Out of the frying pan, into the fire? Will the U.S. blindly follow the British lead to turn the retreat from Afghanistan into more provocations against Russia and China? Or can we learn from our catastrophic mistakes, and join Afghanistan's neighbors to engage in cooperative, mutually beneficial development policies, to bring peace to the war-torn country. Further, it is time to end the U.S. economic enslavement to British neoliberal economic/financial policies -- No to the Great Reset, instead, implement LaRouche's Four Laws!
Pessimists might be shocked by some recent developments. A Putin-Biden phone call ending in a call for joint action against cyber warfare? A unanimous U.N. Security Council vote to open the door for humanitarian aid to be distributed to "all parts of Syria"? How about a U.S. official commenting favorably on a Taliban-Afghan government meeting in Tehran, saying that what Iran is doing "may well be constructive"? The key is ending the dangerous application of British imperial geopolitics, which has dominated strategic relations for most of the last two centuries. For a road map to peaceful cooperation in Afghanistan, read Helga Zepp-LaRouche's statement, "Afghanistan at a Crossroads: Graveyard for Empires, or Start of a New Era?" Contact: harleysch@gmail.com
The U.S. and NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan brings to an end 20 years of a misguided military operation and places squarely on the table the difference in outcomes achieved through geopolitics and through cooperative development. We never should have been in Afghanistan. The 9/11 attacks were not organized by a group of 19 individuals coordinated from a cave. The hijackers drew on external support during their time in the United States, and it came not from Osama bin Laden operating in Afghanistan, but from Saudi Arabia. There was no military mission to achieve in Afghanistan.But it served as the first in a new series of wars, based on a new paradigm of geopolitics that flouted international law and asserted a Responsibility to Protect that demanded military action to interfere in the internal affairs of other nations based on the flimsiest (and most easily faked) of pretexts. As Helga Zepp-LaRouche writes in her Afghanistan at a Crossroads: “The strategic turbulence caused by the withdrawal of NATO troops from Afghanistan, offers an excellent opportunity for a reassessment of the situation, for a correction of political direction and a new solution-oriented policy. The long tradition of geopolitical manipulation of this region … must be buried once and for all, never to be revived.” The world is not a zero-sum “Great Game.” Chinese Vice President Wang Qishan expressed the potential for U.S.-Chinese cooperation: “The biggest challenge for the United States is not China. It is in the United States itself. Its strategy toward China must avoid forming a vicious circle of misleading and misjudgment. As long as we uphold the concept of a shared destiny for all mankind, the issues between China and the United States will not be fundamentally opposed and irreconcilable, and a path of peaceful coexistence and cooperation will be found.” Finding the path towards cooperation requires thinking of the future, drawing us to look, as Hussein Askary expressed it on Saturday’s LaRouche Organization event, not at the mud under our feet, but towards the stars over our heads. International cooperation on the physical infrastructural development of the broader region will bring benefits to Afghanistan and its neighbors that far surpass what could be achieved without that integration. This will require engineering. It will require technical support. And it will require stable financing. This is an opportunity to bring neighbors to the table and to draw on expertise around the world. The how-to book has quite literally already been written—by EIR and the Schiller Institute—in the form of a program for trans-national infrastructure and large-scale industrialization and agricultural technology deployment. “For all these reasons,” Zepp-LaRouche writes, “the future development of Afghanistan represents a fork in the road for all mankind. At the same time, it is a perfect demonstration of the opportunity that lies in the application of the Cusan principle of the Coincidentia Oppositorum, the coincidence of opposites…. In Afghanistan, it holds true more than anywhere else in the world: The new name for peace is development!” It is only by abandoning geopolitics and adopting domestic policies to launch an economic renaissance and crush the power of finance, that the United States could qualify itself to play a useful role in the world. America’s urgently needed missions will be the subject of an upcoming pamphlet from The LaRouche Organization. The work of the greatest recent American thinker on the issue of development—Lyndon LaRouche—is the topic of a LaRouche Legacy Foundation August 14 online seminar, on the occasion of “The 50th Anniversary of LaRouche’s Stunning Forecast of August 15, 1971.”
Dramatic developments are taking place over the past days which make clear that the world is sitting at a crossroads. Two clearly distinct ideas about the nature of man are contending for the future of human civilization. One, which could well lead to the destruction of civilization itself in a nuclear holocaust, sides with the Aristotelian outlook of the British Empire, that some people are born to rule and others to serve, that human beings are as defined by Thomas Hobbes, as “all against all,” with nations following the same logic, locked into geopolitical laws of zero-sum “survival of the fittest.” The other view believes that: “Development holds the key to the people’s well-being, [and] no country should be left behind. All nations are equally entitled to development opportunities and rights to development.” While it would be understandable that one may think this statement came from Franklin D. Roosevelt as he planned his postwar vision for the role of a United Nations, it is in fact the words of Xi Jinping, speaking on July 6 to delegates of 500 parties and institutions from around the world, representing 160 countries, fully three-fourths of the human race, joining in support of the principle of “Peace Through Development,” as intended by China’s Belt and Road Initiative.Today, the Schiller Institute’s founder and president Helga Zepp-LaRouche released a statement titled: “Afghanistan at a Crossroads: Graveyard for Empires or Start of a New Era?” She posits that the policies taken by the world’s nations today on the future of Afghanistan not only affects every citizen of every country, in the sense that the danger of terrorism and drug proliferation affect us all, but also because it could well determine the fate of mankind itself. The only solution to the Afghanistan quagmire, she writes, is for the great nations of the world, and all the nations of the region, to join forces in a “Great Project” to develop Afghanistan as the hub for the New Silk Road, both East-West development corridors connecting East Asia, Central Asia, West Asia, Eastern Europe and Western Europe, and North-South development corridors linking Russia, China, Iran, India and Pakistan. Is it possible? Or is it, as seen by the geopoliticians of the British Empire, contrary to their warped sense of “human nature,” which will always seek out an advantage against “the other”? Will Americans follow this British prescription for imperial “divide and rule,” or will they recall the spirit of the U.S. Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Was this intended only for those who follow so-called “Western values,” and who follow the so-called “rules-based order,” or is it indeed intended for all mankind?
After the hasty withdrawal of U.S. and NATO troops from Afghanistan—U.S. troops, except for a few security forces, were flown out in the dark of night without informing Afghan allies—this country has become, for the moment but likely not for long, the theater of world history. The news keeps pouring in: On the ground, the Taliban forces are making rapid territorial gains in the north and northeast of the country, which has already caused considerable tension and concern in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, and they have captured the western border town Islam Qala, which handles significant trade flows with Iran. At the same time, intense diplomatic activity is ongoing among all those countries whose security interests are affected by the events in Afghanistan: Iran, Pakistan, India, Russia, China, to name only the most important.Can an intra-Afghan solution be found? Can a civil war between the Afghan government and the Taliban be prevented? Can terrorist groups, such as ISIS, which is beginning to regain a hold in the north, and Al-Qaeda, be disbanded? Or will the war between Afghan factions continue, and with it the expansion of opium growing and export, and the global threat of Islamic terrorism? Will Afghanistan once again sink into violence and chaos, and become a threat not only to Russia and China, but even to the United States and Europe? If these questions are to be answered in a positive sense, it is crucial that the United States and Europe first answer the question, with brutal honesty, of how the war in Afghanistan became such a catastrophic failure, a war waged for a total of 20 years by the United States, the strongest military power in the world, together with military forces from 50 other nations. More than 3,000 soldiers of NATO and allied forces, including 59 German soldiers, and a total of 180,000 people, including 43,000 civilians, lost their lives. This was at a financial cost for the U.S. of more than $2 trillion, and of €47 billion for Germany. Twenty years of horror in which, as is customary in war, all sides were involved in atrocities with destructive effects on their own lives, including the many soldiers who came home with post-traumatic stress disorders and have not been able to cope with life since. The Afghan civilian population, after ten years of war with the Soviets in the 1980s followed by a small break, then had to suffer another 20 years of war with an almost unimaginable series of torments. It was clear from the start that this war could not be won. Implementation of NATO’s mutual defense clause under Article 5 after the 9/11 terrorist attacks was based on the assumption that Osama bin Laden and the Taliban regime were behind those attacks, which would thus justify the war in Afghanistan. But as U.S. Senator Bob Graham, the Chairman of the Congressional “Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001,” repeatedly pointed out in 2014, the then-last two U.S. presidents, Bush and Obama, suppressed the truth about who had commissioned 9/11. And it was only because of that suppression that the threat to the world from ISIS then became possible. Graham said at a 2014 interview in Florida: “There continue to be some untold stories, some unanswered questions about 9/11. Maybe the most fundamental question is: Was 9/11 carried out by 19 individuals, operating in isolation, who, over a period of 20 months, were able to take the rough outlines of a plan that had been developed by Osama bin Laden, and convert it into a detailed working plan; to then practice that plan; and finally, to execute an extremely complex set of assignments? Let’s think about those 19 people. Very few of them could speak English. Very few of them had even been in the United States before. The two chairs of the 9/11 Commission, Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, have said that they think it is highly improbable that those 19 people could have done what they did, without some external support during the period that they were living in the United States. I strongly concur…. Where did they get their support?” This question has still not been answered in satisfactory manner. The passing of the JASTA Act (Justice Against State Sponsors of Terrorism) in the U.S., the disclosure of the 28 previously classified pages of the Joint Congressional Inquiry report into 9/11 that were kept secret for so long, and the lawsuit that the families of the 9/11 victims filed against the Saudi government delivered sufficient evidence of the actual financial support for the attacks. But the investigation of all these leads was delayed with bureaucratic means. The only reason the inconsistencies around 9/11 are mentioned here, is to point to the fact that the entire definition of the enemy in this war was, in fact, wrong from the start. In a white paper on Afghanistan published by the BüSo (Civil Rights Movement Solidarity in Germany) in 2010, we pointed out that a war in which the goal has not been correctly defined, can hardly be won, and we demanded, at the time, the immediate withdrawal of the German Army. Once the Washington Post published the 2,000-page “Afghanistan Papers” in 2019 under the title “At War with the Truth,” at the latest, this war should have ended. They revealed that this war had been an absolute disaster from the start, and that all the statements made by the U.S. military about the alleged progress made were deliberate lies. The investigative journalist Craig Whitlock, who published the results of his three years of research, including the use of documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and statements from 400 insiders demonstrated the absolute incompetence with which this war was waged. Then, there were the stunning statements of Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, the Afghanistan czar under the Bush and Obama administrations, who in an internal hearing before the “Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction” in 2014 had said: “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan—we didn’t know what we were doing. … What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking…. If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction … who would say that it was all in vain?” After these documents were published, nothing happened. The war continued. President Trump attempted to bring the troops home, but his attempt was essentially undermined by the U.S. military. It’s only now, that the priority has shifted to the Indo-Pacific and to the containment of China and the encirclement of Russia that this absolutely pointless war was ended, at least as far as the participation of foreign forces is concerned. September 11th brought the world not only the Afghanistan War but also the Patriot Act a few weeks later, and with it the pretext for the surveillance state that Edward Snowden shed light on. It revoked a significant part of the civil rights that were among the most outstanding achievements of the American Revolution, and enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, and it undermined the nature of the United States as a republic. At the same time, the five principles of peaceful coexistence, which are the essence of international law and of the UN Charter, were replaced by an increasing emphasis on the “rule-based order,” which reflects the interests and the defense of the privileges of the trans-Atlantic establishment. Tony Blair had already set the tone for such a rejection of the principles of the Peace of Westphalia and international law two years earlier in his infamous speech in Chicago, which provided the theoretical justification for the “endless wars”—i.e., the interventionist wars carried out under the pretext of the “responsibility to protect” (R2P), a new kind of crusades, in which “Western values,” “democracy” and “human rights” are supposed to be transferred—with swords or with drones and bombs—to cultures and nations that come from completely different civilizational traditions. Therefore, the disastrous failure of the Afghanistan war—after the failure of the previous ones, the Vietnam war, the Iraq war, the Libya war, the Syria war, the Yemen war—must urgently become the turning point for a complete shift in direction from the past 20 years. Since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic at the very latest, an outbreak that was absolutely foreseeable and that Lyndon LaRouche had forecast in principle as early as 1973, a fundamental debate should have been launched on the flawed axioms of the Western liberal model. The privatization of all aspects of healthcare systems has certainly brought lucrative profits to investors, but the economic damage inflicted, and the number of deaths and long-term health problems have brutally exposed the weak points of these systems. The strategic turbulence caused by the withdrawal of NATO troops from Afghanistan, offers an excellent opportunity for a reassessment of the situation, for a correction of political direction and a new solution-oriented policy. The long tradition of geopolitical manipulation of this region, in which Afghanistan represents in a certain sense the interface, from the 19th Century “Great Game” of the British Empire to the “arc of crisis” of Bernard Lewis and Zbigniew Brzezinski, must be buried once and for all, never to be revived. Instead, all the neighbors in the region—Russia, China, India, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Turkey—must be integrated into an economic development strategy that represents a common interest among these countries, one that is defined by a higher order, and is more attractive than the continuation of the respective supposed national interests. This higher level represents the development of a trans-national infrastructure, large-scale industrialization and modern agriculture for the whole of Southwest Asia, as it was presented in 1997 by EIR and the Schiller Institute in special reports and then in the study “The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge.” There is also a comprehensive Russian study from 2014, which Russia intended to present at a summit as a member of the G8, before it was excluded from that group. In February of this year, the foreign ministers of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan agreed on the construction of a railway line from Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, via Mazar-e-Sharif and Kabul, Afghanistan, to Peshawar in Pakistan. An application for funding from the World Bank was submitted in April. At the same time, the construction of a highway, the Khyber Pass Economic Corridor, between Peshawar, Kabul and Dushanbe was agreed to by Pakistan and Afghanistan. It will serve as a continuation of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a showcase project of the Chinese BRI. These transportation lines must be developed into effective development corridors and an east-west connection between China, Central Asia, Russia, and Europe as well as a north-south infrastructure network from Russia, Kazakhstan and China to Gwadar, Pakistan on the Arabian Sea, all need to be implemented. All these projects pose considerable engineering challenges—just consider the totally rugged landscape of large parts of Afghanistan—but the shared vision of overcoming poverty and underdevelopment combined with the expertise and cooperation of the best engineers in China, Russia, the U.S.A., and Europe really can “move mountains” in a figurative sense. The combination of the World Bank, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) New Development Bank, New Silk Road Fund, and national lenders could provide the necessary lines of credit. Such a development perspective, including for agriculture, would also provide an alternative to the massive drug production plaguing this region. At this point, over 80% of global opium production comes from Afghanistan, and about 10% of the local population is currently addicted, while Russia not so long ago defined its biggest national security problem as drug exports from Afghanistan, which as of 2014 was killing 40,000 people per year in Russia. The realization of an alternative to drug cultivation is in the fundamental interest of the entire world. The Covid-19 pandemic and the risk of further pandemics have dramatically underscored the need to build modern health systems in every single country on Earth, if we are to prevent the most neglected countries from becoming breeding grounds for new mutations, and which would defeat all the efforts made so far. The construction of modern hospitals, the training of doctors and nursing staff, and the necessary infrastructural prerequisites are therefore just as much in the interests of all political groups in Afghanistan and of all countries in the region, as of the so-called developed countries. For all these reasons, the future development of Afghanistan represents a fork in the road for all mankind. At the same time, it is a perfect demonstration of the opportunity that lies in the application of the Cusan principle of the Coincidentia Oppositorum, the coincidence of opposites. Remaining on the level of the contradictions in the supposed interests of all the nations concerned— India-Pakistan, China-U.S.A., Iran-Saudi Arabia, Turkey-Russia—there are no solutions. If, on the other hand, one considers the common interests of all—overcoming terrorism and the drug plague, lasting victory over the dangers of pandemics, ending the refugee crises—then the solution is obvious. The most important aspect, however, is the question of the path we as humanity choose—whether we want to plunge further into a dark age, and potentially even risk our existence as a species, or whether we want to shape a truly human century together. In Afghanistan, it holds true more than anywhere else in the world: The new name for peace is development!
Intense diplomacy is underway concerning Afghanistan, with the U.S. pull-out now announced to be completed as of Aug. 31, according to President Biden’s press briefing Thursday. Taliban representatives were in Moscow the same day, and also in Tehran. They conveyed a message to China in an interview in “This Week in Asia.” Russian President Putin and other officials have been in close contact with Tajikistan leaders. Today, India Foreign Minister Jaishankar was in Moscow, after making a stop yesterday in Tehran, on late notice, but meeting with President Elect Ebrahim Raisi.This Monday, July 12, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi starts a four-day trip to Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, at the request of the foreign ministers of those three countries bordering Afghanistan. There will be a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Council of Foreign Ministers, of the SCO-Afghanistan Contact Group, which is expected to release a joint statement on regional security. On the ground, the Taliban, according to a cross-grid of various reports, control some 85 percent of the territory of Afghanistan, including two-thirds of the border lands with Tajikistan, and key locations on the border with Iran. Earlier this week, Some 1040 servicemen of the Afghan national security forces retreated over the border into Tajikistan for refuge. The danger of prolonged civil war is great, but with the many complicated dynamics, there can also be the contingency of tactical withdrawal in play. The only way forward is through international, strategic cooperation among the major powers, to create the context for development-based change. Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp LaRouche addressed this July 7 in her weekly webcast, giving a short history of the geopolitical strife forced upon this region, up through and including the drug scourge. "If we now look at the situation, the drug production in Afghanistan increased by 45% in the last year. Afghanistan produces over 80% of the entire opium production for the world. Now, if you just leave the situation and don’t do anything to give encouragement and incitement to change that, the danger is that the different forces in Afghanistan will increase the drug production to finance whatever military operations they are conducting. ISIS is now in the north of Afghanistan. “So, I think there should be a serious review: Afghanistan is one of the obvious regions where a change from geopolitics to cooperation is really the reasonable approach. We have been pushing an economic development plan for Afghanistan and the entire region over many years, and for example, in 2012, the Russian representative for the fight against drugs, Viktor Ivanov had proposed from the Russian side a development plan which was quite extensive. It was the idea that Siberian science cities should be mobilized for the industrialization of Afghanistan and other Central Asian countries, and they wanted to make that proposal, which was a comprehensive proposal the subject of a summit of the G8. Now the G7, if people remember, kicked out Russia in 2014, so it became a G7 and that summit unfortunately never took place. But now it is very clear that the only way how you can stabilize the situation in Afghanistan, how you can have any hope for the improvement of human rights, for women, for education, is, you have to have a real plan for industrial development, bringing in infrastructure, industry, modernizing the country by making it wealthy, and that way you can effect the changes which are obviously important. “Now, the previous President Hamid Karzai has mentioned many times that he would welcome the New Silk Road in Afghanistan, and the Chinese have clearly expressed interest; the Iranians and also Pakistan is denying U.S. bases in Pakistan to operate from there inside Afghanistan, by making the argument that if you cannot win the war in 20 year, forget about doing it from bases in Pakistan. “My proposal has been, and is again: that if all the countries that are concerned about the opium, the potential danger of terrorism, should join hands—that is, Russia, China, India, which is also very much concerned about Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, and then, the United States should cooperate. They should not have left; they should have brought in the Army Corps of Engineers, and joined hands with these other countries to build up Afghanistan. Now, under these conditions, I think some European countries could also want to be participants in that, because Afghanistan refugees are repeatedly not so great in terms of not being integrated in European countries. So there is an absolute interest of all the countries I just named, to stop thinking in terms of us defeating the other major power for geopolitical purposes, and move to a new phase and overcome the underdevelopment of Afghanistan, and the entire region! “The region should be taken as one, and rebuilt, Iraq, Syria, Yemen; there are lots of things to be done to make this region a prosperous region of the world. And there is a great tradition, the Abbasid dynasty in the 9th century A.D., that was a period where there was the high point of Classical culture, and that is something to reconnect to. I think the United Arab Emirates have done so recently by having a successful Mars mission. Now, that means leapfrogging over long periods of underdevelopment and catching up with the rest of the world in terms of vanguard technologies. And I think you need a vision like that for that region to bring peace and prosperity.”
Join us LIVE on Saturday at 2pm for our weekly Manhattan Project meeting featuring Hussein Askary, Harley Schlanger and Diane Sare. Just as the attempt by the forces running the British Empire to establish and maintain a global "Rules-Based Order", through applying an imperial strategy they named "geopolitics", failed in Afghanistan in the 19th century, so the replay launched in the late 1970s until the present has once again failed, disastrously, as the U.S. and NATO forces retreated this week, under the cover of night. The failure in the 19th century did not teach the world a lesson, as allowing the imperial oligarchs to apply the same geopolitical theory led to two bloody and destructive world wars in the 20th century — which many believe, with some validity, was precisely their intention! Have we not learned the lesson yet, that submitting sovereign nation states to geopolitical practices deployed on behalf of imperial ambitions threatens the survival of mankind? This time, we have an alternative: dump geopolitics and adopt Lyndon LaRouche's approach to peace through development. We must act now, as we may not have another chance.
A majority of people now know that one cannot trust what appears in the media. Yet even those who know this, and consider themselves to have been "awakened" by this awareness, get manipulated by the narratives scripted by psychological warfare specialists. Today we take up questions shaped by those brainwashers, who have developed narratives to convince you that: 1) Afghanistan is hopeless, as civil war, underdevelopment, drug trafficking and terrorism are its destiny; 2) China's economic progress, and its commitment to aid others through the Belt-and-Road Initiative, make it a threat to the U.S.; 3) That a military confrontation between the U.S. and Russia is inevitable.
Lyndon LaRouche frequently made his audiences uncomfortable by posing to them the question of whether or not the United States, and Mankind as a whole, had lost the moral fitness to survive—that if the trajectory of current policies and thinking continued, our species might well disappear.For example, in his Feb. 15, 2000 article, “‘He’s a Bad Guy, But We Can’t Say Why’”, LaRouche wrote: “Through the cult of popular opinion, Rome acquired its fatal loss of the moral fitness of its culture to survive. We as a nation, have been following that same road to Hell, during no less than the recent three decades. The leading, characteristic pathology of that self-doomed Roman culture was the corruption of the mass of the population by the methods of ‘bread and circuses.’ There is virtually no moral difference between the form of entertainment which the Romans enjoyed in the Coliseum under the worst of the Caesars, and popular mass-entertainment today, both TV entertainment, and such forms as mass-spectator stadium and related sports events. If one compares the pornography and blood-and-gore in mass entertainment, with what usually passes for mass-media news broadcasts, one should recognize, with a sense of horror, the systemic likeness of the moral depravity of ancient Roman culture and our own.” LaRouche elaborated: “History punishes, or even weeds out nations and cultures which suffer a manifestly incurable want of the moral fitness to survive.” Now consider today’s withdrawal from Afghanistan by the U.S. and allied NATO forces. Will we be able to debate out and change the disastrous policies which led us into that 20-year catastrophe? This is a crossroad for humanity, Helga Zepp-LaRouche told associates today. Will we allow Afghanistan to sink into a civil war, with an ensuing nightmare of terrorism, drugs and mass migration? Will we continue the same, failed policies? Or can we change those policies and cooperate with China, Russia, and other powers for the well-being of the entire area, by extending the Belt and Road Initiative across the region, as Lyndon LaRouche long advocated? Or consider the COVID-19 crisis, where the world has just reached the terrible marker of 4 million deaths due to the pandemic, while the majority of the world’s population still has almost no access to life-saving vaccines and other health requirements. As Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization, just stated: “Vaccine nationalism, where a handful of nations have taken the lion’s share, is morally indefensible and an ineffective public health strategy.” He added: “The fact that millions of health and care workers have still not been vaccinated is abhorrent.” Will we find the moral fitness to at last adopt the necessary world health policy that Helga Zepp-LaRouche has championed, of quickly providing not only vaccines, but modern health capabilities in every nation on the planet, with the needed accompanying development of food, energy, infrastructure, and other physical economic requirements? To best address the urgent strategic issue of mankind’s moral fitness to survive, the LaRouche Legacy Foundation has announced that it will be holding an international seminar “On the 50th Anniversary of LaRouche’s Stunning Forecast of August 15, 1971: So, Are You Finally Willing to Learn Economics?” The online seminar will bring together leading international experts to examine the unique contributions of Lyndon LaRouche (1922—2019) to the science of physical economy, on the 50th anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s fateful announcement of the end of the Bretton Woods system on August 15, 1971. As the announcement states: “This is also an urgent invitation to reflect on what went wrong with economic policy in the trans-Atlantic sector over the last five decades, in order to correct those persisting policy blunders and change course before we plunge into a breakdown crisis comparable only to the 14th century New Dark Age.”
This week's Fireside Chat featured guest speaker Jason Ross of LaRouche's scientific research team. Have you been told that consumption and development destroy nature? That resources are limited? That climate change is soon to reach a point of no return?The truth is that through economic development, especially in areas of infrastructure platforms and public health, climate catastrophes kill fewer people and cause less damage than a century ago. Overall, fossil fuels are fantastic for human health -- they've allowed life spans to expand by decades.Piercing the lies behind the green religion of the Great Reset reveals a beautiful world of unlimited resources, the absolute end of poverty, and increasing power in space.
The United States/NATO occupation of Afghanistan, the latest, long trail of fruitless wasting of blood and treasure in that suffering country, is now ending. There is an alternative start to peace through economic development which could now succeed, if the sine qua non which Lyndon LaRouche made clear years ago goes into action. The great powers in the region—China, Russia, and India—along with the United States, must cooperate, not with their special forces but with their engineers and their credits, to support that success.This was proposed by LaRouche’s Executive Intelligence Review in special reports already in 1997. It was sabotaged by regime-change wars throughout the region. Proposed again by Russia in 2014—an Afghan region development concept reported by EIR in its 2014 special report, “The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge”—it was again sabotaged by Russia’s expulsion from the G8 after the Ukraine coup d’état. Behind this was the British intelligence Bernard Lewis Plan, adopted by Zbigniew Brzezinski as Carter’s National Security Advisor, to use this region as an “Arc of Crisis” permanent weapon of war and terror against Russia and China. The Belt and Road Initiative, initially a Chinese land-bridge infrastructure project across Eurasia but now involving more than 100 countries, offers economic development advantages and prospects to Afghanistan, including the Taliban, if major nations in the region cooperate on them. The obvious question is why the U.S./NATO occupation persisted for so long in blocking the government of Afghanistan from negotiating on the Belt and Road, when it clearly was open to this and in desperate need of development as we show here. Railway-technology.com, the Belt and Road News, and The Diplomat have all recently reported on the agreement reached in February 2021 by the foreign ministers of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan for a railway to be built at an estimated cost of $4.8 billion from Tashkent, Uzbekistan’s most northerly major city and its capital, through Mazar-e-Sharif and Kabul, Afghanistan, to Peshawar, Pakistan. Uzbekistan—the initiator of the plan, according to The Diplomat—proposed to ask the World Bank to make a loan for this fund, and that request was made in April. Moreover, a Peshawar-Kabul-Dushanbe highway project was recently agreed upon between Pakistan and Afghanistan representatives. As a Pakistani planned project, called the Khyber Pass Economic Corridor as an offshoot of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, this plan dates to March 2015, when a feasibility study was begun. If the rail and road developments are combined, effectively a north-south transportation and economic development corridor begins to be launched running from the main Eurasian Land-Bridge on the north, to the Indian Ocean on the south. This is true even though the core Kabul-Peshawar stretch through the Khyber Pass runs east and west. Tashkent will connect the corridor north through secondary rail lines to the dry port of Khorgos, Kazakhstan, on the main Eurasian Land-Bridge rail line from Lanzhou Port in China to Russia and Europe. Peshawar, via the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), will connect the corridor directly to Pakistan’s growing port of Gwadar on the Arabian Sea—and of course, back into China’s southern industrial heartlands. Mazar-e-Sharif in the extreme north of Afghanistan is the only Afghan city with rail connections now, largely into Uzbekistan. Within Afghanistan itself, this rail-road corridor would turn the northeast quadrant of the Afghanistan Ring Road into a protected part of that international corridor; and through Mazar-e-Sharif, it would connect the Tajik capital Dushanbe which lies to the east of that corridor. The major economic powers must turn from tensions, charges and confrontations, and cooperate for this potential to finally allow peace and development in Afghanistan. The rail line from Peshawar to Tashkent and potentially north to Russia will have serious logistical-engineering challenges, which only the Chinese rail-building companies can solve. The World Bank loan will only be made if the United States agrees to support the plan, and then the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) can become involved in providing additional credit. And development along the corridor will require a lot of new electric power, which can best be nuclear plants engineered by Russia’s world-leading nuclear exporter Rosatom. These are only the beginning of the needs for power, water management, transportation, and urgently now, healthcare. They are the way out of the constant “Arc of Crisis” warfare LaRouche first exposed in his 1998 classic video lesson, “Storm Over Asia.”
While British Foreign Minister Raab threatens China over its unwillingness to submit to the City of London's Rules-Based Order, the largest financial institutions are granted exemptions from the new minimum global corporate tax praised by Biden. If a company is a corporation based in the City of London, Wall Street or Silicon Valley, it is exempt from the new taxes. The blowhards demanding subservience to the new global order are deploying regime change operations and military threats against nations which don't accept the arbitrary rules the Davos billionaires have created for everyone, but themselves! The imperial order is dying, help us put it out of its misery, by creating a new, just order based on principles of international law. Send me your thoughts and questions: HarleySch@gmail.com
Unfortunately, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is not a break with British imperial geopolitics, but an attempt to change the venue from the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific region. The failure of the U.S.-NATO war in Afghanistan will be followed by an even more devastating debacle in the Indo-Pacific, unless the U.S. breaks definitively from the Military Industrial Complex's commitment to geopolitical doctrine. A potential for such a shift was opened by the three-way call yesterday between China's Xi, France's Macron and Merkel of Germany. Will the U.S. join them, or remain an enforcer of the global central banker's Rules-Based Order dictatorship?
Helga Zepp-LaRouche gave the following interview today to the “World Today” broadcast of ChinaPlus, the English website of China Radio International. ChinaPlus: Chinese President Xi Jinping is calling on China and European countries to expand consensus and cooperation to jointly cope with global challenges. He made the remarks at a virtual summit with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The Chinese leader says what the world needs is mutual respect and a sincere cooperation among nations. Xi Jinping: At present, the global pandemic situation remains severe, with frequent resurges. The prospects for economic recovery are uncertain and there is still a long way to go. The world more than ever needs mutual respect and close collaboration, rather than suspicion and technism or zero-sum game. ChinaPlus: During the meeting, the German and French leaders expressed their support for the conclusion of the EU-China investment agreement, and adding that they hoped the 23rd EU-China summit would take place as soon as possible. For more on this, we are joined by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institute, a global political and economic think tank headquartered in Germany. Thanks for joining us, Helga. Helga Zepp-LaRouche: Yes, hello; good day. ChinaPlus: So, what’s your main takeaway from this virtual summit, and what’s your assessment of the overall tone of the meeting? Zepp-LaRouche: I think, from everything one can say, is that it was very constructive, and also much needed, because there were some recent difficulties after the European Parliament blocked the EU-China investment agreement. So, I think that they discussed the possibility of reviving it is very positive. Mrs. Merkel said that she wants to have this revived as soon as possible. And President Macron said that he supports the conclusion of the China-EU investment agreement. So, I think it was very useful and productive.ChinaPlus: The summit is coming at an increasingly tense moment for EU and China ties, given that the EU’s recent sanctions against China and its interference in the country’s internal affairs. So, will this call lead to a shift in the EU’s approach to relations with China? And possibly, easing confrontations between the two sides? Zepp-LaRouche: Yes, I think it will. And I think it’s also important that this comes only four days after the very hysterical statement coming from the Lithuanian Foreign Minister Landsbergis, who had on Friday last week called for an end of the French-German dominance of the EU. He wanted to have a unified EU policy on China, which in his terms means against China. He even said that he wants to set up offices in Taiwan. So, I think this was a clear rebuttal of this position of Landsbergis. So I think that that was very useful. ChinaPlus: What’s your assessment of the current EU policy on China in general? Do you think that the tough stance recently taken by the EU side against China needs to change? As we know, China became the world’s largest EU trading partner last year, overtaking the U.S. European business leaders have expressed their hope that the EU will strengthen cooperation with China, rather than shut it out and decouple. Zepp-LaRouche: Yes, I think such a change is really very urgent, because, as it was mentioned by President Xi Jinping, the world is still confronted with a very serious pandemic. We have a world famine of biblical dimension, as the head of the World Food Program, Beasley, is calling it. We have a hyperinflation danger in the Western countries. As you can see with the situation in Afghanistan, there needs to be an urgent cooperation for economic development in the entire region of Southwest Asia, because otherwise, there is a danger of a new explosion of terrorism, and also the drug problem is very big. So, I think there are so many common aims of mankind in a world which is very fragile, and therefore, I think that these three important countries—China, France, and Germany—make steps to really mend fences and work together more closely, can only be welcomed in the interest of humanity as a whole. ChinaPlus: We see many European politicians have emphasized the differences between China and the EU, but President Xi is calling on China and the EU to adhere to the norms of mutual respect, and to handle differences appropriately. So, were the differences between the two sides addressed during the talks? And how can the two sides resolve their differences? Zepp-LaRouche: Yes, I think some of the differences were clearly addressed. For example, China is always emphasizing the need to stick to the UN Charter and international law, while some Western politicians always talk about a “rules-based order,” which, if you look at it more closely, has turned out to be a rather arbitrary definition of pursuing the interests of some groups. So, I think that was addressed—at least from the read-out, one can say that. And also, it was stressed by China that the intention of China is not to replace anybody else, but to focus on its own development. But I think there was one aspect in the discussions which I thought was particularly promising: Namely, that they seem to have focussed on a joint mission, which helps countries and people to always overcome their bilateral or trilateral difficulties. In this case, the focus was on Africa, that China and Germany and France would work together. That Germany, for example, said they were considering to join the initiative on partnership for African development. I think President Xi not only pointed to the severe situation of Africa, because of the pandemic and economic hardships resulting out of that, but he also said that Africa has the greatest development potential. He has stressed that in the past, in summits with African leaders, and I think this is absolutely true. The African continent has a very young average population, which means that if you provide them with jobs and economic opportunities, they can become really an economic engine in the next generations. That positive look on Africa is generally lacking in Europe, and I think therefore the populations of Germany and France and other European countries can only profit from the optimistic perspective that China has towards Africa. I think this can only have a positive effect. ChinaPlus: Another key factor crucial for China-EU relations nowadays is the U.S. factor. We’ve noticed increasingly frequent interactions between the U.S. and the EU, with Washington trying to rally its European allies against China. Do you think the call emanating from the summit is sending a signal from France and Germany that they are refusing to align themselves with the U.S. bipolar confrontation? Zepp-LaRouche: I would think so, because as you know, there was just the G7 summit, where Biden had travelled to England, and this was an effort to unite the allies in this stance against Russia and China. But Chancellor Merkel had always stressed in the recent period that she does not like to be pulled in one or the other direction, and forced to choose sides, and that she supports a multilateral world order. So, I think this is definitely a positive signal. One would hope that the Europeans really understand that it’s in their self-interest to have such a balanced view, to say the least. ChinaPlus: But some observers believe the U.S. has more power over the EU than that of Germany and France combined, so the change of attitudes from Germany and France won’t make much of a difference in the EU’s China policy. How do you look at this? Zepp-LaRouche: The EU right now is very disunited You had the Dutch leader, Rutte, who wants to kick out Orban from Hungary, and Hungary out of the EU. Then, Slovenia just took over the EU Presidency for the next six months, and he clearly is supporting Hungary, and backs the Hungarian view that they don’t like cultural interventions, interference with their value set, whereby Western European countries try to impose their liberal views, while the East European countries are more traditional. I think if they keep doing these kinds of things—and von der Leyen then attacked Slovenia, and then you have the disunited Baltic states and Poland. I think the EU right now is not in a strong position at all. I think the thing which will, I’m pretty sure, dominate in the future will be the self-interest of these countries. For Germany, for France, and also the other European countries, the economic interest in a world which is in a turmoil, the relation with China is clearly a factor of stability. This is what the German industry wants for the most part. I think also the United States may change. The United States has pursued policies in the last 20 years which were not really in the interests of the United States itself, as you can see by what happened in Afghanistan, where a war was fought for 20 years, and absolutely nothing came out, other than misery, death, and a lot of cost. So, maybe the United States can also start to change, and see that cooperation is more in their interest than confrontation. I know this is not the dominant policy right now, but things are changing very, very rapidly. I would really hope that the new paradigm of international relations gets into the minds of political leaders, because confrontation can only lead to a disaster. Anyway, I think we are in a flux. We are in an historic moment of dramatic change, and a lot depends on good initiatives which people have to influence the situation for the better. ChinaPlus: OK, thank you very much, Helga. That was Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institute, a global political and economic think tank headquartered in Germany.
We present this video to introduce you to the Schiller Institute’s ongoing series of conferences designed to make sure you understand and know how to defeat what is called the “rules based international order” perpetrated by those would be masters of the planet who have deliberately robbed us of tens of millions of lives through disease, famine, war, and other products of the under-development they insist on.
In reviewing strategic developments of the last week, Schiller Institute Chairwoman Helga Zepp-LaRouche highlighted the prospects for peace and collaboration possible when geopolitical confrontation is rejected. The Merkel-Macron-Xi dialogue, for example, opens the door for a change in European Union policy, as the EU bureaucrats face growing tensions over their commitment to the unilateralism implied in imposing a “Super State.” The end of the Afghan war does not mean more conflict, but the emergence of an alternative based on a desire by its neighbors to overcome underdevelopment, as a competent strategy to combat terrorism. In her report on the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, she challenged viewers to not fall back on the axioms drummed into their heads by corrupt media and imperial oligarchs, but to look instead at the real history of China. She described the Conference of World Political Parties addressed by President Xi, which included representatives from more than 150 parties, as an “expression of friendship”, which demonstrates that overcoming underdevelopment is a mission which can be embraced by all nations. It also makes a mockery of the view pushed by geopoliticians that China “is isolated”.
As news reports feature the threat of a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan following the withdrawal of U.S. forces, some voices in the U.S. Congress are questioning why we are leaving! The real question should be, "Why were we there for 20 years? Why did we waste more than $1 trillion and several thousand American lives on a war the Pentagon knew was unwinnable?" The followup question to that should be, "Why are we still using British geopolitical strategies to conduct our foreign and military policies? When will we learn our lesson -- as Lyndon LaRouche always insisted -- that the British Empire is our republic's only true enemy?"
Dennis Speed and Harley Schlanger discuss the implications of Edward Snowden's recent discovery concerning why by most people avoid deliberating about the root causes of actual conspiracy practices. Instead, the population and media, in general, favor obsessing over childish conspiracy theories. Why? Lyndon LaRouche's method of placing current developments in the context of the fight over the image of man of the past 3000 years is the key to subverting the propagation of fake British-authored conspiracy theories dominating popular culture and mass media today. Sign up for weekly updates from Harley Schlanger.
Paul Gallagher of Executive Intelligence Review documents the deliberate policy of hyperinflation followed by deflation practiced by Hjalmar Schacht, President of the [German] Central Bank (Reichsbank) 1933–1939. The same policy is being practiced today by Mark Carney, former head of the Bank of England, in a policy he calls "Regime Change," which intends to subvert the power of sovereign governments and replace it with policies of central banks. The policy has only one conclusion as demonstrated in the horrors of Germany during WW2. Learn more about the Great Reset and how to defeat this policy of genocide.
On this weekend, as the United States celebrates the anniversary of its Declaration of Independence, let us each reflect on how we can bring into reality the potential represented in the presentations and discussions of last weekend’s Schiller Institute conference.Consider the backdrop: After the relatively small steps towards U.S.-rapprochement (or at least normalization) with Russia, a British naval provocation in the Black Sea drew a Russian military response and the British have unleashed a new series of claims about Russian hacking of essentially everyone. The danger of nuclear war, growing constantly with the ongoing expansion of NATO despite promises to the contrary, absolutely must be addressed head-on. Inflation continues apace, with raw materials up 31% year-to-date and prices of cars, homes, and food skyrocketing with double-digit inflation. Yet the Biden White House trumpeted its economic success with a tweet merrily announcing that the cost of a Fourth of July cookout had decreased this year … by 16 cents! Green policies that are shuttering coal plants and directing energy investment into intermittent and unreliable sources are leading to blackouts and power shortages. In major de-developing countries, purchases of diesel emergency generators are booming in the context of the unreliable electricity grid. And revelations published by Revolver News site, if accurate, point to direct lines of questioning that could reveal the events of January 6 to have been, not an intelligence failure, but an intelligence setup, to drive a new war on “domestic extremists.” Preventing war means exposing and replacing the oligarchical, geopolitical insanity that drives what Ray McGovern, a speaker on the conference’s first panel, identifies as the MICIMATT (Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-MEDIA-Academia-Think-Tank) complex. A summit among the leaders of the United States, Russia, India, and China is absolutely required to replace geopolitics with a paradigm of growth. The greatest, expanding impediment to achieving that growth was taken up in the conference’s second panel, which exposed “The Real Science Behind Climate Change,” which covered the wild exaggerations central to the climate catastrophe narrative, the enormous costs of proposed mitigation measures against this false menace, and the immense potential of the actually superior power source of nuclear science. Exposing the Malthusian lie that limits to growth truly exist and must be respected, rather than shattered and overcome, can serve a profoundly liberating role. The Sunday panels marked inflection points in the drive for a global Glass-Steagall, for the kind of cooperation required to develop health systems throughout the planet, and for the quality of discussion necessary to organize into a higher mission the many different people and groups of the world. The rotting speculative debt must be given a proper, and speedy burial, and policies for creating real physical and scientific growth must be adopted. The need to ensure health—including creative mental health—for all, can serve as a central driver from which other infrastructure and development needs flow. Join the Schiller Institute’s mobilization. Celebrate Independence Day by acting to end the legacy and reality of the British Empire.
Questions taken up today: 1.) Is Putin right when he said that even if Russian forces sunk the HMS Defender, it would not lead to war? 2.) Do Europeans support the Green New Deal, as European Central Bank Chair Lagarde claims? Is it possible to have an honest debate on whether "climate change" is caused by human activities? 3.) Anything new to report on the status of Julian Assange? 4.) Is the 4th of July still relevant today?
At the Schiller Institute June 26-27 conference, “For the Common Good of All People, Not Rules Benefiting the Few!”, 37 speakers addressed the most important issues facing mankind today, and defined the level on which solutions can be worked out. This process is glaringly not the approach in the major world institutions at present, which are factionalized between the necessity and prospect of a new paradigm, as against those locked in the old paradigm, with great danger involved for everyone.This was manifest today in the Group of 20 meeting in Italy, the 2021 chair of the G20, at which foreign and development ministers and diplomats met in person—the first time in two years— and some virtually. The focus was on the pandemic and food supply crises. Speaking online, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi spoke of the need for coordinated action against the pandemic, saying sternly that the time for thinking in “zero-sum game” terms is over. There must be real collaboration. In contrast, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas used the occasion to criticize China and Russia for distributing their vaccines to countries as “vaccine diplomacy” for political purposes. Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche pointed out that the Matera gathering is one of a sequence of meetings which defines the framework to direct our efforts to make clear to the world, the type of solutions truly required, using the “spearhead” of the necessity for mobilizing for a world health security capacity. July 26-28 in Rome will be the Pre-Summit on World Food Systems, in conjunction with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Food Program and other UN agencies, which will be followed in September by the Summit of the same name at the time of the U.N. General Assembly in New York. In October is the G20 heads-of-state Summit. The enemy green climate track has the October Biodiversity conference in China, followed by the COP26 in Glasgow in November. The generic title of today’s G20 meeting was, “People, Planet, Prosperity,” with the most repeated word being “multilateralism.” U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken had the audacity to assert that the U.S. is leading the multilateral effort to distribute vaccines internationally. However, Wang Yi tweeted that, “multilateralism is not a high-sounding slogan, let alone gift-wrapping for the implementation of unilateral acts.” What is required, Wang said, is for nations to stabilize and expand the production and supply lines of vaccines and other necessities. Nations with vaccine capacity should lift any export impediments. Italian statesman Michele Geraci, in characterizing the Matera proceedings, said today specifically that it will be a world failure if “multilateralism” is taken to mean that 200 nations retrench, and in the face of crises, do not collaborate to deal with the pandemic, the economic tasks, and famine. Geraci, who has been part of prior Schiller Institute colloquies, spoke today in an interview with CGTN TV. Thus, today’s one-day G20 event, if anything, makes clear the responsibility to rapidly expand the dialogue process of the Schiller Institute, in policy and mobilization. Helga Zepp-LaRouche spoke today in particular, of the concept she had put forward over last weekend’s conference, of the necessity to re-tool the capacity locked up in the military-industrial complex, which, she said, she knows sounds utopian. But if we don’t, it will mean perpetuating the endless war policy, of the MICCIMAT, as it is called by Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst, warning of the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-tank complex. The danger of the “endless” war scenario turning into a final nuclear armageddon scenario couldn’t be made more clear, than by considering what is going on this very week in the up-close military exercises taking place simultaneously by NATO and Russia in both the Black Sea region and Eastern Mediterranean. Zepp-LaRouche noted of last weekend’s Schiller Institute sessions, that the entire conference was guided by the mode of thinking of the coincidence of opposites. Now more and more people are “getting it.” Forge the anti-Malthusian alliance.
