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Helga Zepp-LaRouche made an impassioned appeal to viewers of her weekly webcast to use this Christmas period to join with us to mobilize for a New Paradigm. She compared "the commitment to brinksmanship" of Trans-Atlantic war hawks to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, describing this as"extremely worrisome," as it comes from a belief that Russia and China will back down in the face of threats from the U.S. and NATO. The Russians continue to deny an intent to invade Ukraine, and have submitted draft proposals, which they insist cover their minimum national security interests. That western leaders instead repeat their demand for Russian submission to planned NATO expansion which puts us on a course towards war. Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche then turned her attention to what she described as the "heart-breaking, upsetting" story of the refusal of western nations to address the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, which is the result of the geopolitical wars fought in that country. While the OIC has made a proposal to set up a fund and coordinate international aid, western nations are continuing sanctions and refusing to release funds, even though it is clear this threatens millions of lives. The role of the U.S. and NATO in continuing this travesty is destroying "the credibility of the West." She spoke of her commitment to Project Ibn Sina for Afghanistan, as part of a broader battle to provide a world health system for every country. She ended the dialogue with an appeal to viewers to use the next days of Christmas to reflect on the moral responsibility of citizens to act at this moment of deepening crisis. Transcript The Brinkmanship of Trans-Atlantic Cannot Be Tolerated Weekly Strategic Webcast with Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Wednesday December 22, 2021 HARLEY SCHLANGER: Hello I’m Harley Schlanger. Welcome to our weekly dialogue with Schiller Institute founder and Chairwoman Helga Zepp-LaRouche. It’s Dec. 22, 2021. And Helga, as we’ve been reporting over the recent weeks, the drumbeat for war continues coming from trans-Atlantic powers. The Russians are making proposals to try and address it. They seem to be getting little or no response from the West. What’s the latest that you have on this? HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Well, it is extremely worrisome, because it seems there are people committed to make a brinksmanship. Obviously, they hope that Russia, and China for that matter, will back down, but I don’t think that that’s in the cards. So two weeks ago, we spoke about this unbelievable statement by Sen. Roger Wicker, that he doesn’t want to take the first use of nuclear weapons off the table. Now, in the meantime, the whole thing has escalated. There was a CNN report, with an unnamed U.S. high-ranking official, the suspicion was that it was National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, who said we only have a window of four weeks left before we have to get a breakthrough, and somehow referring to a possible plan of Russia to invade Ukraine. Which Russia has denied many times, emphatically. But if you look at the chronologically of the last several weeks—it started much earlier—but let’s take the visit of the Director of the Office of National Intelligence of the United States Avril Haines to Brussels, where she briefed the NATO ambassadors about so-called hard evidence intelligence that Russia would plan and invasion of Ukraine at the beginning of 2022. As I said, it was denied by Russia. Then there are obviously troops being gathered at the Russian side of the Ukrainian border, which has been commented on many times by Russia, that it’s their good right to do on their territory whatever they want. According to Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman of the Foreign Ministry, there are at least 10,000 troops from NATO in Ukraine, 4,000 from the U.S. and 6,000 from other countries; and in the middle of all of that—I mean, there was the discussion between Putin and Biden on Dec. 7 on videoconference—which again looked as if this would move forward. But then, immediately, the people around Biden went back to their bellicose statements, so one never knows exactly what the U.S. policy is exactly. And then Putin proposed two treaties, to the U.S. and to NATO. Now, these are not proposals for negotiations but ready-made treaties, one for the United States to sign, that they will basically not insist that Ukraine be in NATO, and the other one for NATO to sign, that NATO will not move any farther eastward. And the Russians, Putin, they said this is not negotiable; this pertains to the very national security interests of Russia, and they insist that these treaties be signed. Now the reaction from the West, from [NATO Secretary General Jens] Stoltenberg, from Lambrecht, the new German defense minister, various other people, they said, they will not let Russia dictate what to do, and so forth, but there was no serious response so far. And various Russian spokesmen, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov, Grushko, Lavrov, and various other people, they all said that this is very serious. If there is no response from the West, and if there is any more move to either move weapons into Ukraine, or to expand NATO in any way more eastward, there will be a military answer coming from Russia. And the bottom line has been reached, the red line has been reached. So we are sort of in a countdown, where it’s very clear that whoever is pulling the strings in NATO in the end, and sometimes one is not quite clear if it’s Biden or not, or rather not, they’re obviously set that this policy of encirclement against Russia and China continue. And Russia has said, the red line has been reached. Now, this is very, very dangerous, because — Oh yeah, then I think it was also Sullivan, said that if there is any move from Russia in respect to Ukraine, that they will punish the economy of Russia so terribly that it—anyway, so there are all these threats in the air. And there is now a very interesting statement by Leonidas Chrysanthopoulos, a former Greek ambassador, who commented on all of that, by basically saying the West should not be so hypocritical (I’m now using my own words), but that the West should recognize that all Russia is demanding, in written, legal terms, is what was promised in 1990 to them by the United States, by NATO, in the negotiations concerning the German reunification. And this is actually a matter of record: There are now documents which everybody can look up, that on Feb. 9, 1990, Secretary of State James Baker promised Gorbachev that NATO would not move “one inch eastward,” and this was also the content of the famous speech by then German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, in his speech in Tutzing, where he basically said the same thing. Naturally, everybody knows these promises, which unfortunately were not made in written form, but just verbally, they were broken almost immediately and altogether 14 countries of the former Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact were integrated into NATO; and recently, and many times earlier, Russia has made the point that to have Ukraine and Georgia in NATO is unacceptable for the very simple reason that if you look at the border between Ukraine and Russia, it leaves only a few minutes, maybe as little as 5 minutes for a missile system to reach Moscow, which obviously is much too short a time to have an effective defense. So, Russia makes the point that its national security interest is absolutely threatened by these moves by NATO. So we are on a countdown. And we should just keep in mind, if it comes to any war between Russia and Ukraine, which would involve any kind of—even without Western involvement—and this would escalate, Germany would immediately be the target. And if you have such statements like that of Senator Wicker, that the first use of nuclear weapons cannot be taken off the table, people should be aware of the fact, that if it comes to this, Germany ceases to exist! So, this is one of the reasons why I have been saying NATO is no longer a security pact which is in the self-interest of Germany, because if in the case of any military conflict, Germany ceases to exist, obviously, this is not a good defense strategy. So, I think, first of all people must make themselves familiar with this danger. According to the reports, we are in a four-week countdown, and I think it is absolute, urgent necessity that NATO and the United States and European countries do agree to sign such legally binding agreements with Russia, even if Putin, in a just-conducted meeting with some of his top military people said that even a legally binding, signed document does not give full security, because the United States has now a very long record that they pull out of treaties without any problem, overnight. But there must be a recognition that we are on a terribly dangerous road, and people must voice their opposition to this policy, loud and clear, before it is too late. SCHLANGER: There have been some voices speaking out in the West, but not nearly enough, and then, instead, they’re drowned out by people like Sullivan, who said Russia must deescalate, when the escalation is coming from the West. And the U.S. has not even responded yet to this request for these treaties to be negotiated. Now, unless you have something more on that, I think we need to move on to the situation in Afghanistan, where there have been some developments with the Organization for Islamic Cooperation meeting over the weekend, a potential for possible motion on unfreezing the funds. I think 46 congress members have written a letter to Biden. What’s your sense? Is there some momentum building on this, especially given the reports of the danger to millions of people, including children, of starvation and freezing this winter? ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Yes, this is the second, absolutely heartbreaking and extremely upsetting story. You know, the West talks about moral values, value-based order, human rights, democracy, all of these beautiful words, but the reality is quite ugly. Because the World Food Program representatives, I think, the head Beasley and Mary-Ellen McGroarty in Afghanistan, visiting Kabul and Kandahar in the last several days, and they come back and say that 98% of the Afghanistan population is in dire poverty, more than 90% are food insecure, without medical supplies: 24 million people are in danger of dying this winter, 3 million children, babies are dying already—and this is the 21st century and the whole world should know about it, but if you look at the Western media, after the Taliban took over in August, there was a short period when Afghanistan was in the news, but since several months you hardly hear anything about it. Now, there was a very important conference over Friday, Saturday, Sunday in Islamabad, Pakistan, of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC); this is with 57 states, the second largest international organization after the United Nations, and they had a meeting which was addressed by the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan. I listened to his speech and I was—not that everything was new what he said, but he said it very distinctly. He said, when the Taliban took over and the West withdrew, everybody knew that 75% of the budget of Afghanistan came from international aid, and since that aid was immediately cut—the donor countries cut the aid right away, because the Taliban had taken over—everybody knew that the entire budget of Afghanistan was all of a sudden practically nonexistent. Then you had the freezing of the funds by the U.S. Treasury, by European banks, so there was a complete cash crisis: People could not import anything, they could not pay salaries, the whole thing broke down, and this has been going on for four months, with the result I just mentioned before. But this is not the Taliban: When you hear the Western media, if they report anything at all, they say, “Oh yeah, the economy is now terrible, because of the Taliban.” It is not because of the Taliban! Because if you have, after 20 years of NATO war, NATO leaves, and the United States forces leave in a sudden fashion, the country in which they conducted war for 20 years: They leave the country, nothing has been built, no economy, no infrastructure, nothing is functioning, and then, they cut off the international lifeline, the donor monies, which make up 75% of the Afghanistan budget, they cut this off, they freeze the central bank’s funds, and then naturally a catastrophe erupts which nobody, not the Taliban or anybody else, can handle, because you have sanctions, and have a complete freeze of everything! And the West knows that! And they don’t react! I mean, this is unbelievable! If you look at the Afghanistan situation, this is the end of any credibility of the West, and just to think that because the Western media are not reporting that, people should not think that it goes unnoticed. For example, the 57 OIC nations noticed; all the neighbors of Afghanistan noticed; all the third world noticed. So I think if this is not reversed very, very quickly, this will be of a lasting impact of a demise of the West. This is why I have said that the fate of Afghanistan and the fate of humanity are much more closely linked than most people are willing to think through. I find this absolutely horrendous. What the OIC conference decided: they will set up a fund, I don’t know exactly the amounts that will be available, but they will set up an office in Kabul, and the OIC has offered to coordinate international aid. So something is being done, for sure, but the problem is so gigantic that it really requires all the neighbors of Afghanistan to cooperate, and I think that the United States and the European countries—I mean, they were for 20 years in this country, and then they walk away. This is from the standpoint of international law, completely unacceptable. So Europe and the United States have an absolute moral obligation to reverse that and cooperate with the neighbors of Afghanistan and not only have immediate humanitarian aid, to alleviate the hunger, the lack of medical supplies, but then, participate in the economic buildup of the country, which can only occur by integrating Afghanistan into the Belt and Road Initiative projects—you know, the CPEC corridor from Pakistan to Kabul to Uzbekistan; the building of the Khyber Pass, and other well-defined projects which would immediately start building up the economy. So that is what needs to be done. There are 39 congressmen who made an appeal to Biden to unfreeze the funds which are held by the Treasury: I think this is important. Obviously, this must immediately happen because the winter is already there. SCHLANGER: And toward that end of accelerated humanitarian aid, you made the proposal which you call “Operation Ibn Sina,” that is, while specific to Afghanistan, actually reflects the need for the whole world in the midst of the COVID crisis, the economic breakdown, which is the necessity for a world health system, as the front end of a massive infrastructure investment program, which could include the Belt and Road Initiative and so on. How does that look as a prospect from your standpoint? ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Operation Ibn Sina, because one has to start with Afghanistan, and Ibn Sina comes from a place nearby Bukhara which is Uzbekistan, but his father was born in Balk, which is Afghanistan, and people are very proud of him. He’s probably the greatest doctor who ever lived, so there is no better name to give this effort to build a modern health system in Afghanistan, than to call it after Ibn Sina. And there already has been great interest in this idea coming from several places in the region. But more largely, we have now a new wave of the COVID-19, the Omicron variant, and, again, there is such an unwillingness by the establishment of the Western system to recognize that we have been on the wrong track, and I said in the very beginning, when it was clear this was a pandemic, in March 2020, I said we need a world health system or else this pandemic will not go away. Since then we’ve had all these mutations, and now we have Omicron, and there is no guarantee there will not be new mutations. And it’s also clear that the idea that the rich countries are producing and hoarding vaccines, and leaving the developing countries without is not helping anybody, because if you leave entire continents without vaccinations and without modern health equipment, then this virus will mutate, as it has done so far, and it will come back and may even make the existing vaccines obsolete. So, either we go in earnest, and say that the fact that billions of people do not have modern hospitals is unacceptable, don’t have clear water, don’t have enough electricity, this is something which could be done; there is no reason why we could not immediately start to build modern infrastructure, like we have it in Germany—it may be rotting, but it’s still there because previous generations were a little bit smarter than the present crop of politicians—but there is no reason in the world why not technically, why not technologically, we could not start building hospitals: We need about 30,000 new hospitals around the world. That would be easy! We could even make these hospitals prefabricated, in the United States, in Europe, and then ship the modules to the respective countries. The Chinese proved in Wuhan that you can build a modern hospital in two weeks. It could be done this way. We could start a crash training program for medical personnel. I have called for the youth, the young people in the world to be trained to help build such an effort, like it was done by Franklin D. Roosevelt with the CCC program in the New Deal. You can train young people on the job, give them a vision and a mission in life. And I think this is really something—you know, we cannot continue this way! The idea that every time something happens, the rich countries only take care of themselves, and the developing countries are left in the dark, that has to stop and we have to start to really think in terms of a new paradigm if humanity is supposed to come out of this crisis. And given the fact that we have now the Christmas period, the holiday season, people have some days to think. And rather than just going about your business as usual—I mean, this is a breaking point of civilization: Either we really can shape up as a human species, or it may not look so great for our perspective. SCHLANGER: I think your last point, that in the spirit of Christmas, of generosity and love of mankind, peace and good will toward men, this would be the time to move ahead with the shift to the new paradigm. Helga, thanks for joining us today, and I know you wish all your viewers a merry Christmas, as do I, and we’ll see you again next week. ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Yes. I wish you a Merry Christmas, and the first topic we discussed, I really want you to think about, because what we face in Europe between Russia, Ukraine, and Europe and NATO, is like a reverse Cuban Missile Crisis. In the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy pointed to the fact that an island which is only 160 miles from the coast of Florida, the idea that you could deploy nuclear missiles in such a close vicinity, obviously could not be tolerated. But nuclear missiles in NATO, in the Baltic, missile defense system in Poland, in Romania, and the idea to move lethal weapons into Ukraine, from the standpoint of the Russians, this is exactly like the Cuban Missile Crisis. So, I really want you to use this Christmas period to really work with the Schiller Institute, and help us to stop something which could really be fatal for all of humanity. And at the same time, there are all the resources, there are so many beautiful contributions to civilizations, Beethoven’s music, all the great poets, the great philosophers—read these things over these days and rethink how we should go about it, because we definitely need to change course urgently.

Sergei Lavrov expressed the Russian disappointment with the written response from the U.S. to President Putin's demand for new treaties which guarantee Russia's security interests. While agreeing to further discussion of secondary issues, the Biden administration appears to have refused to meet Putin's demands. At the same time, the U.S. is escalating its plans for sanctions against Russia, and the media -- led by CNN -- is running false reports about Biden's discussion with Zelensky, to stoke tensions.Despite Blinken's claim of complete unity among NATO allies, fault lines continue to become visible. In Italy and Germany, businessmen and manufacturers want to speak with Putin, as they recognize that a war, or escalation of sanctions, would have disastrous consequences for western economies, which are already weak. The desperation in the west is also visible, in reports of a likely wave of debt defaults of highly-indebted poor nations, if interest rates are raised in the U.S. Helga took note of the positive potential which emerged from the meetings in Oslo with a Taliban delegation, and motion in support of her Operation Ibn Sina. She appealed to viewers to join with us to break out from under the war drive of the geopoliticians, and bring about her husband's perspective of a New Bretton Woods, which would uniquely address the common interests of all nations. Transcript War Danger Still Exists — A New Paradigm Is in the Common Interest of All Mankind Weekly Strategic Webcast with Helga Zepp-LaRouche Friday January 28, 2022 HARLEY SCHLANGER: Hello, I’m Harley Schlanger. Welcome to our weekly dialogue with Schiller Institute founder and Chairwoman Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Today is Friday, January 29, 2022. While the world was kept waiting for a couple of days for the United States’ response to President Putin’s demand that there be new security guarantees extended to Russia, the response was delivered on Jan. 26. Sergey Lavrov said that while there’s ongoing discussion there was no response to the core issues. Helga, what’s your thinking on where this leaves us? HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE: I think the war danger clearly still exists, because it’s very clear that there are elements who are not satisfied with the relationship between United States, and Russia, and China, for that matter, to go into a civilized direction. But because of the systemic collapse going on in the Western financial system, the desperation is big. And there are, despite what is officially being said, where always psywar ops, covert operations being threatened, it’s a very complex picture. To start off with what the Russian response has been, Lavrov, and the Russians in general, have said that they are very disappointed that the United States and NATO did not respond to the core issue of their demand that NATO should not further expand to the East, that no offensive weapons system should be placed along the Russian borders, and that Ukraine should definitely not be ever in NATO. These were the absolutely important issues, and they were rejected by both the United States and by NATO. And what was offered instead was all kinds of, what from the Russian standpoint are also useful discussions, but not the essential ones. So it’s like, make offers for arms control, for continuation of the dialogue—all of that is useful, naturally, but I think it is to be noted that the basic position of the West to not respond to the very legitimate security interests of Russia. And it’s very difficult to say where this will all end up, but the bullying coming from people like Blinken, in particular, is so blatant, and the obvious neglect of the United States, not only for the security interests of Russia, but also the security interests of European countries like Germany, or economic interests, is also so absolutely blatant, that this whole thing may end up in a complete backlash, in a blowback. Because if the United States insists on being the hegemon, and keep a unipolar world, and in then in the process of trying to ram that through, tramples over the interests of its so-called Allies, and creates an open hostility with the so-called adversary—, namely Russia and China—this may end up in not what the architects of the confrontation have intended, but it may reveal the absolutely uncivilized behavior of those who are pushing this confrontation. Now, Lavrov said that compared to NATO, the response of the United States was almost diplomatic decency, while the response from NATO was so ideologically blatant that it leaves almost no room for any civilized discussion. So we have to see. Now there are different voices. There is a lot of psywar and it’s sometimes very difficult to know what is true and what is not. The latest flareup is this CNN report by Matthew Chance who claims that in yesterday’s phone discussion between President Biden and President Zelenskyy, Biden supposedly would have said that once the ground is frozen, the Russia attack will come, and he would have told Zelenskyy that Kiev will be sacked, that he should prepare for a big impact—all language that is draconian and barbarian. The White House denied that this was said in this form. In any case, I think it’s very unlikely—there is not even an interest by Russia to occupy Ukraine! They have an interest to protect the Russians in east Ukraine, but for sure, not to overrun Ukraine, where the entire west is filled with Nazis and neo-Nazis and would be a complete mess to even think of occupying a terrible place like that. So, I think there is an incredible psywar going on. Zelenskyy himself said he does not think anything has changed, only the hype has increased. Papers like the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung say that they think there is a very low probability for a Russian attack. One has to differentiate between the confetti which is being thrown around, and the core question. And the core question is that a solution must come out of all of this which takes into account the basic security interest of Russia, and that is the bottom line. SCHLANGER: I think, Helga, for the sake of our American listeners, who don’t get any of this reporting, it’s worth noting that what CNN said was not only denied by the Zelenskyy spokesman who said that no one in the President’s office said such a thing in the discussion with Biden, and described it as completely false, but National Security Council spokeswoman Emily Horne said that CNN’s sources are leaking falsehoods. So that’s what you’re getting in the United States, with the psywar. And speaking of psychological warfare, there is the British intelligence report that came out this week which said that they have evidence that the Russians are about to try to install someone to run the President’s office in Ukraine, presumably as a coup, who’s favorable to Russia. The Russians denied this, the person whom they named said this is completely preposterous; but we’re seeing this kind of psychological warfare. Now, countering the psychological warfare, there’s been a continuing diplomatic offensive from Russia. Putin had an interesting discussion with the Russian-Italian Chamber of Commerce, and it appears that the German business and manufacturing grouping wants to have a similar discussion. And the EU has denounced this. This is part of what appears to be a growing split occurring within Europe, isn’t it? ZEPP-LAROUCHE: I think it’s deepening, and if Blinken goes around and talks about the “unity of the allies” and NATO and so forth, I think this is absolutely not true. As you say, the EU tried to pressure Italian businessmen and corporations not to go into this dialogue with Putin, and only two or three did back down, but the vast majority did have this dialogue. And in Germany, the German Committee on Eastern European Economic Relations (Ost-Ausschuss der Deutschen Wirtschaft), which is basically the core of German industry, they also came out and want to have a videoconference with Putin. And they also reminded people of the statements by former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, that the most important good is the maintenance of peace. And they also made emphatically the point that the security interests of Russia must be respected. That is important. Then you have in the Social Democracy (SPD) an appeal circulated that Germany has to remember and return to the Ostpolitik of Willy Brandt and Egon Bahr, the détente. And there are similar other appeals circulating. So I think there is a reawakening of the peace movement in several countries, and this is a reflection of the fact that people are becoming very, very upset about the possibility of war. There is one demand coming from Vladimir Yermakov, who is the Director of Arms Control and Nonproliferation in the Russian Foreign Ministry, and he demands that the modernized nuclear weapons which are in Europe, the B61 and other types, that they all be withdrawn back to the territory of the United States, and that the five non-nuclear members of NATO who are training for the case of a nuclear attack on Russia, that that must be absolutely halted. I think this will be a demand that will be picked up by peace-oriented people in Europe, because the fact that these weapons do exist on European soil makes the countries that have these weapons prime targets if it comes to any kind of a confrontation, because it is generally very clear that conventionally there is no way how the United States and NATO could win a war against Russia. The United States may have all kinds of modern equipment, and right now both the British and the United States are having continuous transport of so-called “lethal weapons” into Ukraine; and also from the Baltic states, whom the U.S. has given permission that they can transfer weapons which they got from the U.S. to Ukraine. But if you look at the map, Russia has the advantage of territorial depth—Russia is a country with 11 time zones—and any time somebody tried to conquer Russia, starting with Napoleon, and continued with Hitler, they got such bloody noses: The great Napoleonic army was decimated to a few hundred, poor lost souls who returned from that campaign. Hitler could not defeat Russia, at a tremendous loss for the Russian people, but there was no way how Hitler could have won that war; and that would be the fate of anybody who was trying to have a war that would involve Russia. So the danger, naturally, is that it would come to the question of the use of nuclear weapons. Now, we are still sitting on a powder keg, because Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu has warned that there is evidence of American or British mercenaries operating already inside the territory of Ukraine. There are reports about private military companies, in part these are the “gray zone” people, former soldiers who now have private firms training people who have a crazy affection for military questions. So there is a big danger, because a provocation could be launched at any moment, and false-flag operations, as well, so this is something to be watched very carefully. Then there is the discussion that supposedly Xi Jinping would have asked Putin to wait until after the Winter Olympics are over before attacking Ukraine—which is ludicrous, but increases the danger, and I can only say that people must really step back from this whole question and get back to their senses. One has the feeling that the people who are pushing this confrontation have gone completely mad: They’re playing with the existence of civilization. And I can only tell people, this is something where we have to walk back from the brink of the potential annihilation of the human species. SCHLANGER: There is one other aspect I want to bring up, which you mentioned before, which is the bullying by Blinken. We’re seeing more signs of insanity from Congress in terms of sanctions that they’re talking about, new economic sanctions against Russia. “Preemptive sanctions,” which is being discussed by a number of different people—including some in Ukraine—saying the best thing to make sure that Russia doesn’t invade is to have “preemptive sanctions.” And then you have the threats against the diplomats, the fact that more diplomatic offices are being shut down—this is all part of what seems like a pre-war mobilization. ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Well, I must say that this is not civilized behavior any more. First of all, the U.S. recalling its non-essential diplomats from Ukraine is an unfriendly act. There is no reason to do that. Then there is this talk about the Russian ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov, that may be forced to leave in April. Now, that would be a very, very dramatic escalation, to basically force the ouster of the most important diplomat between the United States and Russia. And then, there was a readout from the White House, from unnamed “senior administration officials” discussing what the nature of potential economic sanctions against Russia would be, in the case of a Russian attack. Now, obviously, the Russians have stated again and again, they do not intend to attack, and Lavrov has said it many times, that if it is up to Russia, there will be no war. And other officials have said the only people who are pushing a war between Russia and Ukraine is the West. Russia has no interest to attack. They just put up these troops along the border to make the point that they have a security interest, and they want to have a solution to it, but they never said they intended to attack. Now, what this White House readout says, it is quite incredible. This was a meeting which took place on Jan. 25. They discussed a whole range of “severe economic measures” starting “at the top of the escalation ladder”—in other words, not moving up slowly, getting stronger and stronger, but going full blast from the beginning. And they say want to “hit Putin’s strategic ambitions to industrialize his economy quite hard,” by denying him access to all modern advanced technologies, like artificial intelligence, quantum computing, anything having to do with defense aerospace. And they basically say the aim is to prevent Putin’s intention to “diversify” from exporting oil and gas, causing an atrophy of the Russian economy. And on and on with this language. The language of this is so brutal, it’s basically saying: Look, we managed with the shock therapy in 1990s, with Jeffrey Sachs in the Yeltsin period, to turn a former superpower into a raw materials producing, third world country, and now we will deny Russia the right to industrialize, by applying such measures. Now, that is a form of a declaration of war already! How can you deny a country to develop industrially? This is really big, and I would like people to read this, because if you read the language, how this is written, it portrays a mindset which is the mindset of a party declaring war already. And naturally, I remember, there was a report by the CIA in 1991, which had similar language, which basically said Russia has more raw materials than the United States and they have better educated scientists, and therefore, any economic development of Russia must be discouraged. And that was the beginning of the shock therapy, which reduced the industrial capacity of Russia between 1991 and 1994, to only 30% of what it had been before. And the 1990s were a decade which the Russians regard as “genocide,” because the demographic curve was absolutely reduced by 1 million people per year. Naturally, this is also not very realistic, because in the meantime, the Chinese economy is in the process of overtaking the United States, and while there may still be certain areas where such sanctions would be felt in a painful way by Russia or anybody else who is affected by it, but the idea that you can deny Russian industrial development by applying such sanctions, it’s a reflection of the same kind of arrogant mindset; because China has put a rover on the far side of the Moon, where nobody in the West has, so they could not have stolen that technology from anybody—they’re the leader. They’re also the leader in terms of fusion energy research and fast train systems and many other areas. But it shows you an intention, and that mindset is the same one as Mr. Blinken thinks he can force the Europeans to go along with these sanctions, even if it would destroy their own economies, which if you go in this direction, then Russia would cut off all oil and gas supplies which would hit Europe, not the United States. So this is really wrong, and I can only say that hopefully there will be some people inside the United States who will say this is not the true character of the United States, because you cannot build peace on the basis of doing the utmost damage to whoever you want to have a relationship with. SCHLANGER: It’s also a confirmation of what your husband, Lyndon LaRouche talked about in his 1998 “Storm Over Asia” video, in which he said the attempt to deny economic development to Russia and China is part of the traditional British geopolitical doctrine, which is dictated from the City of London. And the idea, obviously, that they’re trying to stop any Eurasian integration with Europe is really one of the key, underlying features. Now, on that, there are some developments around Afghanistan: There is a Taliban delegation in Norway this week. There’s continued discussion of your proposal for Operation Ibn Sina. Why don’t you let us know what you have on developments around Afghanistan? ZEPP-LAROUCHE: I think it’s good there was this conference in Norway, where a delegation of the Taliban met with representatives from the U.S., Germany, I think France, Italy—and I don’t know the full extent of what measures came out of that. But the fact that this took place, and there are now more organizations working with the Taliban and that there is a recognition that the only way to save the 25 million people who are in acute life danger is to work with the Taliban—this is definitely a breakthrough. I think the German head of UNICEF gave a report from Kabul, where he said 1 million children are in acute danger and are actually dying; 7 million children are in acute danger. And he said this is as many children altogether as there are in Germany. I haven’t checked this figure, but it makes sense, and it shows you the incredible dimension of the need to change the thinking. And as we have mentioned on this show several times, I launched the Operation Ibn Sina, which refers to the great physician from 1,000 years ago from this region. And I’m very happy that there are now more people picking up on it and really think this is a very good idea, to use Afghanistan as a model to create a modern healthcare system for every country in the world. And the speech I gave about it, which is the cover story in the January 28 issue of EIR, which you can download and circulate it. We can also put the link underneath this show afterwards. The video of the speech I made is also available. And these are being tweeted by several influential people, and they are sending it through their social media. So I hope this will lead to a really broad discussion and becomes the basis for actually implementing a modern health system for Afghanistan and every other country on the planet! Because the pandemic is still here, and despite what people hope, new variants are still a possibility. And in any case, the conditions of many, many countries in the developing sector, they must have a development perspective, because it cannot go on that billions of people are on the verge of famine, and losing their livelihoods, and in danger of dying. So Operation Ibn Sina must be the beginning of a new paradigm. And this becomes all the more urgent, because we’re sitting on a powder keg: The reason for all the war danger is the fact that the financial system is about to blow up. There are many reports that the so-called “emerging markets” which is a synonym for the developing countries, that they may have a huge debt crisis if there is the slightest “tapering” of interest rates by the Federal Reserve. So the urgency to go with LaRouche’s Four Laws, and really go in a completely different direction, rebuilding the world economy by having actual development, starting with a world health system is of the greatest urgency. SCHLANGER: Among those issuing a warning was Guardian columnist, Larry Elliott, who pointed out that almost 50% of the debt which could be lost in a wave of defaults from poorer countries that are heavily indebted, is owed to financial institutions and investments. That means, people’s personal retirement funds are invested in this debt. David Malpass, the president of the World Bank, also warned that we could be seeing a trigger of debt defaults from the developing sector: So, in that sense, the interconnection between the war danger, the spread of disease and collapse of healthcare, and the overall economic system, really comes back to the importance of Lyndon LaRouche’s proposal for a New Bretton Woods. And I think that would be a good place to wrap this up. ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Yes. I think there are many countries in the world that clearly are preparing for the eventuality of a sudden collapse. You see it in many details: Gold buying is up again, which always happens when the population starts to get hysterical, then you have large buyers of gold. You have more and more a tendency to go out of the dollar. So, even if Russia would be cut off from the SWIFT system, I don’t think it will have that devastating an affect on Russia, but it could be a “nuclear bomb” for the Western capital markets—at least, that’s what Friedrich Merz, the new head of the German Christian Democracy has been saying, and I tend to agree with him on that point. So, I think we have to have a discussion about a new paradigm: We must completely change the orientation of colonialism, the idea to keep the developing countries suppressed. We have to replace that with a new just world economic order, along the lines with what China is doing with the Belt and Road Initiative, and we must get the Europeans and the United States, hopefully, to cooperate with the Belt and Road Initiative, in the development of Southwest Asia, of Africa, of Latin America. And you know, if we join hands, no problem could not be solved! So I think, in the same way as the relationship between Russia and China has been named by former Russian Prime Minister Medvedev, he said that that relationship has become a model of what relationships among nations should be: In other words, that each furthers the best interests of the other, respects its sovereignty, doesn’t meddle in its internal affairs. And China has offered that many years ago, already, as the model for a great power relationship between the United States and China. So, we have to have a new thinking, and the common interest of mankind must be put first. If we cannot mobilize the thinking of the population to that level, we may not make it as a species, so there is right now the urgent need to have such a debate. And if you want to help this effort then join the Schiller Institute, and we will soon have a big new conference on all of these issues, probably in the week of February 7-11, so stay tuned: Become a member, help our mobilization, and hopefully we’ll see you next week. SCHLANGER: And I would urge people, as you mentioned before, but your presentation from last Saturday’s Manhattan Project meeting of the Schiller Institute—“Can War with Russia Still Be Averted?”—was very effective at identifying what this new paradigm would be and how we would get there. So, I would urge people, go to the Schiller Institute YouTube channel and it’s the presentation from January 22, 2022. So Helga, thanks for joining us. It’s always good to get a note of optimism, but it’s also important that people face the fact, as you say, that we’re still sitting on a powder keg, and it’s a little hard to be totally optimistic when you have a powder keg underneath your rear end: So, join us now, and let’s see what we can do about it. So, Helga, we’ll see you next week! ZEPP-LAROUCHE: I hope so—next week.

“The world is getting more dangerous by the day,” Helga Zepp-LaRouche stated in discussion with associates today. “If people … do not mobilize and intervene, this is on a very bad course.” This danger can be clearly seen in the unhinged provocations by the United States against China and Russia—the two other biggest nuclear powers in the world—over the recent days. Escalations against China, in particular, are rapidly approaching a red line, with moves by the U.S. State Department to bring Taiwan into the UN, eliciting harsh denunciations from the Chinese side against the U.S. attempt to “humiliate itself” by violating UN Resolution 2758 and the one-China principle. “The West is getting detached from cause and effect, and this is very, very dangerous. We have to wake people up. If things continue for long on this course, it is only a matter of time until they go completely out of control,” Helga Zepp-LaRouche said.The October 11 statement issued by Schiller Institute Chairwoman Helga Zepp-LaRouche and CLINTEL initiator and co-founder Guus Berkhout, “A Wake-Up Call: The Danger for Mankind Is Not the Climate, but Toleration of a Devious Policy that Uses Climate To Destroy Us!” states the situation quite clearly: “All the symptoms of a collapsing system are right before our eyes, if we care to see them: an economic system in which the balance between cost and benefit is totally out of balance, an accelerating hyperinflation that devours our earnings, a good healthcare system that only the rich can afford, an education system that teaches neither excellence nor moral values, an out-of-control woke culture that turns people against each other, a disastrous geopolitical confrontation policy against alleged rivals—and the list could go on and on! “All these manifestations of crisis have a common cause: We in the West are living under the dictatorship of a financial oligarchy, for which the common good is nonexistent, and whose sole interest is to maximize its own privileges.” It is that financial oligarchy, along with the British Royal Family, which has organized its Halloween séance in Glasgow, COP26, a self-proclaimed Malthusian “last chance” to extract commitments of suicide—economic devolution—from nations of the world. The witches of Glasgow, however, can be defeated—the majority of nations are refusing to go along with the collective suicide pact of non-development, as seen in China’s firm commitment to poverty elimination in its own nation and in partnership with underdeveloped nations around the world through largescale physical economic growth—infrastructure, industry, and scientific capabilities. Helga LaRouche emphasized today that when you’re in such an ocean of insanity, you have to go back to the fundamentals, to the one universal value remaining: the sacredness of each human life. For this reason, the upcoming Schiller Institute conference on November 13—14 (the day after the close of COP26) can make a decisive intervention into a wide open global strategic situation to derail the tragic trajectory humanity may be on with the clear and available solutions. Use the Schiller Institute/CLINTEL “Wake Up Call” and the conference invitation mobilize thousands around the world to pull civilization back from the brink and to put politics back on the basis of natural science and classical culture. Your life may depend on it.

LIVE NOW!Schiller Institute International Conference – July 31, 2021Watch HereSaturday, July 31, 10:00 am EDT; 16:00hrs. CETModerator: Dennis Speed (U.S.), The Schiller Institute Helga Zepp-LaRouche (Germany), Founder and President of The Schiller InstituteKeynote Address: “Afghanistan: The Bright Future for the Coming Cooperation of the Great Powers” Pino Arlacchi (Italy), Sociology Professor at the Sassari University, Former Executive Director of the UN Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention, and former European Parliament Rapporteur on Afghanistan“Eradicate Opium in Afghanistan, Develop Modern Agriculture, Build the Nation, Now” H.E. Ambassador Hassan Shoroosh (Afghanistan), Ambassador of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan to Canada“The Way Forward for Afghanistan” H.E. Ambassador Anna Evstigneeva (Russian Federation), Deputy Permanent Representative at the Mission of The Russian Federation to the UN “Russia’s Outlook for Afghanistan and Eurasia” Dr. Wang Jin (China), Fellow with The Charhar Institute“Afghanistan and the Belt and Road Initiative” Question and Answer SessionRay McGovern (U.S.), Analyst, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA-ret.), Co-Founder, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)“The Real Interest of the United States in Asia” Hassan Daud (Pakistan), CEO, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province Board of Investment “The Perspective from Pakistan: The Role of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) for Afghanistan Reconstruction.” Hussein Askary (Sweden/Iraq), Southwest Asia Coordinator for the Schiller Institute“Put Afghanistan on the Belt and Road to Peace!” Discussion PeriodWe welcome questions during the conference. Please send them to questions@schillerinstitute.orgSupplementary material by Executive Intelligence Review (EIR)—Special Report Offprint: ‘Will Afghanistan Trigger a Paradigm Change?’PDF of the invitation“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.”—Helga Zepp-LaRouche, July 10, 2021 We face an extraordinary moment, of further descent into chaos, or the beautiful potential of Afghanistan becoming the seed-crystal of a new era of international cooperation so desperately needed in the wake of growing disease and famine worldwide. Afghanistan was once a hub for the ancient Silk Road, the connection between the great cultures of Asia and those of the European side of the Eurasian continent. The entire Central Asian region was once known as “a land of 1,000 cities”, showcasing advanced technologies in oasis cities, including Merv, Balkh, Kabul, and Kandahar, with large-scale underground irrigation systems. Water development will once again be crucial, and the agricultural potential is great.In the past weeks, most of Afghanistan’s neighbors have come together, in an attempt to forge a commitment to end the nightmare suffered by the people of Afghanistan, a nightmare also suffered by the military forces of many nations drawn into needless combat in the service of a British-centered oligarchy fostering the growth of drug trafficking and terrorism in the entire region. Just as the collapse of the Soviet Union marked the end of an era—the division of the world into nuclear armed blocs hostile to one another—so also the utter failure of the 20-year misadventure of the United States and NATO in Afghanistan, and in the other failed colonial wars in Southwest Asia, poses the question: Can the great nations of the world cooperate in the transformation of Afghanistan, and the other war-torn nations, into modern economies, participating in co-operative development through the New Silk Road process, exemplified by China’s Belt and Road Initiative? Leading voices, from veterans’ groups and whistleblowers, to experts on the danger of global narcotics plague and on international political relations, will join Helga Zepp-LaRouche in dialogue, to impel the United States and Europe to join the growing international cooperation that is coming together. We can use this opportunity to make the turn from 50 years of failed policies, and instead to embark on the path required to achieve a new paradigm for mankind. Watch Here

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

Helga Zepp-LaRouche addresses an audience of young people from around the world on the method of thinking discovered by Nicholas of Cusa. “[Nicholas of Cusa] developed a method of thinking, of thinking something completely new… It was the idea that human reason has the capability to define a solution on a completely different and higher level, than those on which all the conflicts and contradictions arose. It addresses the capacity to think a One, which is of a higher magnitude and power, than the Many. And once you train your mind to think that way [according to the coincidence of opposites], you have the inerrant key to creativity, and one can apply this way of thinking to virtually all realms of thought.” —Helga Zepp-LaRouche Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder and chairman of the Schiller Institute, and one of the world’s leading Cusa experts, insists that to get out of the onrushing New Dark Age, mankind must learn from the father of the 15th Century Golden Renaissance, Nicholas of Cusa. We must start with the underlying crisis: that in the method of thinking.

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

With nearly all policymakers and strategic analysts in the trans-Atlantic sector of the world in a clueless state of utter chaos and hysteria over the developments in Afghanistan, Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche today convoked an urgent international seminar for this coming Saturday, August 21 to pursue the only available solution to the crisis: peace through development. The seminar will continue the prescient discussion held by the Schiller Institute on July 31, with many of the same panelists, as well as new ones.Zepp-LaRouche drew a crystal clear picture in her weekly strategic webcast yesterday: “First of all, I do not agree with the hysteria of the Western media that this is the end of the world. The first thing that must be stated, is that it ends 40 years of war for the Afghani people, and if people have any sense of what it means to live in such a long war, all the suffering of the civilians, all the terrible things people had to endure, in terms of drone attacks, in terms of anxiety, I think, first of all, it’s very good that the war has ended. “I think it is, on the contrary, the real chance to integrate Afghanistan into a regional economic development perspective, which is basically defined by the Belt and Road Initiative of China. There is a very clear agreement of Russia and China to cooperate in dealing with this situation. The interest of the Central Asian republics is to make sure there is stability and economic development; and there is the possibility to extend the CPEC, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, into Afghanistan, into Central Asia. So I think it’s a real opportunity, but it does require a complete change in approach.” Zepp-LaRouche continued: “This is an epochal change…. I think that if the European nations and the United States would understand that this is a unique chance, if they cooperate, rather than fight Russia and China and their influence in the region, and if they join hands in the economic development there … then this can become a very positive turning point, not only for Afghanistan, but also for the whole world.” Zepp-LaRouche made a special appeal to the United States in remarks earlier in the day on Aug. 17: “The United States must go back to the foreign policy of the Founding Fathers and the initial period—such as John Quincy Adams—that the aim of the United States is not to chase foreign monsters, but to build alliances. John Quincy Adams said that the United States should have alliances of perfectly sovereign republics, and this is now the moment to really do that. The idea is to not oppose China linking Afghanistan into the Belt and Road Initiative, but rather see it as an opportunity to cooperate, and stop this geopolitical confrontation which can only lead to catastrophe.” She concluded: “That’s the kind of discussion which we have to catalyze.” The video archive of the July 31, 2021 Schiller Institute conference on “Afghanistan: A Turning Point in History after the Failed Regime-Change Era” can be found here: The speakers included: Helga Zepp-LaRouche (Germany), Founder and President of The Schiller Institute; Pino Arlacchi (Italy), Sociology Professor at the Sassari University, former Executive Director of the UN Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention, and former European Parliament Rapporteur on Afghanistan; H.E. Ambassador Hassan Shoroosh (Afghanistan), Ambassador of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan to Canada; H.E. Ambassador Anna Evstigneeva (Russian Federation), Deputy Permanent Representative at the Mission of the Russian Federation to the UN; Dr. Wang Jin (China), Fellow with The Charhar Institute; Ray McGovern (U.S.), Analyst, Central Intelligence Agency (ret.), Co-Founder, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS); Hassan Daud (Pakistan), CEO, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province Board of Investment; and Hussein Askary (Sweden/Iraq), Southwest Asia Coordinator for the Schiller Institute.

As the year 2022 opened marking economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche’s 100th birthday, the heads of state and government of the five nuclear weapons states, which are also the permanent members of the UN Security Council, consulted as Helga Zepp-LaRouche has insisted they must do, and issued a declaration, for the first time, that “nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought” (see the Declaration in Documentation). The words were used by Presidents Biden and Putin following their Dec. 7, 2021 video conference; and this declaration will now sit over the U.S.-Russian-NATO negotiations on the Ukraine crisis Jan. 10-13.But the fundamental reason for optimism here is not so much the words of this declaration as that the five powers’ leaders acted together against global war. Helga Zepp-LaRouche had publicly called on them to do exactly two years ago—Jan. 3, 2020, in the dangerous period after the assassination of the Iranian General Qassem Soleimani—and has urged it on them many times since. On Jan. 15, 2020, two weeks after Helga LaRouche’s first call, Russian President Putin called for a P5 heads-of-state summit to deal with problems of peace, security, and terrorism—and he, too, has repeated that proposal several times since; and his spokesman emphasized today that it is still necessary after this “nuclear war never” declaration. Already by early March 2020, Helga LaRouche had identified the COVID pandemic—demanding a modern healthcare system be built in every country—as the new requirement for such a major-power summit. This must be done on an emergency basis in Afghanistan, along with food aid and power supply guarantees to save millions of lives. It is the start of, through physical-economic development, the real name for peace; and it points to a new international credit system like FDR’s Bretton Woods, in place of the crash-prone casino we have now. These are the missions uniquely reachable through what Lyndon LaRouche called “the four-power agreement” of America, Russia, China and India. That makes today’s “P5” declaration significant beyond its words. The declaration was posted simultaneously at roughly 11:00 a.m. U.S. Eastern Time on all five Presidents’/Prime Ministers’ websites. “We affirm that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” the statement says. “As nuclear use would have far-reaching consequences, we also affirm that nuclear weapons—for as long as they continue to exist—should serve defensive purposes, deter aggression, and prevent war. We believe strongly that the further spread of such weapons must be prevented.” This rebukes those mad war-hawks like Sen. Roger Wicker who have been raising the “option” of a nuclear first strike on Russia over Ukraine. The five signers also reaffirm the importance of addressing nuclear threats, as well as their commitments to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and its obligation “to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date.” They “reaffirm that none of our nuclear weapons are targeted at each other or at any other State.” They also declared: “We intend to continue seeking bilateral and multilateral diplomatic approaches to avoid military confrontations, strengthen stability and predictability, increase mutual understanding and confidence, and prevent an arms race that would benefit none and endanger all. We are resolved to pursue constructive dialogue with mutual respect and acknowledgment of each other’s security interests and concerns.” Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said, “We hope that, in the current difficult conditions of international security, the approval of such a political statement will help reduce the level of international tensions.” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov emphasized that Moscow still considered a summit between the world’s major nuclear powers to be “necessary.” China’s Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu was quoted by the official Xinhua that the pledge “will help increase mutual trust and replace competition among major powers with coordination and cooperation.” But it is only a step that these nations’ leaders must be kept to. The trans-Atlantic banking and financial system is headed for hyperinflation and crash. What the world absolutely needs is a major-power negotiation process which involves at least India as well, to launch a new international credit system capable of funding real economic development, “TVA-like” thorough development of poorer regions, advanced nuclear power development, technological progress led by space science and fusion power crash programs. The guide and planner of this process, and the world’s leading fighter for it, was Lyndon LaRouche. This begins LaRouche’s year.

In her weekly dialogue today, Helga Zepp-LaRouche contrasted the exciting horizons opened by three near-simultaneous space flights arriving at Mars, with the polarizing circus underway in the U.S. Senate trial of former President Trump. The Mars' missions, she said "show where mankind should be going....We have so much to discover." She pointed to the successful development of COVID vaccines by Russian and Chinese scientists, and their willingness to share them, as another example of the kind of cooperation required at a moment of crisis like this.

"Humanitarian Sanctions" Are Killing Syrians, While New Sanctions Threaten To Crash The Russian Economy: They Must Be Overturned! April 16 -- As the Biden administration is recklessly expanding the sanctions regime which has become the routine response from Anglo-American officials to any government they accuse of violating the "rules-based order", Helga Zepp-LaRouche issued a call to end this practice, beginning with lifting the "Caesar Sanctions" against Syria. Zepp-LaRouche, the founder of the Schiller Institute, released a statement on April 15, as an "Urgent Call to Stop the Genocide in Syria and Yemen: The Moral Collapse of the Western System Cries Out for a New Paradigm". Her call, which is intended to alert the world to the deliberate mass murder imposed on the Syrian people through the Caesar Sanctions, coincided with the announcement by the White House of new sanctions against Russia, the most damaging of which is an assault against Russia’s ability to issue ruble-denominated debt, with the stated purpose of triggering massive capital flight and wreaking havoc on the Russian economy.By prohibiting American companies and financial institutions from purchasing Russian public debt offerings as of June 14, 2021, a senior administration official admitted that the intent of this latest attack is to destroy the Russian economy: “This is the main market that funds the Russian government… Removing U.S. investors as buyers in this market can create a broader chilling effect that raises Russia’s borrowing costs, along with capital flight and a weaker currency. And all of these forces have a material impact on Russia’s growth and inflation outcomes.” Biden justified the measures, which included the expulsion of ten diplomats and other sanctions, by “declaring a national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States” purportedly posed by Russia. His Executive Order also threatens to impose additional measures in the future: “We are prepared, going forward, to impose substantial and lasting costs” on Russia if they do not behave as they are told. The new sanctions against Russia are a response to allegations of Russian hacks against the networking software company, SolarWinds, and "interference" in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. As is so often the case in such allegations, no hard evidence has been produced to back these charges, which come from anonymous sources in the intelligence community, producing the same type of false narratives which have been exposed as blatant lies presented in the "Russiagate" case against Presidents Trump and Putin. Schiller Institute Intervention In her statement, Zepp-LaRouche points to an intervention by Apostolic Nuncio to Syria, Cardinal Mario Zenari, who has alerted the world to the acute humanitarian emergency that has been deliberately imposed upon Syria, in the aftermath of nine years of war, through murderous “sanctions” measures imposed by the U.S. State Department and irresponsibly supported by a number of other governments, most emphatically the British. Instead of acting to increase the poverty and death rates of Syrians, Cardinal Zenari urgently calls for an end to sanctions, and to pursue a pathway of Peace through Development, in reversing the moral indifference which increasingly threatens to unleash this scale of calamity throughout the planet. In her weekly Schiller Institute webcast discussion on April 14, Zepp-LaRouche demanded that the world come to the aid of the Syrian people. As Cardinal Zenari has stated, more than 90% of Syrians are below the level of extreme poverty, and many are in danger of losing their lives due to famine. The last decade of war, the unjust sanctions, and the COVID-19 pandemic have created an absolutely intolerable condition of suffering for the Syrian people.Similar horrors confront Yemen, where the agonizing reality of hunger is conveyed in the powerful documentary “Hunger Ward,” referred to by the head of the World Food Program, David Beasley, who saw children dying before his very eyes in the hospital, and he was unable to help. There is nothing “humanitarian” Zepp-LaRouche stated, in starving children and shutting down hospitals and medical care, based on fraudulent narratives cooked up by British and American regime-change advocates, in and out of government. “This must stop and the Caesar Sanctions must be lifted. And all the members of the U.S. Congress who do not lift these sanctions make themselves complicit in every death that occurs in the region.” Zepp-LaRouche continued: “This has reached the point where either the world wakes up and we start to remedy this, or we will not survive, because of our own moral failure as a human species. I call on you: Work with the Schiller Institute. Work with its Committee on the Coincidence of Opposites, which is working to get aid programs and reconstruction. I appeal to you: Get in contact with the Schiller Institute and respond to the call by Cardinal Zenari.” What Are The Caesar Sanctions? Having failed in efforts at regime change in Syria, which were launched by the Obama-Biden administration through their support of "moderate rebels", who conducted a bloody civil war in the country, Trump's Secretary of State Pompeo mobilized international support for regime change through economic strangulation. To do this, a bill was introduced in the Congress, as part of the National Defense Authorization Act, which imposed sanctions on Syria. It passed in June 2020. It was called the "Caesar Act", named after a mysterious figure who claimed to have been a photographer employed by the Syrian Ministry of Defense to take photographs of victims killed in the civil war. Described as a "defector", he delivered more than 58,000 photographs to the Syrian National Movement (SNM), which is funded in part by Qatar, to oppose the Assad government. The SNM then turned the photos over to Human Rights Watch (HRW), which produced an 86-page report in 2015, which included more than 28,000 photos. The report, titled "If the Dead Could Speak: Mass Deaths and Torture in Syria's Detention Facilities", was used to push the sanctions through the Congress. In a detailed exposure of the fraud behind this report, investigative journalist Max Blumenthal from the GrayZone outlines how the usual cast of characters from the human rights mafia were involved in using this falsified report for the purpose of regime change. 1) "Caesar" was brought before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in a private session in April 2014, and again in a public session in August of that year, to present the "evidence" of Syrian government murders. According to HRW, their investigators "meticulously verified dozens of stories" of civilians they claimed to have been tortured and murdered by Syrian government officials.