-Change Era” and “Will Afghanistan Trigger a Paradigm Change?”). This approach—to end the geopolitical division of the world into warring tribes, and to address the common aims of mankind—is not just a good idea, or a naive dream. The choice of peace through development, which has driven every renaissance throughout history, is the only option to end the current global crises—the out-of-control pandemic; the exploding financial bubble; the threat of thermonuclear war; and the cultural decay dragging the Western nations into a drug-infested perversity reminiscent of the last days of the Roman Empire. The upcoming 20th anniversary of 9/11 will be the occasion of a Schiller Institute conference celebrating the cultural and intellectual ideas required to defeat this evil, and to bring about, at this moment of profound phase-change in human history, the necessary creative direction required of our citizens, and citizens around the world (details of the conference will be available soon). Anticipating that event, the Schiller Institute has announced the publication of the first issue of a new quarterly magazine of art, science and statecraft, Leonore. The announcement of the new publication asks: “What would a world look like if every young person could fully exercise their creativity?” Leonore will be sent automatically to every sustaining member of the Schiller Institute. Click here to become a sustaining member.

When President Joe Biden made it clear in his afternoon statements to the press following his virtual meeting with the G7 nations, that he was sticking to his August 31 Afghanistan pullout deadline, a somber pall appeared over 10 Downing Street, Porton Down, and Gee Street in Clerkenwell, home of the Tavistock Institute. The dismayed Nigel Kim Darroch, Baron Darroch of Kew, said," It is going to take quite a long time for the West as a whole—because it is a Western failure, a Western disaster, this is not just the UK and the US—to recover from all this, to recover our reputation." He of “flooding the Trump zone” fame had to reckon with the hard truth that the multiple attempts to stop Biden from carrying out the promised Afghanistan withdrawal had not worked, and that the public relations stunt known as “Global Britain” had just been revealed to be “Windsor castles made of sand.”Retired Admiral Mike Mullen, former Joint Chiefs of Staff head from October 2007 till September 2011—that is, under both Bush 43 and “Bush 44,” Barack Obama—confessed that he, Obama, and that entire administration had been wrong, and Joe Biden had been right, about whether or not to “surge” in Afghanistan with 40,000 troops in 2009. Biden had opposed the surge, suggesting 10,000 troops who would fight terrorism at the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, and otherwise train the Afghan military. Biden “had it right back then…I give him credit for that,” Mullen said. He is the first to exercise the conceptual option of what Ray McGovern has called “metanoia.” When Metanoia (“Beyond-Thought”) was personified, it was often as a goddess, cloaked and sorrowful, who inspired both regret and reflection, leading to repudiation of wrong judgements. Those who have been afflicted by chronic misjudgment of current history for the past several years due to “the pestilence of partisanship,” particularly after Lyndon LaRouche’s September 2012 observations on the post-Cheney/Obama “Bush 43/44” death of the political party system in America, are baffled by the present moment. Caitlin Johnstone, in an August 22 article entitled “Bush-Era War Criminals Are Louder Than Ever Because They’ve Lost the Argument,” observed: "After the US troop withdrawal established conclusively that the Afghan ‘government’ they’d spent twenty years pretending to nation-build with, was essentially a work of fiction, thus proving to the world that they’ve been lying to us this entire time about the facts on the ground in Afghanistan, you might expect those who helped pave the way for that disastrous occupation to be very quiet at this point in history. But, far from being silent and slithering under a rock to wait for the sweet embrace of death, these creatures have instead been loudly and shamelessly outspoken. “The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change has posted a lengthy essay by the former Prime Minister. who led the United Kingdom into two of the most unconscionable military interventions in living memory. Blair criticizes the withdrawal as having been done out of ”obedience to an imbecilic political slogan about ending ‘the forever wars’." Blair has long believed and practiced through Responsibility To Protect the idea that Global Britain must be vigorously defended down to the last American. But those that refuse to understand the British “Babylonian priesthood special relationship” to the United States, “can’t touch this,” and remained intentionally unenlightened. A statement written by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization on the situation said: “The SCO member states reaffirm their intention to assist Afghanistan in becoming a peaceful, stable and prosperous country, free from terrorism, war or drugs, and are ready to join international efforts to stabilise and develop Afghanistan with the central coordinating role of the UN.” Afghanistan joining the Belt and Road Initiative is the pathway forward, and the United States, using the very real need for a world health platform, can turn its attention to joining these nations while simultaneously retooling and re-employing its own nation for that battle. Over two-thirds of the American people want the war to end. The Presidency has moved to honor that desire, and to complete that policy in Afghanistan. As for the evacuation’s chaos: has anyone considered that the fact that factions in the United States turned down the offer to coordinate efforts in Afghanistan, including evacuation efforts, with the Russians, and possibly others, contributed to the instability? Or that an announced and implemented anti-Covid-19 world health initiative, begun months ago, along the lines of what Helga Zepp-LaRouche had proposed in conference after conference since June 2020, would have also helped to “pre-stabilize” the conditions of withdrawal in Afghanistan prior to evacuation? Even now, and for a small percentage of the $2 trillion known to have been spent in the war in the past 20 years, the United States could help win the peace in Afghanistan, through a world health platform construction program involving all the nations of the area. Lyndon LaRouche said, in a 1991 interview given in prison: “Whether I remain in prison or not is essentially at the pleasure of the President, or the Presidency. The legal grounds for removing me from prison, by removing the sentence, by removing the conviction, exist…. The evidence exists. As to whether that evidence and that procedure will be acted upon, will be up to the political pressures acting upon the Presidency. I am here because the President wishes me here, and for no other reason. If the President were to change, then I probably would—the law would be allowed to release me from prison.” LaRouche, who campaigned as a Presidential candidate more than any other individual, realized that the institutional powers of the United States Presidency were of a different nature than the compromised capabilities of a prime minister. When the power of the Presidency of the United States is deployed for the good, it is immense, the greatest in the world. Biden’s completion of the withdrawal that Trump started, despite British-inspired Pentagon and State Department pressures to do the opposite, is, if completed, an example of that.

The British press is in a complete state of hysteria, as evidenced by the headlines reported in the BBC’s own blog. “Blair Attacks Biden’s ‘Imbecilic’ Retreat as Kabul Chaos Ceepens,” blares the Sunday Times. The Telegraph notes Blair’s attack on Biden, adding the subhead: “America shuts Kabul airport as Raab forced to turn to China and Russia for help in Afghanistan.” And on and on.Blair, a member of the Queen’s Privy Council, rounded on Biden (as the Sunday Times puts it). “We didn’t need to do it,” he wrote yesterday. “We chose to do it. We did it in obedience to an imbecilic political slogan about ending ‘the forever wars’.” Biden used the term when he announced the withdrawal. Blair said: “For Britain, out of Europe and suffering the end of the Afghanistan mission by our greatest ally with little or no consultation … we are at risk of relegation to the second division of global powers.” The Sunday Times reports that “Ministers have warned that Britain will have to tear up its foreign policy after the debacle in Afghanistan, amid flaring tempers about America’s decision to cut and run.” The paper cites an unnamed minister who denounced American “isolationism” and said that the government would have to “revisit” the recent review on defense and foreign policy because the United States was no longer a reliable ally. “America has just signaled to the world that they are not that keen on playing a global role,” the minister said. “The implications of that are absolutely huge. We need to get the integrated [policy] review out and reread it. We are going to have to do a hard-nosed revisit on all our assumptions and policies.” Then the imperial “old sow” was let loose: “The U.S. had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the First World War. They turned up late for the Second World War and now they are cutting and running in Afghanistan,” was this minister’s conclusion. The tensions have reportedly extended to the troops on the ground in Kabul. Military sources have also told MPs that as tensions rose last week, there were clashes with the U.S. on the ground and “heated words” between British and U.S. commanders at Kabul airport, including one “stand-up” row.

Can the current eviction crisis in the United States can be addressed in a manner similar to what Lyndon LaRouche proposed in 2007 to address the upcoming housing and banking crisis engulfing the nation at that time? In February 2009, the LaRouche movement circulated the following updated version of Lyndon LaRouche’s proposed Homeowners and Bank Protection Act of 2007, as a draft resolution for state and local governments:Whereas, the failure the leadership of the United States Congress to pass the Homeowners and Bank Protection Act of 2007 proposed by Lyndon LaRouche in his July 25, 2007 webcast, has transformed a dire situation from one that could have remained manageable through the Autumn of 2007, into a breakdown crisis of not only the U.S. economy, but of the world economy; Whereas, the Congressional leadership instead chose a course of insulting treatment of state and local legislative and associated bodies within the states, who clamored for the Congress to enact the HBPA, as shown in the HBPA’s passage by five state legislatures, and more than 90 city councils across the United States, in addition to hundreds of endorsements by trade union and other constituency leaders individually; Whereas, the repeated attempts approved by Congress to bail out financial institutions with cumulative trillions of taxpayers’ and Federal Reserve money, have utterly failed; Whereas, forcing the leadership of the U.S. Congress into more responsible behavior on the HBPA now, is perhaps the only chance to begin to move things in a direction which could lead to saving the United States of America itself from the deepest physical depression in its history; Therefore, be it resolved, that the City/State of ______________________ hereby endorses the Homeowners and Bank Protection Act of 2007, as initiated by economist Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. This Act includes the following provisions: Congress must establish a Federal agency to place the Federal and state chartered banks under protection, freezing all existing home mortgages for a period of however many months or years are required to adjust the values to fair prices, and restructure existing mortgages at appropriate interest rates. Further, this action would also write off all of the speculative debt obligations of mortgage-backed securities, derivatives, and other forms of Ponzi schemes that have plunged the banking system into bankruptcy. During the transitional period, all foreclosures shall be frozen, allowing American families to retain their homes. Monthly payments, the equivalent of rental payments, shall be made to designated banks, which can use the funds as collateral for normal banking practices, thus recapitalizing the banking systems. These affordable monthly payments will be factored into new mortgages, reflecting the deflating of the housing bubble and the establishment of appropriate property valuations, and reduced fixed mortgage interest rates. This shakeout will take several years to achieve. In the interim period no homeowner shall be evicted from his or her property, and the Federal and state chartered banks shall be protected, so they can resume their traditional functions, serving local communities, and facilitating credit for investment in productive industries, agriculture, infrastructure, etc. State governors shall assume the administrative responsibilities for implementing the program, including the rental assessments to designated banks, with the Federal government providing the necessary credits and guarantees to assure the successful transition. And therefore, Be it Further Resolved, that a copy of this resolution shall be forwarded to members of Congress from the state, and also be delivered to the President of the United States, for immediate implementation.

In the course of her briefing to the European organization yesterday, Helga Zepp-LaRouche called for the creation of a trans-national task force for scientific truth, tasked with deploying the “united front” of forces that were assembled in embryo at the Saturday “There Is No Climate Emergency” Schiller Institute conference. The first sobering scientific truth is that there is no reason for the 300 million-plus people on the planet now in danger of starvation to go hungry. There is no reason for anyone on the planet not to have electricity, now, with the technologies available. There is no reason that anyone has to walk three hours or more to retrieve sometimes-contaminated water, when fresh water can be made readily available. That truth was established by the conference speakers—farm leaders, scientists, retired military officers, nuclear engineers, and Schiller Institute representatives.“We have to only solve one problem, and that is to make sure that this very powerful message gets out in a much stronger way than we have been doing so far,” Zepp-Larouche said. I think the worst thing we could do is to sit on our hands and be happy that this event took place, and not make sure that we do the utmost to really get it to all scientific organizations, to all people concerned with nuclear, with blackouts, with energy in general, related issues. So I really want to put this out as a task, that we make a list, many lists of all organizations that should know about that, and start building up our outreach in a much more systematic way, than we have been doing… And the argument that we don’t have the manpower, I think, is not a good argument. Because if that is the argument prevailing, then our efforts will be noble and good, but not sufficient. And I think we really have to start making this outreach question a really central idea, because otherwise we would not have the impact which we could have. “So given the fact that this will be a major issue probably escalating between now and the COP-26 (Glasgow) conference, I think we have to have the aim to derail this story, that there is a consensus among the scientists about the causes of climate change….. So, maybe we can think about a supra- or trans-national task force where we start to really work together to make sure our impact on the scientific organizations, and I mean that in the generic form, that that becomes much, much bigger….” There are notable statements on the theme of the true human identity of all mankind being located in our capacity for fundamental scientific and technological breakthroughs, which you will find reported in the items reported below. Those statements, interestingly, are from thinkers and patriots from Russia, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Uzbekistan, Argentina—but generally not from the United States, France, Germany, or the trans-Atlantic world. With the exception of the forces associated in one way or the other with Lyndon LaRouche, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, or the initiatives of the Schiller Institute and affiliate organizations, almost all policy pronouncements presently being made, deny an essential premise—that the problems facing, not only humanity, but life and non-life as well, are susceptible to resolution through the power of creative reason. This method of creative reason, as expressed and contained in the “negative ontology” and “negative theology” of Nicholas of Cusa, is the subject of the dialogues being carried out in the organizing process that began last Saturday, that culminates in the August 14 LaRouche Legacy retrospective on LaRouche’s successful forecasting method, and is escalating with this week’s discussion of “A True Proposal For Peace Through Development, for Afghanistan and the Globe.” LaRouche’s documents such as 1984’s “The Present Scientific Implications of Vedic Calendars from the Standpoint of Kepler and Circles of Gauss,” and the later January 1985 “The Implications of Tilak’s Theses for the Scientific Potential of India Today,” as well as “The Science of the Human Mind,” may be suddenly very much appreciated, for example, by persons in Bolivia who speak about “Millenarian people armed with advanced technology” as being unstoppable, or like the foreign minister of Paraguay, Euclides Acevedo, who, at the occasion on July 24 of the founding of the Latin American Space Agency, said: “We may not yet have satellites to place in orbit, but we are beginning to place in orbit those enemies of success, those apostles of failure, the mediocre and the resentful.” When the President of Uzbekistan invokes, as he did on July 16, the identity of South and Central Asia as composed, not of ethnicities or language groups, but of an intense dialogue of civilizations among scholars like Ibn Sina, Al-Farabi, Al-Kwarizmi and others, this shows the way out of geopolitics. The fact is, that LaRouche and his associates are not only familiar with the terms of such a dialogue, but hold the key to a creative restatement, including through the conducting of public “Socratic” dialogues in the streets, of the principle of the power of Ideas, that is at the core of the Platonic method, This was embodied in 2005’s “The Principle of Power” collaboration among LaRouche and scores of his youth colleagues, as directed by the LaRouche Science team, “The Basement.”That earlier scientific dialogue in Europe, from 1439 until 1517/25, resulting in new discoveries and inventions, and the machine tool designs for their multiple and even mass replication, created the most rapid expansion of potential population growth in history, and greatest real wealth. Yes, the pandemic spread of the coronavirus and its multiple variants, along with the possibility of new fungal and other mutations, demonstrates the accuracy of LaRouche’s 1973-74 warning about “a biological holocaust on the horizon,” were his policies not adopted. Nonetheless, the adoption by President Ronald Reagan of LaRouche’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) policy in March,1983 demonstrated that the United States Presidency can be moved to greatness, just as Martin Luther King had successfully moved that Presidency in the Spring and early Summer of 1963. In a world where the Belt and Road Initiative does nothing if not remind America of its once-productive identity, the Zepp-LaRouche proposal for Afghanistan collaboration among Russia, China, Pakistan/India, and the United States, and others, is a bold attempt to replicate, albeit in secular form, what Cusa sought to do at the Council of Florence in 1439. While such policy formulation as LaRouche accomplished in 1983 is a scientific matter of the highest order, it is of the very specific nature that LaRouche described in the remarks that began the Saturday conference, which can be viewed, and which are only partially excerpted here: "What is the Good, as if it were known only by one person, in defiance of the contrary opinion of every other living person? And how could that Goodness be proven? That is the question which preoccupied Socrates: What is the Good? Man is properly motivated by nothing but the love of the Good! That love of the Good, and its efficient self-service, is the essence of efficient self-interest… “What is the Good? How can we observe the Good, empirically? Well, first we look at the difference between ourselves and the beasts. And then we have to study economics; not the kind that is preached in Washington, or in the universities today, or by the so-called economics profession, but physical economy—real economy. The power of a species, or of an individual, to produce the material and cultural conditions necessary for the existence of that species.” It is the conveying of that underlying idea of the Good, in the course of happily wrecking such ideological evils the scientific climate-consensus lie, and proposing a policy of peace through development for Afghanistan, which is the self-chosen task of the proposed trans-national task force for the advancement of scientific truth.

U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan announced on June 20 that Washington was preparing another package of anti-Russian sanctions over Alexey Navalny and against Russian companies participating in the construction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia underneath the Baltic Sea to Europe.Sullivan’s announcement happened on the same day as Russian Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov arrived to resume his post in Washington, after having been recalled for consultations to Moscow on March 20. Sullivan’s remarks drew a sharp response from the ambassador. “This is not a signal we all expected after the summit,” Antonov stressed. “I don’t think it is possible to stabilize and normalize relations between countries by means of sanctions. The current task is to normalize dialogue. First of all, we need to restore wrecked dialogue mechanisms. It is sad that our American colleagues are opting for a path that will not lead us to a positive result our presidents were oriented to.” Antonov continued: “The task is to simply work and implement the positive words that were pronounced by the presidents. Russian diplomats, who are working here, are ready to improve Russian-U.S. relations.” A few hours earlier, he took a commercial Aeroflot flight to New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport, where he was met by Russian diplomats. On arriving in Washington, Antonov said, “Back in Geneva, unlike many of my colleagues, I was very particular about the summit results. I said that I trust deeds more than words. I said let us wait and see what our American colleagues are going to do,” he told journalists upon arrival from Russia. When it comes to plans to impose more sanctions, “What you said—I feel I have seen something of the kind, that we have been through this.” Antonov also said he hoped to meet with his American counterparts in the coming days to determine where things stand. “Let me meet with the American colleagues,” he told journalists. “Everything will be clear in some ten days. So far, it is too early. We do have very serious problems. We are ready for a constructive dialogue, ready to try to resolve all the problems,” TASS quoted him as saying. Interestingly, President Biden and President Putin held a phone discussion on April 13, at which they discussed the need for a face-to-face summit between them. Then, on April 15, President Biden signed an Executive Order with a truckload of sanctions, including expelling 10 Russian diplomats, and sanctioning 32 individuals and companies for alleged interference in the 2020 election, and on and on. After years of not responding to illegal U.S. sanctions, Russia responded. Antonov had already been recalled to Moscow a month earlier. On April 16, the Foreign Ministry announced expulsions of U.S. diplomats on a one-to-one basis for every Russian diplomat expelled. Ending the activities of State Department-controlled NGOs in Russia. And U.S. Ambassador to Moscow John Sullivan was summoned to the Foreign Ministry for what was previewed as a “difficult discussion.” It was shortly afterward revealed that Sullivan was invited to return to Washington for consultations, indefinitely.

The Group of Seven nations plans to launch a green alternative to China’s Belt and Road initiative when the leaders meet at their annual summit, according to two people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg reports. The G7 summit will take place under British chairmanship in Cornwall June 11-13.“The strategy, expected to be called the ‘Clean Green Initiative,’ would provide a framework to support sustainable development and the green transition in developing countries, the people said. The initiative will also be on the summit agenda for the leaders.” However, it is not clear whether the G7 will decide to put some money behind the initiative, as the initial purpose was “a pledge toward creating a strategic framework.” G7 member countries also quarrel on where to focus: the U.S. wants to focus on Central and South America, whereas France, Germany and Italy want to focus on Africa, and Japan on Asia. They apparently believe that developing nations are so stupid as to accept CO₂ tradeoffs instead of development. In a related development, UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance Mark Carney is struggling to get his Global CO₂ Trading scheme ready by the end of this year. The group set up by Carney, the Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets, is divided on major issues that have to do with the price of CO₂: Whereas some members are pushing for a global regulating agency, Carney wants prices to be determined by “the markets,” which means they can be manipulated at will. Carney insists with the target of a $100 billion market by the end of the decade—a difficult target to achieve from the supply side.

China Plus World Today Interview with Helga Zepp-LaRouche (China Plus is the official English website of China Radio International.) Monday, May 31, 2021 WORLD TODAY: You’re listening to World Today. Denmark’s secret service helped the U.S. to spy on European politicians, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel from 2012-2014, Danish media report. According to a report by Denmark’s radio, the Defense Intelligence Service collaborated with the U.S. National Security Agency to gather information, and intelligence was collected on other officials from Germany, France, Sweden and Norway. Similar allegations emerged in 2013. Then secrets leaked by U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden alleged tapping of the German Chancellor’s phone by the NSA. For more, we’re now joined on the line by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institute, a Germany-based political and economic think tank. Thanks for joining us, Dr. LaRouche. HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Yes, hello.WORLD TODAY: Could you first tell us more about what the Danish media have found? ZEPP-LAROUCHE: It’s really a funny story, because all of this information essentially was known in 2015, namely that the NSA used the fact that in Denmark, you have transatlantic cables with which one can spy on everything going on in the East bloc, but also internationally. This all came out in 2015, but nothing really happened. Merkel, at the time, said “Oh, spying on allies—that doesn’t go at all,” but then absolutely nothing happened! Again, last year, the same story was leaked, and nothing happened. So there is apparently one or more whistleblowers in the Danish secret service, who say, this is just too much. This is putting in question the sovereignty of Denmark, the interest of the Danish people. So they kept leaking the same information, and now, this was picked up by a whole network of European media circles—Le Monde and German TV, Norwegian and Swedish TV—and they have been given access to the internal documents of the Danish secret service, and that is what broke. WORLD TODAY: Do you think Angela Merkel will perhaps respond differently this time? And what’s been the reaction to this report so far in Germany, and perhaps other parts of Europe? ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Well, I think the intention of this whistleblower is, because he sees that there is no reaction, and therefore he keeps leaking in order to build up the pressure. So, now, [Peer] Steinbrück, who is a former [SPD] chancellor candidate, said this is a scandal. The Norwegian and Swedish ministers said that now they demand an investigation. We have to see what happens, because this all happened already last year, and I think it totally depends, if the population says that if these governments allow that everybody is being spied on then these governments are obviously not defending the interests of their respective populations. So I think we have to see how this unfolds. WORLD TODAY: And following the news of the report on Sunday, Edward Snowden accused U.S. President Joe Biden of being deeply involved in this scandal, the first time around. Why would he say that? ZEPP-LAROUCHE: [laughs] Well, because it’s true! It’s fairly well known for everybody who has listened to Edward Snowden, and there is a whole group of American whistleblowers, who have said similar things, that the NSA is spying on everything—everything going on in the world. They’re spying on emails, laptops, telephone calls, and they collect all of this in gigantic storage facilities. And they’re not looking for a person or a subject, they’re collecting everything. And then, once they have it, later on they can go, and go with search words and call up specific things they want. In reality, this NSA operation has become a world surveillance state. You know, they’re making a lot of noise about surveillance in China and Russia, and so forth, but the reality is, the British GCHQ, that’s the equivalent of the NSA, and the NSA, they’re just collecting everything. And I think that obviously Biden, both in his capacity as Vice President and now as President, is completely on top of that. WORLD TODAY: OK, but why would the U.S. spy on its allies? ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Because they think they are the guardian of an unipolar world, and it is, for them, they don’t have any sense that there may be something wrong with that. It’s for them, quite normal and self-evident that they can do that. I mean, you know, the United States, unfortunately—and I think some officials in China have been aware of it—that the United States has turned away from their original values of the American Revolution, where they were created as a republic, and in the recent years—actually decades, one can say—they have turned into an ally of the British Empire, running the world on the basis of the “special relationship,” whereby they think that if they behave like the muscle of the British Empire, then that’s the way how they run the unipolar world. WORLD TODAY: But do you think this is going to have an impact on America’s relations with its key allies, because Joe Biden is seeking to rebuild alliances? ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Well, the question I’m asking myself, and many other people are asking themselves, is: Why is it that there was no reaction after these stories came out in 2015, in 2020? I mean, the Danish clearly knew what they were doing, but they didn’t want to make any fuss about it. They didn’t want to rock the boat. It’s almost like they would prefer to be the slave of the great master, than being kicked out of the club! You know, it’s a complete scandal: It puts into question, all this question about “Western values,” the great Western democracies, human rights, all of these things. Where are the human rights of the European citizens being protected by their governments? I hope that some very clear questions will be asked of President Biden when he attends the G7 meeting. I mean, I doubt it, because these leaders have not shown—they’d rather be part of the “Five Eyes” and “Seven Eyes,” and whatnot rather than defending their own citizens. WORLD TODAY: Thank you, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institute, a Germany-based political and economic think-tank. You’re listening to World Today.

During the year 1983, in which Republican President Ronald Reagan advanced the seismic change in post-war military strategy known as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), stunning the entire trans-Atlantic world by embracing the inspired proposal of 1984 Democratic Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche, LaRouche authored a number of documents subsequent to that March 23 achievement. They included his “The Implications of Beam-Weapons Technology for the Military Doctrine of Argentina,” May 1983; “Saudi Arabia in the Year 2023,” June; “A Fifty-Year Development Policy for the Indian-Pacific Oceans Basin,” August; and two December documents, “The Design for a Leibnizian Academy of Morocco,” and “A Proposal To Begin Development of a Long-Range Economic Development Policy for the State of Israel.” LaRouche, besides his participation in many seminars and conferences that year, also took time to describe for all, in “The Science of the Human Mind,” written in October of 1983, what he meant, when LaRouche entitled the much-earlier “Open Dialogue with Leonid Brezhnev: The Content of Policy Is the Method by Which It Is Made.” The rediscovery of the Promethean “principle of power,” the power of labor, technology, and productive work, today under assault by the British Empire’s Great Reset, is the core of the LaRouche economic method, and all policy initiatives that flow from it.Though there are forces that clearly intend to prevent even President Joe Biden from meeting with President Vladimir Putin, using everything, including the bogus Belarus affair to do so, Russia intends to do its part to not play the provocation game. Meanwhile, the physical reality of the coronavirus pandemic and its implications, whether in Palestine, India, or Honduras, are not a game: that deadly reality, even for countries like the once-protected Vietnam, has forced the truth to the fore: “Therefore, send not to know for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee.” The bankruptcy of the United States’ policy on making vaccines available to the world in a timely fashion was luridly on display in the press conference addressed by the CDC’s Dr. Rochelle Walensky and Biden’s Covid coordinator who, after blathering about “80 million vaccines distributed to the world by the end of June,” was caught covering up for the fact that over 100 million vaccines are already produced and not about to be used, not counting the 67 million that the states already have, and are having problems finding people to take. The issue, however, is not whether to vaccinate either American children, or Indian physicians. The issue is: What are the hypotheses that must be the foundation for a world physical-economic development policy? Only the philosophical method of mass organizing developed by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, in his “De Docta Ignorantia,” is adequate to the challenge faced by mankind today. One sub-chapter of LaRouche’s May ’83 “Argentina” document is entitled: “‘Mad’ as a Malthusian Dogma.” Truly, the trans-Atlantic thermonuclear war-fighting policies presently being considered, such as “Prompt Global Strike,” reflect a cult-like form of religious belief, not rigorous strategic thinking in the 21st century. Besides being a rejection of the 1983 breakthrough by Reagan and LaRouche, preventive war and thermonuclear first strike is, together with the “Great Reset,” a pathetic front for the inevitable demise of the $2 quadrillions-plus bankrupt financial system. Neither scheme can work, except to exterminate all, or most of the human race. (Malthusianism also often has the ugly habit of destroying its proponents first.) But, though this “new world order” will fail under any circumstances, what will succeed? From a physical-economic standpoint, the opportunity afforded by the merciless, “Masque of the Red Death”-like prompting of humanity to change its ways, by the coronavirus pandemic and its implications, has, for perhaps the first time since the successful LaRouche campaign for the SDI in 1983, brought mankind and its governments, face to face with self-development, or self-destruction. A world health platform, demanded by elected officials, medical personnel, clergy, military, and all persons interested in justice, whether for Palestine, the African continent, or the urban poor in nations all over the world, can overturn every axiom of geopolitics, can take exception to every “rule of law,” can reset “the Great Reset,” solely by forcing an insistence on the idea that the world needs more people, at higher standards of living, achieved even without and independent of the prior resolution of outmoded forms of conflict and division that have characterized the relationships among states up to now. The deeper enemy we are facing, as pernicious as with the Dionysians of the Great Reset, is Kantian pessimism, seen, for example, in the cynical reflections of University of Washington Prof. Karen Levy: “With COVID-19, thinking like a pathogen leads to an inevitable conclusion: Getting the vaccine out to everyone in the world as quickly as possible is not just an ethical imperative, but also a selfish one.” This will, and should, inspire no one. The antidote to this can be found in the optimism of genius. Karel Vereycken recounted in the 2013 article “The Secret of the Florentine Dome” that Antonio Tuccio Manetti (1423-1497), author of “The Life of Filippo Brunelleschi,” who had met Brunelleschi when alive, reported regarding the contest to build the Duomo at Florence: “Even more so since the construction masters were already worrying about the difficulty to have to build a vault that wide and so high: seeing its height and width, its weight, its buttressing and supports, arches, and other armatures, which all had to be raised from the ground, it looked in such a fashion that not only the effort seemed awful, but its realization properly impossible.” To those who invoked that impossibility, Brunelleschi sharply answered that the dome was a sacred building and that “God, for whom nothing is impossible, will not abandon us.” To start the project, he suggested to the wardens of the Opera del Duomo to organize an international conference and invite all the architects, engineers, and masons “as many one could find across Christendom.” So they did, and during that meeting, “From the words of Filippo, the wardens deduced the verdict that such a building so big and of such a nature could not be terminated and that it had been a naïveté, from those architects of the past and of those who conceived the whole project, to believe so. When Filippo said, contesting that wrong opinion, that it could be done, they all answered in chorus: ‘How will the centering [falsework] be done?’ but he insisted again that it could be built without such centering.” Lyndon LaRouche, in “The Issue of Mind-Set” remarked that “The case of Filippo Brunelleschi’s construction of the dome of the famous Cathedral of Florence, typifies the axiomatic sources of the achievements of the Renaissance as a whole. If one examines the nature of the problem which Brunelleschi solved, viewing this as would a physicist in the tradition of Leonardo, Kepler, Leibniz, Gauss, and Riemann, one is startled, at first, by the fact that, as early as the middle decades of the Fifteenth Century, the catenary was used, not merely as a form, but as a physical principle of curvature, to solve the otherwise insoluble problem of construction posed. Brunelleschi used a ‘hanging chain’ form, to guide the workmen in the construction. Other ruses of a principled nature, used by the same Brunelleschi, including camera oscura constructions, afford the modern investigator the means to peek inside the cognitive processes which the great architect mustered in the course of the most notable innovations used in his work.” Such a construction of a durable world order is the task of the moment. Recalling the Mind-set of LaRouche’s 1983 year of creativity, and its impact on the world, provides the standard, both of the American Presidency and of the dialogue among nations, to which we must aspire.

An article entitled “A Roadmap to Zero Emissions Healthcare” published in April, uses data from a 2019 Lancet article about health care and climate change, to raise concerns about the environmental “costs” of keeping people in good health. It is an obscenity that these themes are being drawn upon by UN climate leader Mark Carney and other institutions at this time of pandemic and dramatic healthcare deficits.It’s not just cement, motor vehicles, and air conditioners that are destroying the planet, according to these neo-Malthusian crusaders; surgery must be added to the list: “Surgical, obstetric, and anesthesia care is one of the major contributors to climate change within the health sector,” according to an article published this month in The Lancet scientific journal by doctors and researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. They worry that the climate impact of current surgical practices will get worse as lifesaving procedures become accessible to the 5 billion people around the world, mostly in low- and middle-income countries, who currently can’t get them. “We do need to get more people surgical care,” says Dr. Aaron Bernstein, co-author of the article and interim director of the Center for Climate Health and the Global Environment at Harvard University. “But if we do it in a model that has been developed in rich countries, it will break the climate — and we can’t afford that.” Globally, health care is responsible for about 4.6% of so-called greenhouse gas emissions, according to a 2019 report in The Lancet. A quarter of that is from the U.S., despite it having 4% of the global population. “If the health sector globally were a country, it would be the fifth [largest] emitter of greenhouse gases,” says Susan Wilburn, international sustainability director at Health Care Without Harm, an organization working to reduce the environmental footprint of health care globally. The article zeroes in on surgical care, because it’s the most energy- and waste-intensive specialty in health care. Operating rooms can consume three to six times more energy per square foot than elsewhere in a hospital, according to another Lancet study. That’s because heating, ventilation, and air conditioning in operating rooms run on high, even when no patients are in them. The article says that if hospitals ventilated operating rooms only when they were occupied, this would significantly reduce energy consumption. Operating rooms also produce 20% to 30% of a facility’s waste, by some estimates, and a third of its biohazard waste, which must be disposed of specially. The use of certain anesthetic gases, such as nitrous oxide and desflurane, is another major source of greenhouse gases in operating rooms, according to the article. Anesthetics that are injected instead of inhaled, on the other hand, leave a minimal carbon footprint. Perhaps they will next propose that preventing the patient from breathing will further reduce future carbon emissions! “The easiest thing we can do is stop wasting so much,” says Dr. Jodi Sherman, associate professor of anesthesiology and of epidemiology in environmental health sciences at Yale University. “We waste a tremendous amount.”

May 12 (EIRNS)—Schiller Institute Press Release, May 12 FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT schiller@schillerinstitute.org Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Schiller Institute Founder and Dr. Bouthaina Shaaban, Political and Media Advisor to the Syrian Presidency, Lead Off May 8 International ConferenceThe historic May 8th Schiller Institute International Conference, “The Moral Collapse of the Trans-Atlantic World Cries Out for a New Paradigm,” brought together leaders of institutions and governments from around the world to address the exceedingly dangerous global strategic crisis: a rush to confrontation between the world’s nuclear powers; a pandemic threatening to expand with a vengeance; mass starvation threatening dozens of millions in Africa and Asia; and a financial bubble of unprecedented scope which is already beginning to fissure. The conference was keynoted by Schiller Institute founder and Chairwoman Helga Zepp-LaRouche, and it is excerpted below. The full two-panel conference, with 19 speakers from Europe, Asia and the Americas, and two extended discussion sessions, is available here. Extensive transcripts will be published in the next two issues of Executive Intelligence Review. Interviews and/or video clips can be made available for your use. Lift All Unilateral Sanctions! Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche, and many of the speakers, developed in devastating detail, the danger of war over Ukraine; and highlighted the illegal and deadly unilateral sanctions policy of the U.S., pointing especially to Syria and Yemen. She emphatically called for overturning the Caesar Sanctions on Syria and lifting all unilateral sanctions amidst the devastating food crisis threatening the death of millions. The pandemic spike in India is an indication of the danger of the threat to all of a myriad of new mutations. The first panel was joined by, among other speakers, Dr. Bouthaina Shaaban, Political and Media Advisor to the Syrian Presidency, speaking on the topic, “Restore International Law: Respect Syria’s Perfect Sovereignty” and Col. Richard H. Black (USA, aret.), former head of the U.S. Army’s Criminal Law Division, on “The Immorality of Sanctions: The Case of Syria.” Dr. Shaaban was the second speaker. She thanked Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche for the keynote address saying, “I thought while you were talking that I would love to carry this speech and circulate it the world over, because it is the antithesis of what Western colonial powers are doing. And I would like to say to you how I read that you, Helga, and the Schiller Institute look at humanity. You see humanity, see all of us as global brothers and sisters, while the imperial and colonial powers have always treated us or looked at us as second- or third- or fourth- or fifth-class citizens of the world. They continue to do that because they are only interested in looting our resources, and in making money for themselves while depriving our people of our own resources. I think your idea is great…. Thank you, Helga, for inviting me, always. I think this is the time to make the Schiller Institute a leading narrative, your narrative, to be a leading narrative in the world. I think most people everywhere need this, and want this, and are ready to join party with you and work with you for this noble cause you have been embracing for the last 50 years. Thank you very much.” Zepp-LaRouche: “The March of Folly: Can Mankind Still Extinguish the Now-Lit Fuse of Thermonuclear War?” She said in part: “We are conducting this Schiller Institute conference with an urgent appeal to as many people as possible to help to change the direction in which the political situation is going right now. Because we are on a course which, in a very short period of time—much shorter than most anybody probably realizes—we are on a course of the potential extinction of civilization. It’s not clear where the greater danger comes from: the danger of thermonuclear war, the danger of the pandemic going out of control in combination with world famine, or with the neo-Malthusian virus which has beset the brains of so many people. It is not clear if these neo-Malthusians are more eager to destroy industrial society or if they are simply willing instruments in aiding geopolitical confrontation with Russia and China. “Let’s start with the danger of thermonuclear war: it’s not just one trigger point, one strategic crisis. It is the overall tension between the United States, the so-called Global Britain, NATO, and also increasingly the European Union with Russia and China. It’s becoming so big that any one of the crises around the globe could become the trigger point. It could be a crisis with Russia over Ukraine going out of control, or with China over Taiwan. “It is alarming, and it should alarm all of you, now that more and more people, even such unlikely ones, as Henry Kissinger—who has been not exactly a friend of our organization (which has everything to do with his infamous NSSM-200 paper which he wrote when he was National Security Advisor in 1974), and that he was the enemy and adversary of everything Lyndon LaRouche and his movement stood for—but even Kissinger is now warning that the tension between the United States and China is becoming so all-engulfing for the whole world, that it could lead to an Armageddon-like military clash, extinguishing mankind ‘in a finite period of time.’ This he said about a week ago. “Then the commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, Admiral Charles Richard, in February, informed the Pentagon that they should change the likelihood of nuclear war from ‘not likely’ to ‘very likely.’ He repeated that before the Congress. On May 6, the New York Times had an article by Peter Beinart, who said that the Biden policy towards Taiwan is truly reckless, that we are very close to war, mainly because the Democrats had abandoned the One-China policy last year. “If it would come to such a war, given the fact that China has 39 air bases around the region of Taiwan, the United States has only two, the United States would lose any conventional war, and if it would think of using regional nuclear weapons, the danger is that it would go into an all-out global nuclear war…. “On March 21st, Adm. Philip Davidson, the head of the Indo-Pacific Command, said we must be absolutely prepared to fight and win such a war, should competition turn into conflict. Then, the U.S. Pacific Fleet commander, Adm. John Aquilino, who will replace Admiral Davidson, said we are much closer to such a war ‘than most think.’ And H.R. McMaster, the former National Security Advisor to Trump, said the most dangerous time in his view is the period between the Congress of the Chinese Communist Party later this year, and the Winter Olympics in Beijing next year. So, that is, indeed, very close.” Convene a P-5 Summit “What is to be done? There is a solution, but it is important to take all these problems at once. Because when you have a systemic crisis such as I have described, it is not enough to solve a little of this and a little bit of that crisis. We have to create a completely different system. President Putin, in January 2020, called for an urgent meeting of the Permanent Five Members of the UN Security Council. I think that is what must absolutely happen now. Such a summit should be called because of the danger of World War III, a pandemic out of control, a world famine, the danger of a blow-out of the financial system, and it must lead to an immediate implementation of the following program. Build Modern Health Systems Everywhere “Given the pandemic, the only way to stop that and future pandemics, is to create a world health system, which means a modern health system in every single country. Because if you don’t stop the pandemic in even the poorest country on the planet, it will come back; there will be new variants, new strains, which eventually could make obsolete the vaccines which already have been distributed. So, we are in a race against time. We should do in every single country, what was done in Wuhan when the pandemic broke out. Build hospitals! This can be done with the Army Corps of Engineers, with aid organizations. In one week, one can build a hospital for 1,000 people. Then, these modern hospitals need well-educated doctors, nurses. You need lots of clean water; 2 billion people in the world have no access to clean water. You need lots of electricity; this cannot be done without infrastructure. So, the building of a modern health system in every country can and must be the beginning of overcoming the underdevelopment of the developing countries for good. “We have to have a program of global poverty alleviation, exactly as it was intended by President Franklin D. Roosevelt when he called for the Bretton Woods Agreements, which were never fully implemented because of his untimely death. But now, we need exactly that. It must start with global Glass-Steagall banking separation, which then must be followed by the creation of a Hamiltonian national banking system in every country. We need a credit system, which then can become a New Bretton Woods system. Then we can finance the extension of the New Silk Road into Southwest Asia. “The solution to overcome the death and starvation in Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq and other crisis areas is obvious. When President Xi Jinping was in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Egypt in 2015, he offered to extend the New Silk Road into the entire region. That program—and the Schiller Institute has worked on a comprehensive program for the entire region—can be implemented if, in such a P-5 UN Security Council meeting, it is agreed, and then the neighbors of Southwest Asia—Russia, China, India—all work together, and the United States and European nations agree to cooperate in the reconstruction of this region that has been destroyed by these endless wars. This will then extend the New Silk Road with international cooperation from other countries. Japan and South Korea and other nations should all be involved in the reconstruction of Africa. A Human Future of Discovery and Development “Geopolitical confrontation can then be replaced with crash programs for the development of thermonuclear fusion power, in which major breakthroughs have occurred recently. Rather than extending geopolitical confrontation into space, we should have international cooperation to build a village on the Moon, and soon a city on Mars. “The Hubble Telescope has discovered that there are at a minimum 2 trillion galaxies. I would like you to really put your mind on that thought, and then think how stupid it would be that we, as a human species, who are the only species which can potentially be the immortal species because of our creative reason, that we would destroy ourselves in thermonuclear destruction. I think we should have the ambition not to be more stupid than the animals, because there is no animal species which would ever conduct such behavior.”

HARLEY SCHLANGER: Welcome to the Schiller Institute conference, “The Moral Collapse of the Trans-Atlantic World Cries Out for a New Paradigm.” I’m Harley Schlanger, and I will moderate the first panel, which is entitled “The March of Folly: Can Mankind Still Extinguish the Now-Lit Fuse of Thermonuclear War?”As we meet, the survival of the human race is imperiled as perhaps never before. We face the danger of a new world war, including the possible use of nuclear weapons; of a systemic breakdown of the real physical economy, which keeps more than 7-plus billion people alive, and the collapse of which bring with it famine and an out-of-control pandemic. But these threats do not arise from the so-called “malign intent” of Russia and China. Despite the accusation of the leaders of most governments and parties in the trans-Atlantic world who charge them with aggression against the so-called rules-based order. Nor do they come from so-called manmade climate change, being used to club nations into giving up their sovereign rights, to submit their nations and citizens to a deadly looting process enforced by a central bankers’ global dictatorship committed to radical population reduction. This is the intent of those who demand a submission to a rules-based order. The use of the U.S. military to impose a unilateral world order which rejects principles of international law in favor of the dictates of arbitrary rules which serve the narrow interests of the City of London and Wall Street. In our deliberations today, let’s be inspired by the words spoken by President John F Kennedy on June 10, 1963, shortly after the successful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis which threatened to unleash a nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. In speaking for the adoption of a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, Kennedy said: “What kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and build a better life for their children—not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women—not merely peace in our time, but peace for all time.” He continued saying that by directing our attention to our common interests, differences can be resolved. “For in the final analysis,” he concluded, “our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.” Four years later, Pope Paul VI summarized this view with his encyclical Populorum Progressio proclaiming, “Development is the new name for peace.” Achieving this has been the life’s work of the economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche, and has been the mission adopted by the Schiller Institute since it was founded in 1984 by his wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Today, we have a distinguished panel of speakers representing many nations guided by this common goal. I will introduce them after the first speaker. But it’s most appropriate to begin with a keynote by the Schiller Institute’s Helga Zepp-LaRouche. It’s my honor to introduce Helga Zepp-LaRouche. HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE: I greet all of you wherever you may be around the world. I’m telling you that we are conducting this Schiller Institute conference with an urgent appeal to as many people as possible to help to change the direction in which the political situation is going right now. Because we are on a course which, in a very short period of time—much shorter than anybody is probably realizing—we are on a course of potential extinction of civilization. It’s not clear where the greater danger comes from; the danger of thermonuclear war, the danger of a pandemic going out of control in combination with a world famine, or with a neo-Malthusian virus which has beset the brains of so many people where it is not clear if they are more eager to destroy the industrial society or if they are willing instruments to the geopolitical confrontation against Russia and China. So, let’s start with the danger of thermonuclear war. It’s not just one trigger point, one strategic crisis. It is the overall tension between the United States, the so-called global Britain, NATO, and increasingly also the European Union with Russia and China. It’s becoming so big that any one of the crises around the globe could become the trigger point. If could be a crisis with Russia over Ukraine going out of control, or with China over Taiwan. It is alarming, and it should alarm all of you that now more and more people—even so unlikely ones like Henry Kissinger, who has been not exactly a friend of our organization, which has everything to do with his infamous NSSM-200 paper which he wrote when he was National Security Advisor in 1974. That he was the enemy and adversary of everything Lyndon LaRouche and his movement stood for. But even Kissinger is now warning that the tension between the United States and China is becoming so all-engulfing for the whole world that they could lead to an Armageddon-like military clash, extinguishing mankind in a finite period of time. This he said about a week ago. Then the commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, Admiral Charles Richard, recently in February, informed the Pentagon that they should change the likelihood of nuclear war from not likely to very likely. He repeated that in front of the Congress recently. Just two days ago, the New York Times had an article by one Peter Beinart, who said that the Biden policy towards Taiwan is truly reckless, that we are very close to war, mainly because the Democrats have abandoned the One-China policy already last year. Biden is now receiving envoys from Taiwan, as he did for his inauguration. Then, the article quotes Graham Allison, the historian who thinks that a danger of a Thucydides trap exists, by saying that people have to be sure that China would be more willing to go to war than accept losing Taiwan. In light of the history of China, this is very likely. If it would come to such a war, given that China has 39 air bases around the region of Taiwan, the United States has only two, the United States would lose any conventional war. If it would think of using regional nuclear weapons, the danger is that it would go into an all-out global nuclear war. I advise those people who don’t think that that is true, to read the papers by Ted Postol over the difference between conventional and thermonuclear war, where it is the logic that once you use one nuclear weapon, all will be used. And also to listen to what Tulsi Gabbard said recently in an interview with Tucker Carlson, where she said that to have this geopolitical confrontation with Russia is completely crazy. Russia has thousands of nuclear weapons which, in a conflict, would hit every U.S. city in less than 30 minutes. This would bring about excruciating death and suffering over the American people; millions would lose their lives, and flesh would be burned from their bones. That would be the end of the world, and this could come much sooner than anybody thinks. Also, the Australian press is warning that Taiwan may be a trigger for a catastrophic war, and that is not just a question of if, but when. That China has become the enemy for no other reason than it has dared to eclipse the U.S. as the most powerful economy. On March 21st, Admiral Philip Davidson, the head of the Indo-Pacific Command said we must be absolutely prepared to fight and win such a war, should competition turn into conflict. Then, the U.S. Pacific Fleet commander, Admiral John Aquilino, who will replace Admiral Davidson in his position, said we are much closer to such a war than most think. And [H.R.] McMaster, the former National Security Advisor to Trump basically said the most dangerous time in his view is the period between the Congress of the Chinese Communist Party later this year, and the Winter Olympics in Beijing next year. So, that is, indeed, very close. The Taiwan Defense Minister already announced that they will now mass produce long-range missiles capable of striking deep into the inside of the Chinese mainland. So, the situation around Taiwan could be the trigger point for a global war. But so could the situation over Ukraine. With the developments in Ukraine, you had an escalation in the recent years of an incredible demonization of President Putin. But it has nothing to do with Crimea, because as Putin correctly said, if it would not have been Ukraine, they would have found some other reason. The narrative of what is going on with Russia, Ukraine, Crimea is completely upside-down. It did not start with the so-called annexation of Crimea; it started with the EU association agreement for Ukraine at the end of 2013, which was rejected for good reasons. Then, that led quickly to the demonstrations on the Maidan, which escalated into the coup, leading to a Nazi coup in February 2014. As a consequence, in which coup Victoria Nuland, who is now again in a position in the State Department. Then you had the development where the people of Crimea voted to join Russia. You have right now [U.S. Secretary of State] Blinken and Nuland in Ukraine. This is a very dangerous game, because they’re there to further the building of U.S. bases in Ukraine to support the demand by the Ukrainians to join NATO. That is reaching then a point where Putin has recently said that people in the West should not cross red lines, because if it would occur, the response would be asymmetric, swift, and hard. Russia is a nuclear superpower, and this could lead, if it would be provoked to answer in such a way, to the annihilation of mankind. Scott Ritter, who warned that the “weapons of mass destruction” were a fake story in Iraq, recently commented on the Defender Europe 2021 large maneuvers, which are going on right now along the Russian border. He basically said that all that this demonstrates is that NATO is absolutely inferior compared to the Russian troops in a conventional way. That therefore, the danger would be that if it comes to a conflict, it could go nuclear. There was a RAND Corporation study in 2016 entitled “War with China; Thinking Through the Unthinkable.” They basically say it would be better to have the war with China now than in ten years, because the gap will close and China would probably win such a war later on. The same RAND Corporation had a study in 2019 called “Extending Russia; Competing from Advantageous Ground,” which is a 354-page piece in which they describe how one should overextend Russia economically, militarily, and propaganda-wise. Number one, conduct economic warfare. Hinder the oil exports; block export of natural gas; block the construction of pipelines, such as Nord Stream II; escalate sanctions; escalate the brain drain. Escalate the situation with Ukraine; bring lethal weapons to Ukraine; support the rebels in Syria; topple Lukashenko; increase the cost for Russia in the South Caucasus; go for color revolution in Moldavia. Discredit the election process in Russia, like Navalny; cause unrest in Russia, go for a color revolution. Put military bombers, missiles at the border to cause permanent stress for Russia. Provoke Russia into a costly arms race. If you listen to that so-called study, you have the exact script for about everything that happened in the last two years. This conference actually was caused to happen by the urgent appeal by Cardinal Mario Zenari from Syria. He has been issued a call saying that as a result of the combination of ten years of war in which the United States was allied with al-Qaeda, al-Nusra, and ISIS—these are my words, not his—which was aimed to topple the legitimate elected government of Syria, the pandemic and the co-called Caesar sanctions, we have now a situation where more than 90% of the Syrian population are below the poverty line. I just should note that the Caesar sanctions are based on the same kind of fraud as we have seen used as a pretext for all of these endless wars, like the chemical weapons supposedly used by the Syrian government which was a fraud by the White Helmets; or the babies ripped out of incubators in 1991, which was a lie. Then you had the so-called weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003. Yellow cake from Niger, but this was all a complete lie. Unilateral sanctions such as these Caesar sanctions are, from a standpoint of international law, completely illegal. We will hear about that from Professor Koechler shortly. The only kinds of sanctions which are allowed would be those which are agreed upon by the UN Security Council. Otherwise, unilateral sanctions are a form of warfare, which targets the poor, the old people, the children. It is the idea to drive the pain of the population so high because of lack of food and medicine, that eventually it will cause an uprising and conduct regime change. Brian O’Toole, who is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a former advisor to the U.S. Treasury, and he worked for the CIA, is an expert in so-called “behavior economics.” He said that this is a strategy to raise the pain meter—what an insane expression. For Russia, it would only be 10% of this pain meter, and it would be important to drive it up to 70% by cutting Russia off of Swift, the connection to the international financial system, and to cut off Sberbank from financial transactions. For Syria, a continuation of these Caesar sanctions means the deaths of many thousands, maybe millions of people. But the people who are conducting this say literally, “So what?” I’m not exaggerating! Madeline Albright said on a “60 Minutes” program with Leslie Stahl, that the half million children who died in Iraq as a result of the sanctions—these were children under the age of 5! She said, it’s a very hard choice, but the price was worth it. David Beasley, the head of the UN World Food Program, just made a documentary about the famine in Yemen, called “Hunger Ward” which I would urge everybody to watch. He showed how in Yemen, there were little girls with arms as thin as my finger. They had hollow eyes and their skin was like parchment because of the starvation process. But I think Mrs. Albright should have nightmares every single night where each of these 500,000 dying children from Iraq look at her and haunt her. Looking at her with their dying eyes, and this would continue until this woman has a human feeling. The situation is much worse, because according to the UN World Food Program, the new report they published, “2021 Global Report on the Food Crisis” says 55 nations are in extreme need of food. And Syria, because of the sanctions, the war, the depreciation of their pound, there is now a very high number of food insecure people. The food prices from December 2019 until 2020 increased by 236%. That means that all together in all of these nations—40 nations—34 million people are in acute danger of starvation in the coming months. Beasley, at the SIPRI—the Stockholm Institute for Peace Research—called on all nations to mobilize urgent support to avert mass deaths of millions of people. Actually, a number of people which is very quickly going to be as much as all of World War II deaths. He mentioned that the UN Security Council Resolution 2417 was passed unanimously in 2018, and that resolution very clearly that hunger cannot be used as a weapon of war. There are right now, 155 million people in acute food insecurity. These people are in countries like Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Haiti, norther Nigeria, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Yemen, Zimbabwe. The COVID-19 pandemic in India has already officially caused 238,000 deaths. But according to experts, it is 5-10 times higher, because they count only the people who die in hospitals, not the people who die in the countryside. The few planeloads of aid, which are being sent by international countries, is just a drop in the ocean. The head of the African CDC said that they are horrified by looking at India, because most of the vaccinations which came to Africa was produce there, and now with the crisis exploding in India they are worried that no more vaccine is coming. It is also clear that we are looking at mass deaths in Brazil and many other places. If you look at this picture as a totality, and that is what we have to do, the chickens are coming home to roost. We are now at the exact point Lyndon LaRouche predicted in 1971 when Nixon destroyed the old Bretton Woods system and went on a course of monetary liberal policies. Lyndon LaRouche at that point said that if you continue on this course, it will come to a point where you are faced with the danger of a new depression, the danger of war, and the danger of a new fascism. My late husband was also absolutely correct when he warned already in 1973 that the IMF conditionalities would mean that new pandemics would come and that would eventually be a total threat to civilization. The financial system is about to blow. We are looking at a situation where, after the 2008 systemic crisis nothing was done to remedy the root causes. Just quantitative easing and pumping money by the trillions. Now we are looking at the potential of a hyperinflationary blow-out like it was in Germany in 1923. In 1923, the Reichsbank printed money to pay the war debt and the reparations. First you didn’t see much of it, but then in November 1923, it exploded. It was the complete expropriation of the life work of the people. Yesterday, Bank of America put out a report saying that we have just a transitionary hyperinflation. This is visible because all the commodity prices are going up, but that this will soon translate to an increase in consumer prices. A transitionary hyperinflation is as much as being a little bit pregnant. However, that hyperinflation is the necessary result of all of this policy of further speculation in the last period is known to all the big players. This is the real reason why they are betting to create one last super-bubble by going for the Great Reset, the great transformation of the decarbonization of the world economy, the Green New Deal. It is the illusion that if they pump now in the next ten years another $60 trillion into the financial system, that that would somehow save their earnings and their system. But it would just mean a gigantic transfer of wealth again from the poor to the rich. This is already on the horizon. It’s happening because the EU is implementing the Green New Deal, the Biden administration is doing it. While that only threatens the de-industrialization of the so-called advanced countries, for the developing countries it means mass death on top of the crises I already mentioned. The Indian Energy Minister, Mr. Singh, recently said that the Green deal may be OK for the industrialized nations, but absolutely not for the developing sector. Alone in Africa, 800 million Africans don’t have access to electricity. It would mean—and these are my words now—it would mean an absolute massive reduction of the population, and it is also clear that this is their intent. What is to be done? There is a solution, but it is important to take all these problems at once, because when you have a systemic crisis like what I’m describing with these different elements, it is not enough to solve a little of this and a little bit of that crisis. You have to create a completely different system. President Putin, in January 2020, called for an urgent meeting of the Permanent Five Members of the UN Security Council. I think that is what must absolutely happen now. Such a summit should be called because of the danger of World War III, a pandemic out of control, a world famine, the danger of a blow-out of the financial system. It must lead to an immediate implementation of the following program: Given the pandemic, the only way to stop that and future pandemics, is to create a world health system, which means a modern health system in every single country. Because if you don’t stop the pandemic in even the poorest country on the planet, it will come back; there will be new variants, new strains, which eventually could made obsolete the vaccines which already have been distributed. So, we are in a race against time. We should do in every single country what was done in Wuhan when the pandemic broke out. Build hospitals! This can be done with the Army Corps of Engineers, with aid organizations. In one week, one can build a hospital for 1000 people. Then, these modern hospitals need well-educated doctors, nurses. You need lots of clean water; 2 billion people in the world have no access to clean water. You need lots of electricity; this cannot be done without infrastructure. So, the building of a modern health system in every country can and must be the beginning of overcoming the underdevelopment of the developing countries for good. We have to have a program of global poverty elimination, exactly as it was intended by Franklin D. Roosevelt when he called for the Bretton Woods, which was never implemented because of his untimely death. But now, we need exactly that. It must start with a global Glass-Steagall banking separation which then must be followed by the creation of a Hamiltonian national banking system in very country. We need a credit system which then can become a New Bretton Woods system. Then we can finance the extension of the New Silk Road into Southwest Asia. The possibility to overcome the death and starvation in Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, the solution is obvious. When President Xi Jinping was in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Egypt in 2015, he offered to extend the New Silk Road into the entire region. That program, and the Schiller Institute has worked on a comprehensive program for the entire region, can be implemented in such a P-5 UN Security Council meeting. It is agreed, and then all the big neighbors of Southwest Asia—Russia, China, India—all work together and the United States and European nations agree to cooperate in the reconstruction of this region, which has been destroyed by these endless wars. Then, naturally, the New Silk Road with this international cooperation, including other countries like Japan, India, South Korea should all be involved in the reconstruction of Africa. We have to replace geopolitical confrontation with a crash program of cooperation for the development of thermonuclear fusion power, where in the recent period, major breakthroughs have occurred. Once we have fusion power, we will have a safe energy source for the whole human population, and we will also tackle the problem of limited raw materials, because you can separate isotopes with the fusion torch procedure and create new raw materials. We have to have international cooperation in space. Rather than extending geopolitical confrontation into space, we should have international cooperation to build a village on the Moon, and soon a city on Mars. We should listen to the head of the Mars mission and the head of the Energy Ministry of Abu Dhabi, Miss al-Amiri, who already some years ago made a beautiful speech where she stuck her finger in the air like this—please put on the video—people should look at what is at the end of her finger to see what the sky will tell them. Can you put on the video, please? [video] SARAH AL-AMIRI: The Hubble Space Telescope was pointed at a region that small [pointing her finger]. And it came up with this image. This image, the dots of light that you see in these images are not stars, they’re galaxies. There are hundreds of billions of stars in each one of those dots in that small region of sky that we look at. [end video] ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Now, the Hubble Telescope discovered that there are at a minimum 2 trillion galaxies. I would like you to really put your mind on that thought, and then think how stupid it would be that we, as a human species who are the only species which can potentially be the immortal species because of our creative reason. That we would destroy ourselves in a thermonuclear destruction. I think we should have the ambition not to be more stupid than the animals, because there is no animal species which would ever conduct such a behavior. Thank you.

Register for the May 8 Schiller Institute conference. European Conference Call Excerpt with Helga Zepp-LaRouche Tuesday, April 27, 2021 Helga Zepp-LaRouche: I think we have to wake up the international population much more than even we have been doing so far, because in going through the intelligence in preparation for this phone call, when you are looking at the picture as a totality, it is absolutely horrifying. To start with what I think could be really a detonator of the situation, you remember that when Putin gave his speech on April 21 to the Federal Assembly, he said there are red lines which cannot be crossed, and then he said there was an assassination attempt against Lukashenko and a coup attempt against Belarus, and that that had really gone too far.So now the director of the Russian Federation Security Service (FSB), Alexander Bortnikov, is saying that they are investigating the possible involvement of the U.S. government in the planning of a potential, supposed military coup in Belarus, and that sudden investigation of the plot of a military coup against Lukashenko is going on, and that the opposition politician Grigory Kostusev, and the political analyst Alexander Feduta, the lawyer Yuri Zenkovich, according to Lukashenko were involved in an assassination plan against him, and he accuses U.S. special services and U.S. leading forces to be responsible. And also quoting the head of the Belarus KGB, the project plot was planned for the summer, June or July; the military coup was planned for May 9 in Minsk, during the parade for Victory Day, and that this would have been sponsored from abroad. Then according to a report in the Belarus TV station ONT, the implication is that Michael Carpenter, one of the most important foreign policy advisers of U.S. Vice President Biden and director for Russia at the National Security Council; afterward he was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense with responsibility for Russia, Ukraine, Eurasia, the Balkans, and Conventional Arms Control, was a key figure behind the supposed coup attempt in Belarus, and that next week more interesting new details about this story would be made known. I find this absolutely incredible, because we published in the recent period, a lot of the activity of Michael Carpenter, who is among other things, nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. He was in the in the Obama administration, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense with responsibility for Russia, Ukraine, Eurasia, the Balkans, and Conventional Arms Control; director for Russia in the National Security Council; and he’s now Managing Director of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2018, he made some waves when he accompanied the Ukrainian neo-Nazi then-Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada Andriy Parubiy on a trip to Washington, and when he was questioned concerning Parubiy’s connection to the Nazi movement which was involved in the Ukraine coup in 2014, he defended Parubiy as a patriot and fantastic leading personality. Carpenter was also together with Biden, the author of an article in Foreign Affairs publication of the Council on Foreign Relations for January/February 2018 “How To Stand Up to the Kremlin: Defending Democracy Against Its Enemies” He’s obviously close to Biden. I find this absolutely incredible, because if this turns out to be the case, we could be closer to World War III, than anybody realizes: Because this is exactly the kind of stuff which happens in the forefront of world wars. And we should also note the fact that, today, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin announced on April 26 that China will support Russia in front of the sharpened Western sanctions. He said: “China has all along maintained that differences should be properly resolved through consultation as equals on the basis of mutual respect. We reject the approach of wantonly resorting to unilateral sanctions or threat of sanctions…. China and Russia are comprehensive strategic partners of coordination in the new era. We will continue to understand and support each other in safeguarding our respective sovereignty, security and development interests.” And we should keep in mind that when Wang Yi and Sergey Lavrov met in the Chinese city of Guilin on March 23, they were already talking about such an increase in the global governance partnership between Russia and China. Then one should also remember that just last week, on April 19, the U.S. Strategic Command announced what they called a “preview of the Posture Statement Review,” it’s addressed to U.S. Congress every year, and there they tweet: “Posture Statement Preview: The spectrum of conflict today is neither linear nor predictable. We must account for the possibility of conflict leading to conditions which could very rapidly drive an adversary to consider nuclear use as their least bad option.” StratCom is the same thing, what the Commander Adm. Charles Richard had told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, last week [April 20] that the Chinese nuclear capabilities are advancing so rapidly that it’s not worth to update it, because it’s going so fast that each new report is outdated; and that a portion of China’s nuclear arsenal has been recently primed for ready use, that is launch on warning. And then, we should remember that Tulsi Gabbard had warned against this kind of anti-Russia brinksmanship, where she had in the “Tucker Carlson Tonight” show [April 12], said that “such a war would come at a cost beyond anything that we can really imagine.” An entirely accurate picture of “hundreds of millions of people dying and suffering seeing their flesh burned from their bones.” She is one of the few people who are warning about that, but it is an absolute scandal that there is no discussion. However, I will come to that in a second. I think there are indirect indications that some people in Europe are slowly waking up, that this confrontation against Russia is insane. But one should see this, what I just reported about the accusation concerning the possible plot against Belarus, also in the context of the absolute increased tension with Czechia, where now, after President Milos Zeman, who is generally reasonable concerning Russia—he had been attending the Rhodes Conference several times—in any case, he had said that the Czech secret services would know that there was no Russian involvement in this 2014 blowup of this ammunition depot [in Vrbetice]. Now, as a result of his saying that, the leader of the Czech parliament is investigating the possibility of a suit against Zeman for high treason, because supposedly he would have revealed state secrets in this speech; and he or some other speaker announced that there is already a collection of signatures on a petition to the Senate, a constitutional complaint that he was being responsible for treason. Obviously, this story was at the bottom of why the 60 Russian—that’s not a little, I mean, there’s almost nobody left—60 Russian diplomats have been expelled from the Czech Republic. And then you have a similar process going on with Poland. So naturally the hand of the British is visible: Chatham House had an article on that story of the 2014 explosion in the Czech ammunition depot, in which it states that this is the key issue to which Europe must respond, that the failure to do so would be inexcusable and be highly dangerous. [“Europe Must Admit Russia Is Waging War,” And they say that these are the same Russians who were responsible for the Salisbury poison attack on the Skripals in 2018, and this would be tantamount to an act of state terror, on the territory of a NATO and EU member state. So, Lavrov responded to that, by basically saying, this indeed the territory is where the EU should investigate this. And he said that Zeman’s statements were absolutely reasonable, but the attack on him means that “those who make such statements have already decided everything for themselves, decided that there are no alternative explanations other than the guilt of Russia.” Also as part of this insane war-mongering environment, Politico reports that U.S. spy agencies are now looking to declassify more intelligence on Russia and China’s “malign behavior,” and there is a memo signed by 9 of the 11 U.S. military four-star commanders, demanding that more intelligence for the information war against Russia and China should be published, that the world must know what Russia and China are doing. I think if you look at this, it’s really hair-raising: If you have the accusation that Russian and Belarus secret services that the U.S. is involved, and they’re naming this guy Michael Carpenter—I have not had the time to talk to the U.S. before making this briefing, but I think there is a story behind it, which either it turns out to be true, and then it’s really serious and extremely dangerous; or it’s some fake, which I doubt very much that you would joke with such stuff—I just want to say that this is extremely alarming for the state of affairs. Now, the reason why I think that some Europeans are waking up, is because, for a two days or so, the German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas has slightly modified his tone, saying there cannot be a continuation of the confrontation with Russia; and in contrast to what Green Chancellor candidate Annalena Baerbock is saying, who blasts Russia and China, and is on a complete confrontation course, and she is the invited guest of the conference by the Atlantic Council on May 5. But Maas is calling for de-escalation, and so is Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, who, in an interview with Neue Zürcher Zeitung said that he’s against more sanctions against Russia, that there must be a de-escalation, and that peace in Europe is possible with Russia, and not against it. So, I think we should try to talk to many people and get a reason, what is really the perception in Europe about this state of affairs. Because if there would be any kind of escalation, it would be nuclear, because the U.S. forces and the NATO forces in Europe will not be involved in a war against Russian forces—that’s a complete joke—and the whole discussion about “low-yield nuclear weapons,” the modernization of nuclear weapons, I think it would affect European countries immediately, and it would be the end of Europe: That’s what we should really realize…. OK, so I will not go through a whole plethora of other subjects, because I think what I said in the beginning is the most worrisome, and that means that our upcoming conference on May 8 is more urgent than ever before, to really get a resistance against the war danger, against the sanctions, against all of these policies, which can only mean a disaster as the outcome, and we should really try to convince people that we need a moral resistance against this kind of decadence which could very well be the beginning of the hours and days before World War III. So, I think we really need a mobilization: I know people have all reasons why we are overworked, and this and that, but I think in light of what I said in the beginning, it is really horrifying. And people have to wake up, because it doesn’t register! It does not register! People have been numbed, and become so indifferent, that if we don’t break through that, I think the outcome will be a disaster. So I can only say that we have already some very interesting speakers: I hope to be able in a day or two, to put together a preliminary list of speakers and titles, which we will put out as soon as it is together. But it shapes up already as very interesting, both on the strategic crisis, and also on the continuation of the work of the Committee of the Coincidence of Opposites. So we should really go in all out effort to build this conference as a platform for anybody who wants to have a voice of reason and discuss solutions.

With the Ukraine crisis careening rapidly towards a strategic showdown, President Joe Biden called President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday to propose that the two leaders hold “a summit meeting in a third country in the coming months to discuss the full range of issues facing the United States and Russia,” according to a White House read-out. The intent would be for “the United States and Russia to pursue a strategic stability dialogue on a range of arms control and emerging security issues.”Even as Biden was speaking with Putin, his emissary, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, was in Brussels egging on Ukraine into a flight-forward demand to join NATO immediately, which all sides know is a tripwire for Russia. At the same time, the U.S. has deployed two warships into the Black Sea, which Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov described as a provocation “designed to test Russia’s nerves.” He warned that U.S. military support for Kiev is turning Ukraine into a “powder keg,” and that “if there is any aggravation, we of course will do everything to ensure our security and the safety of our citizens.” What more is behind the Biden-Putin phone call is unclear at this writing. But two things are clear: 1) that the Ukraine flashpoint and the broader war danger are driven by the systemic collapse of the entire trans-Atlantic financial system, which has also unleashed a pandemic, famine, and mass unemployment across the planet; and 2) that no solution for any single crisis will work, unless the entire civilizational collapse is addressed and reversed. “I think it is dawning on more and more relevant people that we are looking at a potential complete and utter failure of civilization,” Schiller Institute founder and President Helga Zepp-LaRouche stated today. “You cannot respond to any one crisis, or collapse, or danger, as an individual phenomenon; you have to really address the entire picture as one. Because either we can catalyze some moral response from people who are willing to recognize that what is going on is a civilizational collapse, or else I think we are on a short road to disaster.” Zepp-LaRouche added: “I find it quite remarkable that this subject of a civilizational failure is becoming an issue among numerous important people, the most recent one being UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, who yesterday reviewed the global response to the COVID-19 crisis and the situation of world famine, poverty, and unemployment, and he told a gathering of the UN ECOSOC that no element of the multilateral response has gone as it should. He said that last year more than 3 million people died of Covid, 120 million have fallen into extreme poverty, and the equivalent of 255 million full-time jobs have been lost. And the crisis is far from being over. He said that the crisis is ‘putting multilateralism to the test, and so far, we have failed.’ He added that a complete paradigm shift was needed.” Zepp-LaRouche went on to draw a moral line in the sand: “You have these absolutely incredible pictures of children dying right before the world’s eyes in Yemen and elsewhere, but that doesn’t stop the richest people in the world from having made a $5 trillion increase in their wealth in the last year. How can a Bezos or a Gates or all of these other creeps like Soros, how can they live with themselves, when they know that their mass of wealth is built on the corpses of so many millions of people? I think we should say it that way,” she insisted. She urged LaRouche movement organizers to not be diplomatic, but to get under people’s skin. “I think anybody who sees the combination of the war danger escalating, the famine killing millions of people in several countries, COVID raging—they must react. And against this, the leading elites are showing they are utterly incapable of dealing with this crisis.” “But I’m convinced that this fight can be won,” Zepp-LaRouche concluded, “because it beats the alternative.” The old paradigm is crashing, but if we do our job right, a new paradigm can be won, she stated. But to do that, “I think that the moral question needs to be addressed.”

In an interview with China Radio International on April 8th, Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche spoke positively of yesterday’s phone call between Chinese President Xi Jinping and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. These are two important nations, and stability and progress are useful. Zepp-LaRouche expressed her agreement with Merkel’s opposition to the notion of blocs, which are a form of the geopolitical thinking that led to the two world wars of the 20th century. This stance by Merkel can have a positive impact on the rest of the EU.“Where would the world be as a whole, without the rise of China?” Zepp-LaRouche asked, pointing to the victory for mankind of bringing hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. China’s economic growth despite the Covid pandemic is an important positive development for the world. Although there is a mixed situation of China relations among the EU member states themselves, the situation with the EU bureaucracy in Brussels is that it unfortunately follows the policies of London and Washington, such as in imposing sanctions on China over Xinjiang. The EU is in a terrible state. It failed to handle the Covid crisis. It stands to gain significantly with cooperation with China. Some Europeans are still looking at China as though it were still in the Cultural Revolution, rather than after the results of the Reform and Opening Up. Since China does not pose a threat to Europe, why would Europe need the U.S. as a guarantor of its security? NATO is not providing for the security of Europe, but rather quite the opposite, by carrying out repeated troop exercises towards the borders of Russia. Confrontation is no path forward. On the Biden administration, Zepp-LaRouche said that she had seen nothing positive from the new U.S. administration with regard to Europe. Biden has continued sanctions against Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline to Europe and is pushing Europe towards an alliance against Russia and China. Europe must support its own independence. A world health system is desperately needed, as new Covid variants emerge, possibly overcoming the immunity conferred by the vaccines already developed. This requires the necessary infrastructure to support health, and the urgent development of the underdeveloped parts of the world.