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· February 6, 2022 “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” the five nuclear powers and permanent members of the UN Security Council affirmed in a joint statement on Jan. 3 of this year. Since the use of nuclear weapons always involves the risk of using the entire nuclear arsenal, a percentage of which is enough to cause the extinction of the human species, the confirmation of this fundamental insight should actually have practical implications for the military strategy of all nuclear powers. Notwithstanding this joint statement, in the last week of January, the U.S. Strategic Command launched the Global Lightning exercise, designed to test the readiness of U.S. nuclear forces. Although this was a so-called “routine” maneuver integrated this year with the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and thus aimed at a possible confrontation with China, in the context of heightened tensions between Russia and the United States and NATO, it can be seen as just another—but perhaps the most dangerous—element in the way that the West is playing with fire with respect to Russia and China. The timing of the maneuver coincided with hitherto unproven allegations by the United States and UK that Russia was planning a military attack on Ukraine between late January and mid-February, which the Russian government has repeatedly denied. The nuclear command-and-control exercise is based on the U.S. Strategic Command’s current nuclear war plan. Hans M. Kristensen, Director of the Nuclear Information Project of the Federation of American Scientists, was able, under the Freedom of Information Act, to obtain the cover page of this plan, entitled Stratcom Conplan 0810-12, Strategic Deterrence and Force Deployment, Change 1. Kristensen, one of the most competent specialists in the field of nuclear strategy and weapons, explained to Newsweek that the Global Lightning exercise does not simply assume a nuclear first strike by one side or the other, but an extended nuclear war that will continue after the first exchange of strikes. Even though the individual components of this new war plan, which has been operational since April 30, 2019, are subject to the highest levels of secrecy, the outlines of this conception emerge. The assumption is that the United States and NATO would be able to survive a nuclear first strike by Russia or China, then retaliate, absorb further attacks, retaliate again, etc., in an ongoing military confrontation. This nuclear war plan includes not only nuclear weapons but various other lethal systems such as missile defense systems, directed energy weapons such as electromagnetic pulse weapons and lasers, cyberattacks, and Space Force attacks from space. Who would be able to survive such a prolonged nuclear war? The few people who can nest in deep underground bunkers? It makes the morbid fantasies of Dr. Strangelove look like a child’s birthday party. Last year’s Global Lightning maneuvers in April 2021 focused on a potential conflict with Russia; this year it was devoted to a possible confrontation with China. The Pentagon’s various strategy papers since 2017 had increasingly defined Russia and China as geopolitical rivals and adversaries, replacing the fight against global terrorism with great-power competition as a strategic priority. At the same time, the modernization of the nuclear triad begun by the Obama Administration continued and the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons was increasingly lowered by the stationing of low-yield warheads on Trident submarines, among other things. The Strategic Conflict Although there was little official comment, President Putin’s March 1, 2018 announcement was about Russia’s new nuclear systems. These included the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle (launched from an ICBM, it travels at 20 times the speed of sound and boasts excellent maneuverability that renders the American missile defense system essentially obsolete;" the hypersonic aeroballistic missile Kinzhal; as well as nuclear-powered cruise missiles, fast underwater drones and laser weapons—a shock to the western military establishment. Meanwhile, China has also developed its own hypersonic missiles with infrared homing technology, a capability that the American military may not have for two to three years. American satellite imagery has also located about 300 missile silos under construction in scattered locations across China, some of which may remain empty, but others would have nuclear missiles in a state of “launch on warning” to forestall a disarming surprise attack. This is broadly the strategic background against which Putin presented two treaties to the United States and NATO on Dec. 17, demanding that they be legally binding: no further eastward expansion of NATO, and no offensive weapon systems stationed on Russia’s borders; plus guarantees that Ukraine would not be admitted to NATO. Unlike many trans-Atlantic politicians and media outlets, Gen. Harald Kujat, the former Inspector General of the German Armed Forces, believes that the gathering of some 120,000 Russian troops near the Ukrainian border—some of them, however, hundreds of kilometers away—is not indicative of an impending attack on Ukraine, but that Russia wants to demonstrate strength with this threatening backdrop in order to force negotiations with the U.S.A. and NATO on an equal footing. So far, the United States and NATO have refused to make any commitments on Putin’s key demands, and appear only willing to make what Russia considers secondary commitments on new disarmament talks. Putin has announced “military-technical measures” in the event of a definitive refusal. In view of the fact that the stationing of potentially offensive weapon systems in the vicinity of the Russian borders in connection with NATO’s eastward enlargement—this includes, for example, the Aegis missile defense system stationed in Poland and Romania—created a situation for Russia comparable to the stationing of Soviet missiles in Cuba, the question arises as to what these “measures” might look like. The American Russia expert Gilbert Doctorow suspects that they could include the stationing of nuclear-armed SS-26 Iskander-M short-range missiles in Belarus and Kaliningrad in order to threaten the NATO front-line states and eastern Germany in return. He further suspects Russia may plant sea-launched hypersonic Zircon nuclear-armed cruise missiles off the coast of Washington, D.C., which Russian experts have previously said could destroy the American capital so quickly the President would not have time to board Air Force One to escape. Theoretically, the Zirkon hypersonic missiles could, of course, also be used anywhere on the seven seas and are very difficult for conventional air defense to detect and intercept in view of their velocity—nine times the speed of sound—and maneuverability in flight. So it is only logical that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock on Jan. 20, 2022 showed only 100 seconds to midnight. That’s only about a minute and a half until the nuclear apocalypse. Even though, since the escalation of the Ukraine crisis, after a deep sleep of almost 40 years, the anti-war movement has issued a whole series of appeals, public calls and open letters—most recently from 100 organizations in the U.S.A. demanding that President Biden de-escalate the tensions with Russia—the enormous extent of the threat has by no means penetrated the public consciousness. Uncertainty about the Causes But even among most Westerners who recognize the imminent danger, there is a lack of clarity about the underlying causes of the existential danger to human existence. They are to be found, on the one hand, in the systemic character of the crisis of the neoliberal financial system, which has now entered its hyperinflationary final phase; and on the other hand, in the claim of the financial establishment in the City of London, Wall Street and Silicon Valley to a unipolar world in which only the power interests of this establishment determine what shall happen in the “rules-based order.” The dilemma now arises from an opposing dynamic. Since the paradigm shift of August 1971, prophetically recognized by Lyndon LaRouche—when Nixon effectively ended the Bretton Woods system by abolishing fixed exchange rates and thus paving the way for speculative profit maximization—there has been an increasing shift in the trans-Atlantic world away from investments in the productive physical economy and towards speculation in increasingly exotic derivative-based financial products, of which the most recent folly is “shifting the trillions” into the Green New Deal. From the standpoint of the physical economy this policy—of making investments in industries with the lowest possible energy-flux density—ultimately represents an extensive destruction of capital, just like investments in the military production of weapon systems and the army. The fact that this effect is usually not recognized has to do with the confusion about monetary values, money vs. real wealth, and the illusion that the share values ​​of listed companies say something about the productivity of the economy. Of course, it is in the interest of the yacht-owning billionaires, some of whom have long since acquired condominiums in deep-seated bunkers in Australia and elsewhere, that the bubble economy be sustained for as long as possible, even as the proportion of the population that is impoverished continues to increase, and the middle class shrinks. When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 and the trans-Atlantic establishment, despite all warnings—for example from Pope John Paul II—succumbed to the fantasy of having “won” the Cold War, and interpreted the “end of history” to mean that the whole world must now subject itself to the neoliberal rules-based order, there was no longer any need to keep any promises made to Russia not to expand NATO eastward. The whole spectrum of instruments for cementing the unipolar world was used: regime change, either through color revolutions or “humanitarian” wars against all governments that held other values. Victoria Nuland publicly boasted that the State Department had spent $5 billion on NGOs in Ukraine alone, which initially led to the 2004 “Orange Revolution.” When President Yanukovych refused to join the EU Association Agreement in late 2013, not least because the EU is fully linked to NATO in terms of treaties and security, the not-so-democratic side of the rules-based order came to the fore in the form of the Nazi Maidan coup of February 2014. This did not result in any annexation of Crimea by Putin, but rather a referendum by the people of Crimea, who wanted to withdraw from Kiev’s fascist policies. Even then, Putin stated that the West was actually concerned with containing Russia and that, if not in Ukraine, they would have found another excuse for doing so. The decisive hardening towards Russia and China became visible, in 2017 at the latest, in the changed language in the security doctrines of the Pentagon and the characterization of these two countries as “enemies” and “autocracies.” While the Western institutions initially reacted to the announcement of the New Silk Road by Xi Jinping in September 2013 with an extensive blackout for an amazing four years, these institutions have now reacted to this largest infrastructure project in human history as if it were an existential threat—namely to the unipolar world! Virtually all sanctions that have been imposed anywhere in the world unilaterally, i.e., without UN Security Council resolutions, ultimately had the chief purpose of preventing China’s economic rise and Russia’s regaining the status of world player. The transcript of the Jan. 25 background press briefing by two unnamed White House officials shockingly reveals this intention. They present a whole spectrum of “serious economic measures”—starting at the highest level of escalation—to thwart Putin’s strategic ambitions to industrialize his economy, by denying him access to all modern, advanced technologies, such as AI, quantum-computers, and any technology related to defense or aerospace, to prevent him from “diversifying” the economy beyond exporting oil and gas. The objective is the atrophy of the Russian economy. This policy, formulated in incredibly brutal language, is nothing more than a continuation of Jeffrey Sachs’ so-called “shock therapy” of the 1990s, which had the explicit aim of reducing Russia from the status of a superpower at the time of the Soviet Union to that of a commodity-exporting Third World country. That policy was then, as it is now, a declaration of war—the only difference being that Putin is not a pathetic figure like Boris Yeltsin, pampered by the West for geopolitical motives, but a brilliant strategist who knows how to defend Russia’s interests. The no less hateful tirades against China, which can be heard today from court scribblers of the Empire, as well as from former Maoists of the SDS era who have now risen to top positions in the Green Party, cannot change the outstanding success of the Chinese economy, which recorded a growth rate of over 8% in 2021 despite coronavirus. China has done more for human rights than any country of the so-called Western community of values, lifting 850 million people out of poverty domestically— including the Uyghurs, who now enjoy vastly better living standards and faster-than-average population growth—and offering many developing countries for the first time the chance to overcome poverty. The silence of the same circles on the largest of all humanitarian catastrophes, triggered by Western sanctions in Afghanistan, in which one million children are starving and a total of 24 million people are at risk of dying this Winter, seals their complete discrediting. Joint Statement by Putin and Xi If various authors have warned that the campaigns against Russia and China could lead to even closer ties between these two countries, then rest assured that this is exactly what has now happened during Putin’s visit to the Olympic Games in China. However, there is an urgent need to remove the ideological spectacles and recognize the extraordinary opportunity presented for the whole world by the joint declaration of Presidents Putin and Xi in this extremely dangerous world situation. The 16-page document entitled, “Joint Declaration of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on International Relations Entering a New Era and Global Sustainable Development,” calls for replacing geopolitical confrontation with economic cooperation as the basis for a common security policy. Both nations are calling on NATO to refrain from further expansion plans, to move beyond Cold War thinking, and to enshrine the long-term security guarantees that Russia is demanding. The role of international organizations such as the G20, BRICS, APEC and ASEAN should be strengthened, they say. Russia will cooperate in realizing China’s proposed “Global Development Initiative” and emphasizes the importance of the concept of the “community of a common destiny for mankind.” Let’s think back to the hundred seconds before midnight on the doomsday clock: Who can deny that we are an indivisible community of destiny? In recent weeks, more level-headed voices have spoken out in favor of a new pan-European security architecture including Russia and Ukraine, which could be enshrined in a new Helsinki agreement. However, in view of the complexity of the world situation, the threat to world peace affecting all states, and the inseparability of the security of all, it is necessary to go beyond Helsinki and create an international security architecture that encompasses the security interests of all states on Earth. This architecture must be based on the principles of the Peace of Westphalia; i.e., it must guarantee the interests of all states and, above all, their right to economic and cultural development. The maintenance of world peace presupposes a total and definitive renunciation of Malthusian politics, and requires undivided access to the achievements of scientific and technological advance for all nations. This new order— the prerequisite for the survival of the human species—requires a new paradigm of thought that must draw upon the best traditions of all cultures at the highest humanistic level. We have a choice: Either we keep the clock ticking until the last of the hundred seconds has struck, and then there will be no one left to comment on the result; or, we can remember that we are the only known creative species in the universe, and shape our common future together.

Dec. 26—The world is faced right now with an overwhelming multitude of crises: the pandemic, which is very far from being under control, and has resulted so far in around 800,000 deaths in the U.S. and more than 5 million worldwide; an escalating tendency towards hyperinflation; collapsing infrastructure in the U.S. and European nations; world famine of “biblical dimensions”; a mass-migration crisis affecting more than 70 million people; the list could go on. But probably for the first time in U.S. history, the possibility of a new world war is dawning on people, and that this time it would not just be overseas. If it happens, it for sure will come to the United States. The combination of all of these dangers seems almost too much to bear—unless we realize that none of them are natural catastrophes, but are the result of wrong policies. And that means they can be corrected, provided the political will can be mobilized to do so. The overarching problem is that much of the trans-Atlantic world is dominated by a financial oligarchy that has worked diligently since the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, but especially since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and its coverup, to eradicate, step by step, the principles of economy associated with the tradition of the American System of Alexander Hamilton and replace it with the British System of monetarist policies of profit maximization. When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, these forces—situated primarily in the City of London and Wall Street and more recently also in Silicon Valley—took the demise of Soviet communism as the pretext to create a unipolar world, built upon the much heralded British-American special relationship. This was not stated openly in the tumultuous period spanning the fall of the Berlin Wall, the subsequent German Unification, and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, but behind the scenes the neocons in the U.S. and their London counterparts were already working on what was to become known as the “Wolfowitz doctrine,” i.e., the idea that no country would ever be allowed to bypass the U.S. in terms of economic, military, or political power. Publicly, promises were given to Gorbachev by Secretary of State James Baker III, that NATO would not move “one inch eastward,” if Russia were to allow the peaceful unification of Germany. But that was a deliberate deception from the very beginning. With the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent dissolution of the Iron Curtain. there was an historic chance for a great change. Such chances only emerge at best once in a century. With the borders between Eastern and Western Europe now open, Lyndon LaRouche and his movement proposed the economic program of the “Eurasian Land Bridge,” the idea to integrate the industrial and population centers of Europe with those of Asia through infrastructure development corridors. Such a policy would have created the basis for a peace order for the 21st Century. While there was great support for this visionary policy among many industrialists and peace-loving forces in many countries, the Neo-cons in the U.S. and their British partners had no intention of allowing it. Instead, the CIA published a report in 1991 expressing concern that the nations of the former Soviet Union had a greater number of highly educated scientists and more raw materials than the United States. Therefore, the expansion and upgrading of industrial development could not be encouraged. With the help of the utterly corrupt Boris Yeltsin, Jeffrey Sachs imposed “Shock Therapy” on Russia from 1991 to 1994 and reduced Russia’s industrial capacity to only 30% of its previous level. And the massive population reduction of about one million Russians per year was the result. Organized in institutions such as the Project for a New American Century, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Atlantic Council, and the London-based Henry Jackson Society, these forces had no intention of sticking to the promises made to Gorbachov. They used the occasion of the disappearance of the communist adversary to instead further the transformation of the United States from the Republic that it was created to be by America’s Founding Fathers, into a trans-Atlantic Empire modelled on that very British Empire against which the American Revolution had been fought. With that new orientation came a whole set of policies: further deregulation of the financial markets, including the eventual abolition of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999; and the systematic abandonment of the UN Charter and its guarantee of each state’s national sovereignty, replacing that guarantee with a “rules based order,” in which the rules are made by a few. The introduction of “humanitarian interventionist wars” and the Right To Protect (R2P) policy, led to the “endless wars” in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and other nations. A systematic policy of “Regime Change” and “Color Revolution” against all countries which refused to submit to the concept of the unipolar world was run by this Anglo-American cabal. And, since Russia had been effectively deindustrialized with that “shock therapy,” these Neo-cons thought they could dismiss Russia as a strategic player. They proceed to insulted Russia, to boast that Russia would now be no more than a “regional power,” as Obama proclaimed. Meanwhile NATO moved step by step eastward, not only an inch, but by adding fourteen members, including the seven nations of the former Warsaw Pact and the three Baltic states, and in this way moved closer to the border of Russia with modern weapon systems that reduce the time to reach Moscow to a few minutes. At the same time, the U.S. pulled out of one arms control treaty and other treaties, one after the other: The ABM Treaty in 2002, the INF Treaty in 2019, the JCPOA in 2018, and the Open Skies Treaty in 2020. At the same time, the trans-Atlantic oligarchical establishment arrogantly felt so increasingly self-assured that it decided that it had become safe to maintain its power with a turn to more openly Malthusian green policies, given that the “adversary” had disappeared. And that therefore it was no longer so necessary to maintain state-of-the-art industrial and scientific technology. So, the shift to a more openly and unabashed neocolonial “Transformation of the World Economy” out of fossil fuels and related technologies was promoted. The well-greased propaganda machine of the trans-Atlantic media, under the spell of NATO, escalated the scare about anthropogenic climate change, ignoring the views of thousands of scientists who had challenged the arbitrary models based on tailor-made algorithms about CO2 emissions causing the “planet to boil over,” as Obama famously put it to an audience of African students assembled in South Africa. When these monetarist policies erupted in the systemic crisis of 2008, rather than addressing the root causes of the problem, the money printing machines of QE (quantitative easing) and the zero-to-negative interest rate policy were set into motion, to keep the casino economy of speculation and profit maximization going. Ever more apocalyptic scenarios were put into circulation by the Princes of the British Royal Family and their kindergarten troops of the Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future, increasingly prophesying that the world would end in twelve years unless people stopped eating and driving cars. The more the untenability of the financial system became clear to insiders, the more the determination of the financial oligarchy grew, to transfer their activities into one last gigantic bubble. “Shifting the Trillions” became the new slogan, which was to signify the “decarbonization” of the world economy, whereby investments would, from now on, be directed only to renewable energy and related industries. Meanwhile Prince Charles upped the ante by declaring from mid-2019 onward, that the world had only 18 months left to reach the royally defined climate goals, or otherwise the world would end. What Charles had in mind, however, had little to do with the behavior of the climate of the Earth, which has stubbornly followed its cycles for millions of years, oscillating from warming periods to ice ages and back, depending on processes in the Sun and the changing position of the solar system in the Milky Way galaxy. Prince Charles’ proclamation had very much to do instead with the series of major climate conferences—from the April 22-23 U.S. Leaders’ Climate Summit, to the United Nation’s COP15 Biodiversity Conference in October in China, and culminating in the COP 26 Climate Conference in Glasgow. It was stated in various ways that, by the time of this last of the series of conferences, which would take place in the UK and would be pretty much under the control of the British Royal Family, the climate regime had to be imposed on the entire world, to make the “Shifting the Trillions” maneuver work. So with big fanfare, the two-week extravaganza took place in Glasgow with, according to the BBC head-count, 120 heads of state participating and many top executives arriving in their heavily CO2-emitting yachts and private jets. But COP26 turned into Flop26. First, the leaders of Russia and China did not come, and according to the statements coming from both countries it became very clear, that they were not willing to submit to a global neo-Malthusian scheme, that essentially would condemn the developing sector to giving up any hope of ever overcoming underdevelopment by forcing them to submit to the abandonment of fossil fuels and sign on to something that would effectively be a global eco-dictatorship. The leaders of several developing nations, including Indonesia, India, and Nigeria, made it very clear that they would not give up their right to development by giving up investments in fossil fuel related energy plants and industries, and that furthermore, they completely rejected the arrogant Eurocentric way of thinking of the British elites and their underlings' efforts to dominate them in a neocolonial manner. With the failure of Flop26, the efforts of the U.S. and UK to assert a neo-Malthusian dictate over the world and the attempt to impose this last mega-bubble, the “Great Reset,” to prolong the life-expectancy of the failing financial system, had fallen through. Not much better was the effort by President Biden to rally the designated democratic countries against the so-called “autocratic” regimes, and to get those “allies” to swear allegiance to the “rules-based order.” Several countries abstained from attendance, refusing the demand to essentially choose between the U.S. and China. In the uninvited “autocratic” states on the other side, the self confidence about their own policy successes, for example in respect to economic growth rates or the success in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, was expressed openly. The narrative about the “good” democracies and the “bad” autocratic states had, in the meantime, fallen into a gigantic, almost irreconcilable credibility hole. Not only had the most powerful military machine in the world, the U.S. plus NATO, lost the war in Afghanistan after 20 years of war against essentially 65,000 Taliban fighters, but the circumstances of the hurried withdrawal revealed many other unpleasant realities. Except for maybe a couple of schools and roads, nothing had been built in these 20 years and the whole country was in absolute shambles. In the weeks and months since, it has become obvious that more than 90% of the population had been left food insecure, a euphemism for starvation, and left without medical care. As the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, stated clearly in his address to the Emergency Meeting of the OIC (Organization of Islamic Cooperation) Council of Foreign Ministers in Islamabad in December, when the NATO and U.S. troops left in August, everybody knew that 75% of the Afghan budget had come from international aid. When the donors cut that aid following the Taliban takeover, and then the $9.5 billion in foreign reserve assets belonging to the Afghan people was withheld by the U.S. Treasury and some billions more by European banks, the economy was shut down practically at once. As a result, 24 million of the about 40 million people now living in Afghanistan are in acute danger of starvation this winter, dying of disease without medical care, or freezing to death in the very harsh winter weather of Afghanistan. And this is not the fault of the Taliban, but of the continuation of a war, which could not be won militarily, by other means—the means of financial warfare. If these are the “rules” of the rules-based order, “democracy” has become a bad word. And what had been suspected by many observers is now confirmed by the remarks of Secretary of State Blinken: The purpose of the U.S./NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan was not just to end one of the endless wars, it was to free up forces bogged down in an unwinnable war for redeployment in the Indo-Pacific, and around the crisis with Russia over Ukraine. So essentially the “Western democracies” have suffered three distinct and different defeats during the last four months: first, the defeat in Afghanistan, where NATO did not exactly cover itself with glory; second, the disaster of the Flop26; and finally, the “democracy summit,” where everybody but the most ideologically blind proponents of the official narrative is now convinced that the emperor has no clothes. It is essentially due to the combination of these three defeats on top of a worldwide backlash against the arrogant idea of the U.S. historian Francis Fukuyama about the “end of history,” which he declared with the demise of the Soviet Union. The forces of the unipolar world, announced by Fukuyama, are pushing confrontation with Russia over Ukraine. In a twisted form of a mirror-like inversion, the U.S. and the UK are accusing Russia of preparing a military attack against Ukraine, when it is, in fact, NATO, the U.S., and the UK instigating Ukraine to create security situations that are unacceptable to Russia, and which represent the {de facto} crossing of red lines. In a reaction to what was clearly building up to a military conflict between Ukraine and Russia, with the obvious potential of escalating into a larger war, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on December 17, presented two proposed treaties to the U.S. and NATO, one of which, the “Agreement on Measures to Ensure the Security of the Russian Federation and Member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization,” would require that NATO members commit to no further enlargements of the alliance, including especially to Ukraine. As President Putin and other Russian officials put it, these treaties would retrospectively put in a legally binding form that which was promised to Russia in 1990 in the first place, and which, given the geographical location of Ukraine and its security implications for Russia, is a perfectly legitimate demand. Putin cautioned, however, that even the signing of such treaties would not be a 100% guarantee, given the record of the U.S. pulling out of legally binding treaties. If NATO and the U.S. reject the signing of such treaties, the world will in all likelihood be in for a reverse Cuban missile crisis or something worse. Russia will be forced to respond now as America would, if Russia were to install offensive weapons systems at the Canadian and Mexican borders. There are remedies, but they require a dramatic change, of course. The U.S. and NATO should sign these two treaties, since they are consistent with what was promised to Russia in 1990 and with what is the necessary precondition for a stable security architecture in the world. All nations must cooperate to build modern health systems in every single country on the planet. It should have become obvious to everybody that the pandemic can not be defeated by only providing health care to the rich countries. The incredible suffering of the Afghan people, who have lived under conditions of war for 40 years, must be stopped with “Operation Ibn Sina.” A modern health care system must be built, and the economy must be built up by integrating Afghanistan into the regional projects of the BRI. The U.S. must return to the principles of the American System of economy of Alexander Hamilton and adopt the Four Laws proposed by Lyndon LaRouche. The combination of these policies can bring the world quickly out of the mortal danger we find ourselves in, but they require that you, the American citizen, become active to save the country and save the world!

Oct. 10—This statement was jointly issued today by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institute, and Guus Berkhout, emeritus professor of geophysics; initiator and co-founder of CLINTEL (Climate Intelligence). We have bitter debates about just about everything: green energy, pandemic measures, political ideologies, tax policies, the refugee crisis, rising rents, erosion of fundamental rights, pension plans, government bureaucracies, the generation gap, women’s rights, etc. But what we fail to see is the big picture: namely, that we in the West are ruled by an increasingly powerful political establishment that is in the process of destroying everything we have built since World War II!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. An oligarchy that needs “endless wars” to generate income for its military-industrial complex, and promotes the production and distribution of mind-destroying drugs, both illegal and legalized, the latter because the financial system would have collapsed long ago without the input of laundered drug money. And given that this system is now hopelessly bankrupt, the entire economic and financial system is now supposed to be converted to so-called green technologies in a final great coup—the Great Reset. Under the pretext of climate protection, the motto for this conversion is “Shifting the Trillions.” And it’s happening now! The policies of the Green Deal (EU) and the Green New Deal (USA) mean that banks restrict their loans to investments in green technologies, and have long since subjected companies to an increasingly strangulating system of requirements such as taxonomy, the Supply Chain law, etc. At the same time, there is a method to the high energy prices: pushing prices above the pain threshold in monetary terms is supposed to manipulate the population into learning how to get along without meat consumption, heating, decent housing, travel, etc. This goes hand in hand with an image of man that sees every human being as a parasite polluting nature. While we know that CO₂ is essential to all life on Earth, the green policy trumpets: “The less CO₂ footprints left behind, the better.” The truth is, this is old wine in new bottles. It is exactly the same austerity policy of Hjalmar Schacht, Germany’s Reichsbank president and economics minister just before World War II. This is cannibalization of the labor force. Whoever thinks this comparison is exaggerated, should watch the film Hunger Ward about Yemen, featuring the World Food Program’s David Beasley, or consider the death rate of children in Haiti. What does Klaus Schwab say about this in his book Stakeholder Capitalism? He complains that African countries like Ethiopia successfully fought extreme poverty (p.154): “It reveals the central conundrum of the combat against climate change. The same force that helps people escape from poverty and lead a decent life is the one that is destroying the livability of our planet for future generations. The emissions that lead to climate change are not just the result of a selfish generation of industrialists or Western baby boomers. They are the consequence of the human desire to create a better future for himself.” Here it is in black and white. According to this logic, increasing the death rate by increasing poverty is the best thing that can happen to the climate! Life does not matter to the elites of Schwab. If we want to escape the looming catastrophe, we must rebuild society completely on very different principles. This is our positive message, being a message of a hopeful future with prosperity for all: 1. Human life is inviolable. Man is the only species endowed with creative reason, which distinguishes him from all other living beings. This creative capability enables him to continually discover new principles of the physical universe, which is called scientific progress. The fact that the human mind, through an immaterial idea, is able to discover these principles, which then have an effect in the material universe in the form of technological progress, proves that there is a correspondence between the lawfulness of the human mind and the laws of the physical universe. 2. Just as the spatial expanse and anti-entropic evolution of the universe are infinite, so is the intellectual and moral perfectibility of the human mind. Therefore, every additional human being is a new source for further development of the universe and for the solution of problems on Earth, such as overcoming poverty, disease, underdevelopment, and violence. Taking care of each other is key in this ongoing development. It is the combination of creativity and empathy that transcends mere day-to-day exigencies. 3. Scientific and technological progress has a positive effect in that, when applied to the production process, it increases the productivity of the labor force and of industrial and agricultural capacities, which in turn leads to rising living standards and a longer life expectancy for more and more people. A prosperous physical economy is the precondition for the positive development of the common good, providing not only the elites, but all people with quality food, clean water, affordable and modern health care, quality education, modern communications and, above all, cheap and sufficient energy with high energy flux densities. Inherently safe third-generation nuclear energy and the future use of thermonuclear fusion are indispensable for securing mankind’s energy supply for an unlimited time. Unreliable energy systems and increasing energy prices are the mother of inflation. Poverty starts with energy poverty. 4. The purpose of the economy has nothing to do with profit, but with the happiness of people, in the sense meant by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, i.e., that people are able to develop all the inherent potentials they have into a harmonious whole, and thus contribute to the best possible further development of mankind. Or as the wise Solon of Athens said: The purpose of mankind is progress. It is the duty of good government, through its policies, to provide for the happiness of its citizens in this sense, beginning with universal education for all, the goal of which must be to foster beautiful character through education and the development of an ever-increasing number of geniuses. This perspective is in accordance with Vladimir Vernadsky’s conviction that the physical universe must inherently evolve in such a way that the share of the noösphere increasingly grows in relation to the biosphere. To be more specific, growth should be two-fold, creativity for the material necessities and empathy for the immaterial needs. Taking care of each other and our natural environment is presented in our slogan: “Prosperity for all,” in which all refers not only to us in the here and now, but also to future generations. 5. Man’s true destiny is not to remain an earthling. His identity, as the only known species endowed with creative reason, is to explore space, as we did with planet Earth. What space pioneer Krafft Ehricke called the “extraterrestrial imperative,” or in a certain sense, the new educational effect of space travel on man, requires mankind to truly “grow up,” that is, to cast off his irrational impulses, and make creativity his identity, which has so far only been the case for outstanding scientists and artists of classical culture. In this phase of evolution, of love for humanity and love for creation, generated by recognition of the magnificence of the physical universe, it will have become natural that mankind takes care of all aspects of humanity, the planet, nature, and the universe at large with great care, because the fabricated contradiction between man and nature will have been overcome (new stewardship). Man does not exist in opposition to nature; he is the most advanced part of it. This is what Schiller called freedom in necessity, and is the concept that Beethoven placed above his Grosse Fugue: “Just as rigorous as it is free.” This lofty idea of man and everything he has built, is what is threatened by the Hjalmar Schachts, Klaus Schwabs, the power-hungry political leaders, and the profit-hungry business leaders of the world. This is a wake-up call, addressed to all people, to resist the danger of a new evil. Let us prevent a return to the past, when an evil elite impoverished mankind and told us to be happy with such conditions.

On Pakistan’s “PTV World” broadcast, Faisal Rehman hosted Helga Zepp-LaRouche of the Schiller Institute and Pakistan’s Ambassador to Italy Jauhar Saleem. Rehman began by welcoming “Our guest, Ms. Helga!” with an opening question as whether the world had entered into a clash of civilizations. Zepp-LaRouche answered that she had read Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, and, first, it must be said that he knew very little about the civilizations that he wrote about.Further, the world is not about “geopolitics but geo-economics”—employing the distinction recently made by Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan. AUKUS is not the spirit of the time. The AUKUS attempt may even provoke something like de Gaulle’s response to NATO, as in 1958. This move has destroyed trust in Biden. He had just said, in pulling troops out of Afghanistan, that this was the end of an era; the end of endless wars. Was he serious? Or was it just to concentrate forces against China? This is not good for Biden, as trust in his word is undermined. Rather, the New Silk Road is the pathway—and the Schiller Institute, by the way, has been on this pathway since 1991. So, does Australia want to be an aircraft carrier for this new military alliance? Or does it want an economic future for its own people? The situation is that there is a decaying neo-liberal system, and it has been refusing to respond to offers from China and Russia. After a question and some discussion with Ambassador Saleem, Rehman turned back to Zepp-LaRouche, and asked: How would the U.S. and China, given the present conflicting positions, move ahead? Zepp-LaRouche set out that, objectively, neither China nor Russia represents a threat. There have been many offers on demilitarization from Putin—including to Germany in 2001, when he spoke, in German, to the Bundestag. And China has lifted 850 million of their people out of poverty. The BRI is not a threat. They are offering to developing countries to conquer poverty. We need to take a step back. It is a nuclear-armed world, and there is the threat of war by accident, war by miscalculation. China’s Global Times clearly warned that China will fight and win certain conflicts, such as over Taiwan. Therefore, we must stop geopolitics. In Afghanistan, David Beasley, director of the World Food Program, made clear that 90% are hungry. Afghanistan’s Health Minister Wahid Majrooh explained that 90% have recently been denied health care. The recent move to use the Extended Troika (of China, Pakistan, Russia and the United States) involves reaching out and collaborating to develop Afghanistan. It can be integrated into the BRI—and there is the offer to Europe and the U.S. to join in. Then director of the UN Office of Drugs and Crime Pino Arlacchi, for example, was able to conclude an agreement in 2000 with the Taliban to end opium production. There are presently 2 billion people in the world without access to clean water. We need a modern health sector in every country. Not doing so simply means that there will be more mutations, new variants and the defeat of the last round of vaccines. Clearly, this crisis requires a new paradigm in our thinking. Afghanistan can be the new building block. The human species is the only one endowed with creative reason. We can find cures for a pandemic, for overcoming poverty, even colonizing Mars. You know, in February, the United Arab Emirates, China and the United States all had Mars missions at the same time. It is time to become an adult species.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche spoke with a group of supporters and members of the Schiller Institute on Monday: Let me greet all of you. Actually, I’m a little bit distraught, because if you look at the world situation, it’s really going from bad to worse. We have a very worrisome escalation between Ukraine and Russia, which is really not just Ukraine, it’s actually really NATO, and this is a whole conflict which, if things go wrong, could really lead to war. And that is not an exaggeration. I don’t want to focus on that; I just want to identify it as one of the many problems of the world. Then, also the situation between the United States and China over Taiwan, in particular, is also heating up tremendously. But I want to focus on something else:As you know, the pandemic is not under control at all. If you start with Germany, for example, this country is in a complete turmoil, pandemonium, because obviously for more than a year, the EU and the German government made many mistakes. I think if you look at Vietnam, which is a country which has a larger population than Germany, about 98 million, they had something like between 30 and 50 deaths altogether. In Germany now, they’re talking about a possibly lockdown until the end of the year, because it’s long gone that you could do what Vietnam did in the beginning, containing it with quarantine, contact tracing; now you have a complete, out-of-control situation, and the infection rate is going up despite a lockdown. The same in France and many other European countries. Brazil: The variants in Brazil are a reason for worry for the whole world. Naturally the South African and British variants are also a big factor in the increase in the infection rate. But Brazil is for sure the most dangerous situation, because what most doctors are now concerned about is that if this is not getting under control soon, which means you have a vaccination and health measures, and modern medical treatment in every country, you could have new variants which make already-injected vaccinations not effective, obsolete. In any case, this can take a dynamic which some people have not even thought about, and the big accusation now is that the rich countries are hoarding vaccines, that they have 60% of the vaccines, while the African population has less than 1% of the people are vaccinated so far. Then you have the famine: The famine which is absolutely reaching a point where I could—and I will show you some short video, shortly—but before I do that, the thing that makes me so upset, and I’m not a political lightweight, or lily, or I don’t collapse quickly. But what gets to me is that, there is an unbelievable genocide going on against so many countries: You have a collapse in Yemen—20 million people in Yemen are in danger of dying; 90% of the population in Syria, according to the Catholic Nuncio Cardinal Mario Zenari, are living below the poverty level, have not enough medicine, have not enough to eat—and nothing is happening! You know, at the so-called Syrian donors’ conference which just took place on March 30, they collected a few billions, but it only goes to the countries around Syria which have taken some of the refugees, it goes to the NGOs, it goes to the opposition of the Syrian government, but it is not going into the reconstruction of Syria, which would be the only way to stop it. Now, this Catholic Cardinal has made a very, very urgent appeal, which has gotten very little resonance, but he said that unless there is a radical shift, there is the danger of mass death in the Syrian nation. And that is why I want to focus on that alone, because I think the Schiller Institute is one of the few organizations—I mean, there are other organizations that are doing incredible work, like Caritas Internationalis, and many others—but we need a change! We need a change in politics. For example, in the United States, there is the so-called Caesar’s Act, which had been voted up in Congress and signed by Trump in 2020, which basically says any country which does not respect to the sanctions on Syria and the Syrian government will be sanctioned themselves, and that is the biggest mechanism why actually there is nothing happening right now. As you know, we have initiated last year, the Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites, which was the idea that you need to create an organization which starts to do things to change that, you know, it’s supposed to help to bring medical supplies to the developing countries, food aid; naturally, it is clear that a little, private organization, and it is still little—hopefully it will grow—can only do a symbolic act. We can only make clear what should be done, what should be taken up by the governments, and we hope to be a catalyst to do so. But I think that we need to broaden this. So far, we are only doing things for the education of young people in the United States. This is on a good way. We are also planning to get a project for Mozambique, now that’s on a good way, too. But I think the situation is reaching a point where we absolutely have to shake up the world, much, much more, and I’m asking all of you who are participating in this discussion that you become active with us. Because I think what is happening right now is by far not enough, and I think my late husband, many years ago—I think it was in 1988 on the occasion of a meeting of the Club of Life in Munich, he warned, and this was at that time in the context of the AIDS virus, he warned that the world could collapse. And I think that if we do not change our ways, the moral indifference of mankind not being able to react to something which is happening in front of our eyes, you know, that lack of moral fiber in us, may be the reason why we cannot stop the things which bring about the destruction of civilization of a whole. So my words now are really a cry out: Are there not more people who understand that we have to absolutely, dramatically change the way how things go, that we have to change geopolitics, that only if the major countries work together and not fight each other in proxy wars, in places like Southwest Asia, because innocent people are paying a price! So, I would like to show you the little video clip, which is excerpted from a longer video, which was produced by David Beasley, the director of the World Food Program. It’s a 40-minute documentary, and I just want to show you 2 minutes of it, and I want to encourage you that tonight or later, you watch the whole documentary. It is very difficult to watch because it gets to you very much. But I think people have to confront the reality that that is what is happening. So if you could please show this clip: (A video excerpt from The Hunger Ward shows an obviously malnourished 10 year old girl receiving treatment in an Aden pediatric malnutrition ward.) Now, I don’t think any child should have such thin arms, and Dr. Beasley described that these children, or some of these children were dying in front of his eyes and he couldn’t do anything about it, because there were no materials to stop it. So I think we should really try to wake up the world and get a change in the policy, and I think we should not only put the Africa nations on our agenda, but I think—you know, people have forgotten about Syria and Yemen, and I think we have to change that. So I want to leave it at that and hear if you have anything you want to say.