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Feb. 14—The Biden Administration, with a very bad misjudgment of the real condition of Afghanistan after 20 years of NATO’s war there, made a rushed pull-out and then moved to seize all the country’s cash and punish its people with no food, medical care or shelter in the dead of winter. It never even told America’s NATO “allies” what it was doing. It’s leaving a country destroyed.Can the Biden White House now be allowed to make an even worse disaster in Europe—even a nuclear disaster—in a crisis, the “Ukraine crisis,” which could set off a war to destroy humanity itself? The more and more angry and aggressive bluffing of Russia by the Biden Administration over Ukraine has brought us closer to nuclear war than we have ever been since October 1962, when the whole world was terrified by the Cuban Missiles Crisis. One possibility is that Biden and his dubious national security team is looking for a victory to sell at home, by telling us Russia will invade Ukraine next week, tomorrow, any minute … and then when Russia does not invade, telling us Biden’s threat of crushing economic punishment stopped Putin. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said this was the “elaborate charade” yesterday on Twitter. Former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock put out the idea in a column today, writing for the American Committee for U.S.-Russia Accord. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in her own way, hinted at it Sunday on “ABC This Week”: “If we were not threatening the sanctions and the rest, it would guarantee that Putin would invade…. So, if Russia doesn’t invade, it’s not that he never intended to. It’s just that the sanctions worked.” But we cannot rest on hope that this is political fakery. The Biden White House is punishing Afghanistan incompetently, but with a vengeance. It wants to punish Russia and destroy its economy. Senior White House officials said it in a background press briefing Jan. 25: The goal is “hit Putin’s strategic ambitions to industrialize his economy quite hard…. Undercut Putin’s aspirations to exert influence on the world stage.” The officials vowed, “we’re talking about denying to Russia downstream products that are critical to its own ambitions to develop high-tech capabilities in aerospace and defense, lasers and sensors, maritime, AI, robotics, quantum, etc. … And so, as we build this effort with our allies and partners, we’re willing to work with any country in order to deny Russia an input that it needs to diversify its economy.” With that goal, Biden’s team—which had “everything under control” in Afghanistan—is daring Russian President Putin to go to war. It is squeezing Ukraine’s President Zelensky so hard that he feels compelled to contradict every Russian invasion forecast that London and Washington make. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, in her widely read analysis Feb. 6, said “We Are 100 Seconds to Midnight on the Doomsday Clock: We Need a New Security Architecture.” Two European bankers put out a call for France to block Ukraine’s entry to NATO and leave the NATO strategic command, now, anything to stop the march toward war. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz went to Ukraine today to say, “The issue of [Ukraine’s] membership in the alliance [NATO] is not on the agenda,” so Russia should stop worrying about it. But the NATO weaponry America is pouring into Ukraine and around it is unprecedented: Ukraine’s Defense Minister admits it now has far more anti-tank missiles than Russian tank targets. We all need to mobilize ourselves, not to “watch and wait,” as most were scared into doing in October 1962. There is no John F. Kennedy here to solve this. The solution is to compel more breaks toward negotiation, and to attack the cause, the threat of hyperinflationary collapse which the Biden Administration and Federal Reserve have done so much to bring on themselves and us. Our next D-Day is Saturday, Feb. 19, the Schiller Institute’s all-day conference with the message of Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s Feb. 6 article: We need a new security architecture, one based on economic recovery and development. Register for the conference and organize others.

Feb. 13—The question of what will happen next, and when, in the contrived confrontation by the NATO bloc against Russia in Europe, remains hanging in the air and very dangerous. More counter forces of sanity are speaking out, but a decisive break is urgent.Over the weekend, U.S. spokesmen continued their drumroll of assertions against Russian aggression, and their bogus charge that Russia will attack Ukraine, in statements by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, speaking from Hawaii, by National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, and by Pentagon spokesman John Kirby. They were militantly vague on when and how. Sullivan on CNN this morning said, on the time frame of a Russian attack, that we are “in the window,” and it could be “any day now,” or otherwise “after the Olympics” which end on Feb. 20. Sullivan said that Russia can be expected to stage a false-flag incident, because, for among other reasons, it is just “consistent with the Russian playbook” to do that kind of thing. No evidence is needed. Assessing the situation, Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche said today that the “ambiguity of potential false flags will remain, until someone cuts through this…. We need a decisive break.” Former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) spoke out strongly over the weekend, exposing those behind the insane war drive against Russia. She tweeted out a 4-minute clip from her appearance on Fox News Saturday evening, with a tweet explaining how “Biden can very easily prevent a war with Russia by guaranteeing that Ukraine will not become a member of NATO.” On TV, she charged that “Biden and military leaders actually want Russia to invade Ukraine. Why would they do so? It gives Biden the excuse to levy draconian sanctions … and it cements the Cold War in place…. The military-industrial complex is the one that benefits from this; they clearly control the Biden Administration; warmongers on both sides in Washington who have been drumming up these tensions.” There is also an increasing activation and prominence of anti-war groups in the U.S. Besides the NATO focus on confrontation over Ukraine, the global NATO mobilization in the Indo-Pacific is in full swing. After the ministerial QUAD meeting in Australia this past week, the White House issued a 19-page document, “Indo-Pacific Strategy of the United States.” Blinken plugged its world supremacy point of view yesterday, speaking from Honolulu, where he met with foreign ministers of Japan and South Korea. Blinken said that, “In the meeting that the three of us had, we discussed the threat that Russia’s aggression poses—not only to Ukraine, but to the entire international rules-based order, which has provided a foundation for decades of shared security and prosperity, for our people here in this region and, again, around the globe.” He said of his fellow ministers that, “we agreed to stick together in our response to Russia.” It is against his triumphalism that certain opposition viewpoints stand out, which are coming from establishment figures in Europe. On Feb. 11, the French weekly Marianne carried an article headlined, “NATO Exit: Urgency Absolute,” which urges that France leave NATO. That “will signal Europe’s independence from American exceptionalism, the renewal of multilateralism, the emergence of a multipolar world….” It is by German economist Peter Dittus, former Secretary General of the Bank for International Settlements, and former Deputy Governor of the Banque de France Hervé Hannoun, former BIS Deputy Managing Director. Today, a warning is sounded by Russian policy expert Fyodor Lukyanov, “How the World Sleepwalked into Another Cuban Missile Crisis.” In his article in RT, after stressing the current danger over the Ukraine confrontation, he advises that, “The best-case scenario would be the same as during the Cuban Missile Crisis. At some point, both sides would recognize the grave danger posed by further escalation and start direct substantive negotiations in order to work out the fundamentals of mutual guarantees.” The Saturday Feb. 19 Schiller Institute online international conference is a critical contribution toward the “decisive break” we need, to stop the mad mobilization toward collapse and war. Register and spread the word. It is on Feb. 19, 10 a.m. (EST): “100 Seconds to Midnight on the Doomsday Clock: We Need a New Security Architecture!”

In an op-ed published on Feb. 11, 2022, by the French “souverainist” weekly Marianne, Peter Dittus and Hervé Hannoun, argue in favor of a French exit from the integrated command of NATO. The German economist Peter Dittus is the former secretary general of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), while Frenchman Hannoun is its deputy director general. We reprint it here in full:“Faced with the Ukrainian Crisis, France’s NATO-EXIT Is an Absolute Emergency” Breaking with the policy of non-alignment followed by de Gaulle, Giscard and Mitterrand for 43 years, France once again became a member of the integrated military command of NATO in 2009, without the French people having been consulted by referendum. The current Ukrainian crisis reveals the serious perils to which France is exposed by being attached to a defensive collective security organization under the command of the United States that has become expansionist. Since November 2021, the French, like other peoples of the West, have been subjected to an unprecedented mental conditioning conducted by the United States and NATO on the theme of the “imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine,” which may go down in history as an episode of disinformation along the lines of the fabricated intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction in 2003. What is the reality? Millions of Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the two self-proclaimed Donbas people’s republics live under sporadic firing and shelling by the Ukrainian army against separatist forces. The concentration of Russian troops on Ukraine’s borders is obviously aimed at dissuading Kiev from attempting to regain direct control of the enclaves of Donetsk and Luhansk by force. NATO’s successful disinformation on Ukraine has consisted in presenting Putin’s moral obligation to defend these Russian-speaking populations—which Ukraine wants to progressively deprive of the right to speak their language—as a prelude to the total annexation of Ukraine by Russia. The Myth of an ‘Imminent Russian Invasion’ NATO manages to pass off a concentration of Russian troops ready to come to the rescue of Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the Donbas as an “imminent Russian invasion” of the whole of Ukraine, including Odessa, Kharkiv and Kiev. An insane invasion that in reality Russia completely rules out … unless it is pushed into it by a possible prior Ukrainian attack on the Donbas. The only war that NATO seems to be winning is the one of information. We show in our book [OTANexit: Urgence Absolue, Peter Dittus and Hervé Hannoun, Jan. 16, 2022] the striking German propaganda map in the weekly Bild of December 4, 2021, giving an imaginary detailed plan of the “imminent Russian invasion.” The role of propaganda is terrifying, because of the charge of hatred generated by the lies on both sides. On the NATO side, the aggressive and bellicose discourse of Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg is irresistibly reminiscent of the famous Orwellian inversion: “Peace Is War.” And If France Had the Solution? Paris must avoid the military spiral into which the United States and NATO want to drag it. In the coming weeks, it must not allow itself to be involved in a war in Eastern Europe that is not its own. France has already agreed to deploy hundreds of men in a NATO battle group in Estonia. On January 1, it took the lead in the NATO Rapid Response Force, which includes at least 7,700 French soldiers. President Macron has just announced the possible dispatch of 1,000 French troops to Romania under the NATO banner on the “Eastern flank,” in the Black Sea region. The military escalation is dangerous. For the security of the French people, it is necessary to exclude committing the French army under the banner of NATO in a war in Ukraine or Belarus. On the other hand, France has a diplomatic weapon to resolve the serious crisis between NATO and Russia. The detonator of this crisis was the stubbornness of Jens Stoltenberg and the Americans to pursue since 2018 a creeping process of accession of Ukraine to NATO, called “open door policy,” seen by Russia as a threat to its security. To put an end to the current confrontation, President Macron should simply declare solemnly in the name of France that his country will oppose any request from Ukraine to join NATO. As decisions on membership of the Alliance require unanimity, France can exercise a veto. In doing so, the President would be in line with the commitments he made during his 2017 presidential campaign not to support NATO’s expansion to Ukraine. It would be an elegant way out of the crisis. Alas, the French President, during his visit to Moscow and then to Kiev on February 7 and 8, 2022, did not consider this simple solution because French diplomacy did not oppose in the NATO bodies the mad “open door policy” to the membership of Ukraine and Georgia in NATO. On the other hand, France supports NATO and the G7 in their demand for the return of Crimea to Ukraine, knowing full well that it cannot be done without a war, possibly nuclear. American Subordination At the time of the (Maastricht) 1992 referendum on the EU treaty, no one could have imagined that this great project of Mitterrand and Kohl for peace would be deviated from, from 1998 onward, by the American geopolitical project to take de facto control of the European common defense and security policy. This was due to the simultaneous enlargement of the EU and NATO to ten Eastern European countries between 1991 and 2007, and also to President Sarkozy’s decision, with far-reaching consequences, to abandon in 2008 the Gaullist strategic position of refusing to participate in NATO’s integrated military command. From the moment that 21 of the 27 EU countries, including France, became full members of NATO, the initial spirit of Maastricht was betrayed, because “Europe for peace” was inevitably going to be thwarted by the interference of the United States, with its own geopolitical objectives, in the common European defense and security policy. In reality, there can be no independent French or European defense within the current framework of participation in the integrated military command of NATO by France and 21 other European Union states. The concept of “European strategic autonomy” within NATO is an illusion, given the control of the United States over this Alliance. The EU seeks to hide this fundamental flaw behind a vague concept: the “strategic compass.” The fundamental incompatibility between the U.S.-controlled NATO and an independent French or European defense does not prevent our leaders from defending the thesis of complementarity between the EU and NATO in terms of defense, as summarized on December 11, 2021 by the French Minister of Foreign Affairs: “We are keen for the EU and NATO to complement and reinforce each other in order to contribute to strengthening security and defense in Europe. This is the meaning of the strategic compass that will be adopted during the French Presidency of the EU Council.” Defense: The Impasse of ‘At the Same Time’ The EU’s “strategic compass” is above all an effort to provide a conceptual framework for the false idea that “European strategic autonomy” in relation to the United States is compatible with the NATO membership of the vast majority of EU member states. This complementarity between NATO and the EU, the “at the same time” applied to defense, is an illusion. The fussy logic of national independence has given way to the vague and misleading concept of strategic autonomy and the search for interdependence and interoperability with our “allies.” Beyond the immediate crisis surrounding Ukraine, the [French] presidential elections of April 10 and 24 must allow for a decision on the question of NATO. All those who reject NATO’s march towards the war that is brewing on the Eastern borders of the EU have a unique opportunity, with the presidential election of 2022, to send a simple and clear message of peace to the leaders of our country, in one word: NATO-EXIT (Otanexit). It is a question of ensuring that a candidate for peace is elected President, who is committed to putting an end to France’s alignment with NATO. One can think that the outgoing President will want to avoid a debate in the presidential campaign on the question of our military alliances in NATO: alliance with the adventurism of the Anglo-Saxons, whose arrogance was revealed by the Australian submarine affair, unnatural alliance with Islamist Turkey, alliance with Polish nationalism, and tomorrow perhaps, alliance with a Germany that could use NATO as a springboard for its remilitarization, or even alliance with Kosovo against Serbia. This list alone allows us to measure the risks of a collective security system comprising 30 heterogeneous nations, and dominated by one of them. An Unconstitutional ‘Defense Union’ On January 7, 2022, in a joint press conference with President Macron in Paris, the President of the European Commission allowed herself a federalist statement that exceeded her prerogatives: “We agree that we need a real defense union.” In the presence of President Macron, she spoke of adding a “Defense Union” to the Economic and Monetary Union in the future, without taking into account the fact that this statement is contrary to the French Constitution, which is based on national independence, national sovereignty and national defense. It is necessary to oppose the stealthy European federalism that is currently being practiced, which cannot replace a federalism that is democratically accepted—or rejected—by referendum, according to the procedure followed in 1992 by François Mitterrand for the transfer of monetary sovereignty provided for in the Maastricht Treaty. The French people must reject the concept of defense union under the banner of NATO that Ursula von der Leyen wants to impose on them. France’s current alignment with NATO, through its participation in the integrated military command under American leadership, is a strategic dead end for a country with a universal vocation like France. Today, this country has a historic role to play in stopping the march towards war in Europe initiated by the NATO sleepwalkers. France’s exit from NATO, which will mark the end of the alignment of France’s foreign security policy with the United States, will have an immense impact on the world. It will signal Europe’s independence from American exceptionalism, the renewal of multilateralism, the emergence of a multipolar world and the rapid demise of the obsolete NATO framework. France will then rediscover its universal vocation, contributing to the global balance for peace, and playing, thanks to its rediscovered impartiality, a role of synthesis within the P5, the concert of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Russia, and France), a P5 whose composition must be maintained and whose role as regulator of world peace must be enhanced.

Feb.12—The Chickenhawks running the Biden Administration—Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan—have declared that their psychotic plan to unleash the well-armed and well-trained Nazi militia in Ukraine against the Donbas is set to be implemented in the coming week. While Blinken and Sullivan say that a “Russian invasion of Ukraine can come at any moment,” unnamed sources in the White House and in NATO have informed the media that this will take place precisely on Wednesday, Feb. 16. The plan, they failed to report, is to provoke a response from the Russian military to defend their compatriots among the Ukrainian citizens in the Donbas from this Nazi assault, which will then be declared the much-anticipated “Russian invasion.” This, they imagine, will detonate either the West’s “nuclear sanctions” option, which they believe will destroy Russia (but which will do far greater damage to the Anglo-American allies in Europe), or they will go straight to military warfare. Given that the U.S. has just completed a nuclear war-fighting exercise “Global Lightning,” based on the insane, utopian fantasy that a prolonged nuclear war could be fought and won, the human race is facing an existential question—do we have the moral fitness to survive?Two former directors of the Bank for International Settlements, one French and one German, released an extraordinary document on Feb. 11 (see below) calling for France to leave NATO, asserting that NATO is now led by American “expansionists” who are prepared to sacrifice Europe, and perhaps the world, to maintain their past glory as the world’s unipolar controller of all things economic and strategic. (While they blame this entirely on American control of NATO, they do at least acknowledge the British hand: that it is the “alliance with adventurism of the Anglo-Saxons.”) These are not “anti-war activists”—these are rather French and German leaders of the establishment. They assert that the clearly “unprecedented brainwashing conducted by the United States and NATO on the theme of the ‘imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine’” may well “go down in history as an episode of disinformation along the lines of the fabricated intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction in 2003.” The antics of NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg, they add, is reminiscent of the “famous Orwellian inversion: ‘Peace Is War.’” The full document is being circulated in several languages by EIR and the Schiller Institute. What could drive supposedly educated people like Blinken and Sullivan to such madness? The truth of the matter is increasingly clear, both to governments and to a growing plurality of the citizens of the trans-Atlantic nations: The Western world is entering a Dark Age, while most of the rest of the world is being motivated by a new force, represented by the extraordinary Feb. 4 declaration by Russia and China: “On the International Relations Entering a New Era and the Global Sustainable Development.” The document declares the end of the toleration by the world’s nations of unipolar control over the economy and security of the world. The “rules-based order” manufactured by the “only superpower,” which was invented to replace the principles of peaceful coexistence in the UN Charter, will no longer be acknowledged. As the Feb. 4 document states: “The world is going through momentous changes, and humanity is entering a new era of rapid development and profound transformation. It sees the development of such processes and phenomena as multipolarity, economic globalization, the advent of information society, cultural diversity, transformation of the global governance architecture and world order; there is increasing interrelation and interdependence between the States; a trend has emerged towards redistribution of power in the world; and the international community is showing a growing demand for the leadership aiming at peaceful and gradual development.” The human race has today been called upon by history and by the Creator to respond to this moment of truth, to answer the question posed above: Do we have the moral fitness to survive? Will we call upon all nations, and all the diverse cultures of humanity, to join together in this “New Era” of peace through development, or will the remnants of the failed era of empire and geopolitics bring the world to a fiery end? The Schiller Institute, following the conference on the humanitarian disaster in Afghanistan, co-sponsored by the Russian International Affairs Council on Thursday Feb. 10, will hold a full day conference on Saturday, Feb. 19th, on the theme that “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” The invitation to the conference is here: Please register, and circulate the invitation widely.

Feb 5—At 4:00 p.m. on Friday afternoon (Feb. 4), the following headline appeared on the Bloomberg News website: “Russia Invades Ukraine.” Note that it was then midnight in Moscow, and that President Vladimir Putin was not in the country, but in Beijing. For a full 30 minutes, this headline remained on the website, before it was finally removed, with Bloomberg News posting an attempted apology: “We prepare headlines for many scenarios and one of those headlines was inadvertently published at around 4 p.m. ET today on our website. We deeply regret the error.”Error? For months the Western media, with Bloomberg News right up front, have peddled the lie that a Russian invasion of Ukraine was “imminent.” The U.S. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines briefed NATO leaders in October that the invasion would come in the last weeks of January or the early weeks of February. Day after day the lie was peddled that over 100,000 Russian troops were poised for the invasion on the Ukraine border, despite denials by not only Moscow, but even by Kiev! Error? Keep in mind that Sir Michael Bloomberg made his billions with a software which provided information on every trade taking place in the world in microseconds. “The chance that this was an accident is essentially zero,” Helga Zepp-LaRouche exclaimed today. “There must be a Congressional investigation immediately.” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he could not say whether or not it was an accident, but in any case, “This is a perfect demonstration of how dangerous the situation is when provoked by the endless aggressive statements that come from Washington, London and from other European governments. This is probably also a great demonstration of how such messages can lead to irreparable consequences.” Who is Sir Michael Bloomberg? Not only is he “Mr. Wall Street,” with his computer software used in virtually every financial institution, but he is also “Mr. Green New Deal,” taking great pleasure in the fact that he personally financed the campaign that shut down half of the U.S. coal mines, and also served as the United Nations’ Special Envoy on Climate Ambition and Solutions. At the Glasgow COP26 climate conference in November he announced a new effort aimed at closing a quarter of the world’s 2,445 coal plants, as well as stopping efforts underway to build 519 new coal plants by 2025. As any African leader will tell you, this means poverty and death for Africa. The fact that it is Michael Bloomberg, who is the operative in this war-mongering ploy, further proves the point emphasized for the past 50 years by Lyndon LaRouche and EIR: It is the collapse of the Western financial system (now apparent to all but the morally blind) which is the driving force for war, not the fake geopolitical accusations about “aggression” or “human rights abuse.” Not coincidentally, this incident comes on the same day that Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping met in Beijing, releasing a communiqué, titled “Joint Statement of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on the International Relations Entering a New Era and the Global Sustainable Development.” To understand the profound importance of this historic document, it is instructive to read what a leading mouthpiece for the British Empire and the City of London, the Daily Telegraph, has to say about it. Under the headline, “Russia and China Rise from Their Knees To Challenge U.S. Dominance,” The Telegraph writes: “The message here is anything but routine. At a moment of immense international tension, Russia and China are asserting the arrival of a new geopolitical era. From now on, the dominance of the U.S.-led global West will no longer be taken for granted—or tolerated.” It is quite interesting that they dropped the usual phrase, “U.S.-led international order,” effectively acknowledging that the U.S. is no longer the “world’s only superpower,” but at best the leader of the “West.” The Telegraph continues: “After decades of humiliation, the world’s autocratic superpowers have risen from their knees and will now up-end the inequitable post-Cold War world order.” But they add, we are now entering “a long and frosty Cold War Two.” They also effectively acknowledge that the multiple efforts to turn Russia and China against each other have failed: “The hope that Mr. Xi might be persuaded to restrain his ally or remain aloof—or conversely that Mr. Putin could be enlisted to help contain China—has been dashed.” Unstated, but implied, is that all that is left for the dying British Empire is war, both military and economic warfare, in order to return Russia and China to their knees. Helga Zepp-LaRouche addressed this utopian insanity in an article to be released soon, “100 Seconds to Midnight on the Doomsday Clock—We Need a New Security Architecture!” This is a reference to Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which has kept its annual Doomsday Clock at 100 seconds to midnight for the third year in a row. Zepp-LaRouche insists that the new security architecture, demanded by both Russia and China, must include all nations; must include the right to development for all nations; and must end forever the Empire’s Malthusian paradigm. On February 19 the Schiller Institute will sponsor a virtual conference on this existential strategic crisis. It is essential, Zepp-LaRouche declared, that people everywhere recognize the incredible potential of this moment. Arriving at the brink of extinction is waking people up, causing them to look to see who has been lying and who has been telling the truth—and most important, who knows the necessary solution. This is the LaRouche Moment in history.

What if the U.S. and the U.K. declared war, but nobody came? Day after day the U.S. and U.K. media post screaming headlines about the imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine. Today’s edition includes the Daily Mail reporting that the U.K. government will announce moves to “target Russia’s strategic and financial interests tomorrow,” while Foreign Secretary Liz Truss ranted to Sky News: “Currently, the economic sanctions are fairly narrowly drawn, so we could only target companies with a direct involvement in destabilizing Ukraine. What we are looking to do is widen that so any company of interest to the Kremlin and the regime in Russia would be able to be targeted, so there will be nowhere to hide for Putin’s oligarchs, for Russian companies involved in propping up the Russian state. That’s what we are looking at doing this week.”This follows the open admission by the White House in a published rant on Jan. 25 by a “senior administration official” that U.S sanctions are intended to “hit Putin’s strategic ambitions to industrialize his economy.” There it is—bring down the Russian state, and stop Russia’s industrialization. Hitler had a similar ambition, and it is hard not to recognize the comparison to today. That insanity resulted in the death of 73 million souls. There are major differences, of course—for one, the U.S., U.K., and Russia have nuclear weapons, and 73 million or more would likely be killed on the first day. Nor is the U.S. hiding its intention to use nuclear weapons. Recall that U.S. Strategic Command chief Adm. Charles Richard said in February 2021 that nuclear war is no longer considered “unlikely,” but is now “a very real possibility” due to the rise of China and Russia. On Jan. 25, 2022 U.S. Strategic Command announced the kickoff this week of “Global Lightning 22,” “an annual command post exercise designed to train Department of Defense forces and assess joint operational readiness across USSTRATCOM mission areas,” that this year is being conducted “in coordination with U.S. Indo Pacific Command.” Newsweek yesterday quoted Hans M. Kristensen, the director of the Nuclear Information Project for the Federation of American Scientists, that the exercise “includes practicing operations during a trans-/post-attack nuclear environment, including reconstitution, redirection and targeting of STRATCOM forces.” In other words, it not only contemplates nuclear first use by one side or the other, but also continued nuclear warfighting after the initial exchange. Then there is the “cheering on” of today’s Nazis. A Fox News report (with help from AP) today runs the headline with kicker: Ukrainian Volunteer Forces Prepare To Fight Off Russian Invasion as U.S. Troops Deploy to Eastern Europe—More than 130,000 Ukrainian volunteers are on reserve to defend against a potential Russian invasion." Such heroic coverage leaves out the fact that the “volunteers” they interview are members of the neo-Nazi militia, condemned even by the Israeli government as fascists. So what about the Ukraine government itself, and the Ukraine military? Today’s “egg on your face” story comes from Reuters on Jan. 28, claiming that three “unnamed U.S. officials” had informed them that the Russian military buildup along the Ukraine border had “expanded” to include “blood products” and other medical supplies, which certainly shows (they say) that Putin is prepared for an “imminent” invasion, as CNN says White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki has insisted. Not so, said the Ukraine Defense Ministry in a Jan. 29 statement: “The Center for Operational Information commented on information spread in some media about the alleged accumulation of blood supplies by the Russian Federation in the troops near the Ukrainian borders. First of all, it should be noted that this information, with reference to anonymous officials, was not confirmed by any official source from the relevant agencies of the partner countries. Monitoring and analysis of the current situation around the Ukrainian borders does not record such activities. This is evidenced by the exchange of information between intelligence services and foreign partners. Such information ‘interventions’ are an element of information and psychological warfare, the purpose of which is to provoke fear and panic in our society. The Operational Information Center urges not to disseminate unverified information from anonymous sources and to use official data.” Is this the nation we are to “defend” by going to war with Russia, and possibly also China? We must assure the maximum possible viewership for the Jan. 22 Schiller Institute forum: “A Difference In Leadership: Can War with Russia Still Be Averted?” featuring Helga Zepp-LaRouche and First Deputy Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the UN Dmitry Polyanskiy, along with host Dennis Speed, LaRouche Organization expert Harley Schlanger, EIR Economics Editor Paul Gallagher, and Schiller Institute Representative at the United Nations Richard A. Black.

The Russian Federation continues to insist that the United States and NATO commit to satisfying Russia’s need for assurances that its national security requirements will be respected. But the responses this week — delivered officially by the U.S. and NATO — fall far short of the mark. While offering room for negotiation on secondary matters, the U.S. and NATO have given no positive response on Russia’s core security demands.Russia, which is moving forward with military exercises in Belarus and the Arctic, and organizing training drills using its nuclear forces, has repeatedly made clear that failure to respond will force the use of “military or military-technical measures.” Will those measures include the forward deployment of hypersonic nuclear missiles? Placing short-range nuclear missiles in Kaliningrad? The U.S. maintains some 200 nuclear gravity bombs in Europe, through joint nuclear missions. If Russia moves to bring similar pressure to bear on the United States, how small will become the window of decision for responding to a real (or perceived) nuclear attack? You and I can’t count on U.S. politicians, British imperialists, or NATO commanders to get this right — to avoid a situation which, whether through calculation or accident, could rapidly escalate to an unsurvivable nuclear exchange that would kill hundreds of millions of human beings within an hour and devastate civilization globally, perhaps permanently. Neither can the NATO/Anglo-American maniacs attempting to force Russia and China into submission count on the acquiescence of their supposed partners and instruments. Secretary Blinken claims that NATO is unified, that there “is no light between” the views of the U.S. and other NATO countries. But he is wrong. Those intent on crushing Russia fret that a single NATO country could destroy the consensus on which its decisions must be made. Will Croatia stand firm? Will Bulgaria? Will Hungary dutifully play its suicidal role? Will Germany, after its 1941-1945 attack on the Soviet Union, truly set up another war against Russia? Will diplomats, politicians, generals, and thinkers break ranks? This is the unanswered question of the moment. As Russian diplomats are kicked out of Washington, D.C., as American diplomats reportedly plan to leave Beijing, as the media drumbeat for war intensifies and as supporters of peace are cast as traitors — as weapons fly into Ukraine, as new sanctions are mulled — as calls for censorship grow — will you stand up for the dignity of the human species, and for your own life as well? Will you overthrow the hideous Malthusian dogma that says we are too numerous, and the false culture that says we are animals? Will we be here to marvel at the shocking observations the James Webb Space Telescope will soon be transmitting back to Earth? A crisis of this magnitude — an absolute branching point in history — demands great things of us. The LaRouche movement, headed by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, has warned of the magnitude of the crisis, to which increasing numbers are awakening, and has committed itself to catalyzing the needed new paradigm on this planet. In his poem The Artists, Friedrich Schiller — the namesake of the Schiller Institute — expressed the awesome responsibility that forces itself upon each of us today. “The dignity of man into your hands is given, “Protector be! “It sinks with you! With you it is arisen!” Can the future count on you?

Today Secretary of State Antony Blinken held a State Department press conference, and closed-door sessions with members of Congress, announcing that the U.S. has provided written responses to Russia’s December texts of proposed security agreements. He also stated, “Additionally, NATO developed and will deliver to Moscow its own paper with ideas and concerns about collective security in Europe—and that paper fully reinforces ours, and vice versa. There is no daylight among the United States and our allies and partners on these matters.”In reality, while Blinken’s remarks repeated his usual dark litany of accusations and threats against Russia, daylight is showing through from many directions, on how dangerous and how “British” this whole confrontationism is. Blinken may blow clouds of smoke about “unity,” input from “allies,” and the like, but reality is otherwise. Even a reporter asked Blinken, you talk about “a unified approach with Europe. What do you make of Germany’s stance?” She said, “Would you say that you’re happy or satisfied with Germany sending helmets to Ukraine instead of arms shipments?” Blinken could only huff and puff about how each country has “different capabilities.” In brief, what Blinken did say in his press briefing, was that Russia is the aggressor against Ukraine, and warned, “We’ve lined up steep consequences, should Russia choose further aggression.” Blinken reiterated his “two path” sophistic approach to Russia: that Western militarization in Eastern Europe is the path of deterrence, but otherwise, the U.S. and the West are open to diplomacy, “should Russia choose it.” On the so-called deterrence path, Blinken gave a full report. He said, “Three deliveries of U.S. defensive military assistance arrived in Kiev this week, carrying additional javelin missiles and other anti-armor systems, 283 tons of ammunition and non-lethal equipment…. More deliveries are expected in the days to come. We have provided more defensive security assistance to Ukraine in the past year than in any previous year…. Last week, I authorized U.S. allies—including Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—to provide U.S.-origin military equipment…. Also last week, we notified Congress of our intent to deliver to Ukraine the Mi-17 helicopters….” And 8,500 U.S. servicemen are on “heightened readiness to deploy” in case needed to “to harden the Allies’ eastern flank.” Among the expanding opposition to this dangerous showdown are several political leaders and formations in Europe. In Croatia, President Zoran Milanovic said this week that his country will in no way get involved in the Ukraine crisis, nor send soldiers. He states that Ukraine does not belong in NATO, and that it was the European Union (N.B., including the U.K.) that triggered a coup in Kiev in 2014. Moreover, Milanovic said, as reported by Euractiv, that the crisis has nothing to do with Ukraine or Russia, but is connected with the dynamics of the United States internal situation, and that international security problems reflect “inconsistencies and dangerous behavior” by the U.S.A. In Spain, the Unidos Podemos party and eight smaller parties, all nine leftwing members of the Socialist Party’s governing coalition, have publicly opposed Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s decision to send military forces to participate in NATO’s buildup of forces against Russia, and are calling for an anti-war mobilization like that of 2003 which drove out the Aznar government that had deployed Spain’s military forces for George Bush’s war on Iraq. The existence of NATO itself is being questioned. On Friday, Jan. 28, French President Emmanuel Macron will be speaking by phone to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Today in Paris, officials of the Normandy group of four nations—France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine, met for eight hours, and issued a statement. They plan to meet again in Berlin next month. Today, Sputnik news ran an article reviewing the opposition in France and elsewhere in Europe to the U.S./U.K. showdown with Russia. Headlined, “French Politician: Puzzled by U.S. Warmongering, France & Germany Trying to Avoid EU Militarisation,” the article is based on an interview with Karel Vereycken, Vice-President of Solidarité & Progrès in France, who said that “France and Germany aren’t interested in dancing to the U.S., the U.K. and NATO’s tune—for good reason….” The Schiller Institute is providing the critical platform internationally to wake up the world to the war danger and to what has to be done in foreign relations and economically, including emergency humanitarian action, to stop the conditions and perpetrators who created this terrible emergency. The website offers ammunition, and another international conference to rally action is in the works for early February.

From the moment last Friday that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken announced that they had met and agreed that the U.S. would provide a written response to Russia’s urgent security concerns, the British have been working overtime to make sure that nothing of the sort ever happens—or at least that whatever written response Blinken provides will be a further anti-Russian provocation.First, there are the stepped-up direct military deployments: another American planeload of sophisticated weapons for the pro-Nazi Kiev government; the transfer of Ukrainian rocket launchers and other heavy weapons to the conflict zone with Donbas; and the Pentagon confirming that President Biden had instructed them to put 8,500 U.S.-based troops on heightened alert for potential deployment to Europe, based on a briefing on “military options” presented to him by Defense Secretary Austin and Joint Chiefs of Staff head Gen. Milley. Those options included sending up to 50,000 U.S. troops to Eastern Europe—steps which the Russians will read as a direct military threat. Then there are the British psy-ops: British intelligence reached a fact-less finding that Russia intended to topple the Kiev government and put in their own puppet (denied by the Russian government); an anonymous diplomat in Beijing reported that Chinese President Xi Jinping had asked Putin to hold off on invading Ukraine until after the Winter Olympics (denied by the Chinese and Russian governments); and yet another round of anti-Russian bravado by Blinken (there will be “massive consequences” for Russia if a “single additional Russian force” enters Ukraine) and by Karen Pierce, the British ambassador to the United States (“you’ll always find the U.K. at the forward end of the spectrum” in going after Russia). “What is clear,” Helga Zepp-LaRouche reported today, “is that we are in an extremely dangerous situation and, given the number of lunatics in leading positions and also the absolute certainty of miscalculation based on wrong epistemological approaches, I think the only conclusion we can have out of this present situation is that we have to go into an all-out anti-war mobilization, waking up especially the American public, because that is the main force which is uninformed about what the danger of the situation is.” Russia expects an answer this week, she continued, and that answer cannot fail to address their existential security concerns by putting in writing guarantees that NATO will cease its eastward expansion up to Russia’s borders. But at this point, everything indicates that the U.S. will do nothing of the kind. If that is the case, Zepp-LaRouche warned, then we are in a showdown for a countdown to Russia’s activation of “military technical measures” of their own—which could include the deployment of hypersonic Zircon missiles on submarines within five-minutes flight time of both American coasts. For an anti-war mobilization to be successful, however, it must not simply issue pronouncements against war, but it must address two key policy points: 1) identify who is behind the war drive, and why (the collapsing trans-Atlantic financial empire); and 2) present a program to build a durable peace—based on the policies of global economic reconstruction encapsulated in LaRouche’s Four Laws. As then-presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche summarized the matter nearly 40 years ago, in the opening sentence of a March 30, 1984 “Draft Memorandum of Agreement between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.”: “Article 1: General conditions for peace. The political foundation for durable peace must be: a) The unconditional sovereignty of each and all nation-states, and b) Cooperation among sovereign nation-states to the effect of promoting unlimited opportunities to participate in the benefits of technological progress, to the mutual benefit of each and all.”

Since the COP26 flop, along with the inevitable economic breakdown from the casino-monetarist system, and the green madness to-date, the geopolitical confrontationist hysteria against China and Russia from the U.S./UK/NATO alignment has reached the stage of war provocation. This is exactly the dynamic that the Schiller Institute has warned of, and its process of international dialogue sought to prevent. More voices are now sounding the alarm. The urgent task is to create a mighty chorus.Peter van Buren, an American with a long career in foreign service, has issued a warning posted today, in an article titled, “What Will Be the Casus Belli for War with China?” He makes the point that China “appears to be the next war now searching for a reason.” When it comes to making war, in recent decades, the U.S. “created a false pretext for doing so,” in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, and so on. In contrast, in the case of Pearl Harbor, the aggression against the U.S. was real. But in these other cases, the casus belli was made up, like WMD in Iraq. The same thing is going on regarding China, and the danger is extreme. Tulsi Gabbard, U.S. political leader based in Hawaii, ripped into the rabid war-talk of Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi) this week. Wicker, the second-highest-ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said on Fox TV, Dec. 7, that U.S. military options against Russia must include that “we stand off with our ships in the Black Sea, and we rain down destruction” on Russia. “I would not rule out American troops on the ground. We don’t rule out first use nuclear action.” Gabbard responded on Fox TV last evening, "Anyone who would propose or even consider what he is saying as an option must be insane, a sociopath or a sadist. Let’s go and launch a nuclear attack that would start a war that would destroy the American people, our country and the world and, oh, also, the Ukrainians so that we can save Ukraine’s democracy? I mean, it literally is insane. “And the crazy thing is, Senator Wicker is not an outlier. He is the number two Republican on the Senate Armed Forces Committee, and you are hearing the same kind of rhetoric coming from Democrats and Republicans in Congress and the administration and in the media—no problem with this because they actually agree with this. They are pushing this same narrative themselves, which is why this is such a dangerous, dangerous situation…. We are being pushed closer and closer to a hot war, a nuclear war.” By whom? By “the same neocons and neo libs in Washington who dragged our country into regime change wars in places like Iraq and Libya and Syria.”There are consequences to leaders in our country, influential people in our country to throwing things out like, [that] a first use nuclear attack is on the table. This directly undermines our national security, and it directly puts the American people and our country and the world at risk." Against these voices of reason, comes the U.S-convened Summit of Democracy, which opened today, online from Washington, D.C., and stands out for its lies and confrontation. China and Russia were not invited. Pakistan declined, given their exclusion. Many poor nations were among the roster of 80 countries, participating with short messages out of fear of retribution. President Biden and Sec. of State Blinken announced that a new organization to combat corruption and misinformation that, they assert, threatens democracy, is being formed, called the Global Anti-Corruption Consortium, which has funding from the United Kingdom, Taiwan, the Open Society Foundation (George Soros,) Denmark, and the United States. The State Department’s Agency for International Development (USAID) will start up a Partnership for Democracy program, under the direction of its administrator, Samantha Power, who has been in the forefront of U.S. initiatives at this Summit and at COP26. The USAID was founded 60 years ago, under President John F. Kennedy, for the purpose of providing aid where needed, and doing good. It has been itself subverted years ago to serve British geopolitical purposes, as shown in the extreme by its latest mandate to enforce “democracy.” Now is the time to mobilize for true emergency aid, rebuilding war torn nations, starting with Afghanistan, and building the world economy. Kennedy’s mandate for the USAID was seen in action early today, when China’s air shipment arrived at Kabul International Airport, with 800,000 doses of vaccine against COVID-19, and other supplies. More will be coming soon. Tulsi Gabbard, who is an Army Reserve officer, currently serving at Ft. Bragg, displayed the needed spirit when she spoke out Dec. 7 on Pearl Harbor Day (before Wicker’s insanity), wearing her Army fatigues, delivering a call to action (on Twitter): “It’s time for anyone who cares about their loved ones, other Americans, and all human beings and wildlife, to wake up to this very grim reality of what lies ahead … if we allow the mainstream media, military industrial complex, and self-serving politicians to lead us into the apocalypse of World War 3.”

Both President Joe Biden and President Vladimir Putin made public comments today about the actual content of their summit discussion yesterday. Biden announced that he is working on a further meeting to address Russia’s red-line concerns regarding Ukraine and NATO. “The positive news is that, thus far, our teams have been in constant contact,” Biden said, adding that he hoped to announce by Dec. 10 that there would be a meeting in short order involving Russia, the U.S., and at least four major NATO allies, to address “Russia’s concerns relative to NATO,” and to try to “bring down the temperature along the Eastern Front.”President Putin today again explained what those red-line concerns are: “It would be criminal inaction on our side to spinelessly watch all that’s taking place” in Ukraine, he said, and continuing: “We have a right to provide for our own safety. U.S./NATO weapons are the issue.” As Putin has repeatedly explained, the encroachment of NATO up to Russia’s very borders over the last 20 years, and now the explicit threat of having Ukraine join NATO or otherwise have American and NATO troops on its territory, makes Moscow indefensible—other than by the use of hypersonic nuclear weapons. Each side would then have nuclear weapons within 5-minutes flight time from the other, Putin pointed out. Or would it be four minutes? Right after yesterday’s summit, Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov told the press that Biden said to Putin at their summit that he would discuss NATO’s eastward expansion with his Alliance colleagues. That appears to have been born out by Biden’s own comments today. But on Washington’s side, the lies are coming fast and thick—signaling the enormous danger of war that not only still exists, but is growing by the hour. The war party has moved to entirely take control of strategic policy out of Biden’s hands, and to immediately escalate the provocations against both Russia and China to the snapping point. Secretary of State Tony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan participated in the summit with Putin, acting like Biden’s chaperones the whole time, while Putin sat alone. Blinken and Sullivan then emerged from that meeting to immediately run to the press to issue statements about what had supposedly happened at the summit—making zero mention of the planned meeting to address Russia’s concerns. Instead, Sullivan said that Biden read Putin the Riot Act. Blinken was chillingly clear in delivering threats and warnings to both Russia and China, blaming them for the Ukraine and Taiwan crises, respectively, and threatening a blistering U.S. response to any military moves those countries might make. Blinken was particularly brazen about the Establishment’s gambit in pulling out of Afghanistan, actually arguing that the American people do still have “an appetite … to re-engage overseas if necessary”—i.e., launch more perennial wars, only this time directly against Russia and China, exactly as Lyndon LaRouche had warned all along was the true strategic intention behind the Libya, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, etc. provocations. If there is no significant opposition in the U.S. to such a war between the superpowers, then it will happen, Helga Zepp-LaRouche warned today. The Ukraine crisis is far from over, and the London-led war party is on a rampage, as can be seen in Blinken’s threats against both Russia and China and his explicit intent to starve Afghanistan into submission—a Nuremberg crime if ever there was one. Will Americans just look the other way while a sitting Senator, Robert Wicker of Mississippi, states on national TV that “I would not rule out American troops on the ground” in Ukraine, and that the U.S. also shouldn’t “rule out first-use nuclear action” to deter Russia? Zepp-LaRouche further warned that, if this goes any further, the countries in Europe where nuclear weapons are stationed will shortly cease to exist. On both sides of the Atlantic, it should begin to dawn on people what the existence of hypersonic weapons actually means. In her weekly webcast today, Zepp-LaRouche summarized the situation and issued a call to action: “My assessment [of the summit] is that we are still sitting on a powder keg of potential nuclear war…. I think this is all extremely dangerous and we urgently need a new security architecture in Europe and in Eurasia which rules out the possible danger of a nuclear war…. Hopefully reason will prevail and this incredibly dangerous situation can be turned into something else.” She reminded listeners of her proposed Operation Ibn Sina, in which the world’s major powers would join efforts to stop the looming mass deaths in Afghanistan, and provide that country with a modern health system, adequate food, and the infrastructure needed to make that possible. “Under conditions of a pandemic—which not only has health implications, but is a complete threat to the economy, as we see in many countries—the only way you can address the most urgent issues facing humanity is to say: We have to concentrate on the common aims of mankind, namely to defeat this pandemic, and we have to work together internationally. This would be a step in the direction of overcoming this insane, extremely dangerous geopolitical confrontation.” Zepp-LaRouche urged listeners to mobilize with the Schiller Institute to stop the danger of nuclear war. “And cooperate with us on Operation Ibn Sina, because it is a step towards defusing an otherwise extremely dangerous situation.”

By Harley SchlangerDec. 6 -- On December 9-10, the Biden administration will convene a "Summit for Democracy", with the announced intent "to renew democracy at home and confront autocracies abroad." The themes to be addressed are 1.) "Defending against authoritarianism"; 2.) "Addressing and fighting corruption"; and 3.) "Promoting respect for human rights."