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March 9—The American mass media have been incessantly bombarding Americans with the idea that Russians are monsters, and that there are not—repeat not—any neo-Nazis fighting as part of the Ukrainian forces. For example, PBS Newshour recently lionized Artem Semenikhin, mayor of the small town of Konotop, for his “dogged resistance” to Russia: “We are ready to fight to the end … to defeat these Russian cockroaches.” He proudly displays his automatic weapon. “My weapons are American.” He brags: “I think the occupiers will be pleased that we’re killing them with American weapons.” Then he goes outside to rabble rouse in the town square. The problem is that PBS got their video footage of their “small-town mayor” character, and up on wall behind him for all to see was a giant portrait of the 1940s Nazi collaborator and nationalist Ukrainian hero, Stepan Bandera. PBS chose to deal with the problem by simply blurring the portrait portion of the video: no neo-Nazis here.This blatant media lying is the subject of Patrick Lawrence column in Consortium News on Tuesday, March 8. First, Lawrence notes that any count of fatalities in Ukraine has to begin with the 14,000 dead in the Donbas, along with the 1.5 million refugees, all prior to 2022, from Kiev’s treatment of its Ukrainian citizens. Then he makes the salient point that the West is doing “Brzezinski 1979” all over again—but using Nazi militias in Ukraine instead of mujahideen in Afghanistan. Getting to the PBS travesty, he refers to the January 2021 NATO study, “Cognitive Warfare”—really a technological application of the infamous Bertrand Russell description of a level of brainwashing skill, whereby a government could convince a population that “Snow is black.” Lawrence quotes: “The brain will be the battlefield of the 21st century. Humans are the contested domain. Cognitive warfare’s objective is to make everyone a weapon.” (He also picks out, for fun, this self-damning quote: “In particular, the brain is unable to distinct [sic] whether information is right or wrong.” For Lawrence, the PBS blurring of the Bandera portrait was yet another obnoxious step in the “Cognitive War,” a war where going for clarity is the pathway out. With individual minds making that fight for clarity, he concludes that an effort to examine a) the “regrettable but necessary” Russian intervention, and b) the Putin-Xi joint statement of Feb. 4, will provide the needed clarity for American self-examination: “[W]e are all called upon either to recognize the United States for what it has become, an empire violently defending itself history itself, or accept our fate among the victims of this empire.”

March 9—Two weeks into the Ukraine-Russia war, policymakers in the West are nervously discussing whether or not the scorched earth financial warfare they have launched against Russia—and the world—will backfire. Will it blow out their entire trans-Atlantic system before they can bring Russia to heel? Might it instead lead to a formidable Russia-China economic counter-bloc, outside and against the West’s speculative system of looting? Could it possibly even unleash nuclear war?These are questions which would have been rejected as apocalyptic and foolish just one month ago; but today they are being openly discussed in the Western media as the existential questions of the day. They are precisely the issues that Lyndon LaRouche for decades warned would soon be on Mankind’s agenda, as the systemic breakdown crisis drove the world towards pandemics and wars. A particularly distressing problem for the London and Wall Street financial Establishment is the fact that growing political circles in the West are waking up to the fact that their countries on every continent—Germany, Japan, the U.S., Argentina, Nigeria, Thailand, etc.—are as much in the cross-hairs of this demented policy as is Russia. It is dawning on them that LaRouche was right all along: that the military and financial warfare against Russia is simply the excuse for down-shifting the entire world economy back into the Middle Ages. “Wait a minute! That’s my food, my gasoline, my housing, my job that just went up in smoke!” is becoming an increasingly common, frantic response to the crisis. The world is indeed breaking apart, Helga Zepp-LaRouche emphasized today, and we are heading towards an explosion like few can imagine. We remain at a hair-trigger in the Ukraine theater, and we are also on the cusp of the worst wave of famine in centuries. The most elementary means of human sustenance—energy, food, and the means to produce it, such as fertilizer and transportation—are being priced out of reach of most nations and people, at the same time that their physical production plummets. Under such conditions it is criminally irresponsible to promote the green “set-aside” and “30 by 30” policies that will only further wipe out food production and drive additional millions into hunger and starvation, Zepp-LaRouche emphasized. The breakdown and the backlash open up a brief window of opportunity to pull Mankind back from the brink. Our job is to catch people as they wake up to the reality, Zepp-LaRouche noted, and prevent them from becoming pessimistic about the difficulty of the battle, by catalyzing them into a solution-oriented approach. That means helping to organize the widest possible circulation of, and signatures on the Schiller Institute call for a new international security and development architecture—a call which presents the only viable programmatic solution to the crisis.

March 2—The shooting war that has erupted on Russia’s western flank may be limited so far to only two nations, Ukraine and Russia—with the looming danger of escalation into a thermonuclear confrontation between the superpowers. But the City of London and Wall Street have already launched an economic and financial world war to annihilate both Russia and China. French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire may have been forced to publicly retract his indiscreet announcement on Feb. 28 of the intent to use the “financial nuclear weapon” against Russia, but the policy of the international financial Establishment remains just that: “Wage an all-out financial and economic war against Russia.” This policy was stated to the press by two sneering, unnamed administration officials on Jan. 25. It was reiterated in another background White House briefing on Feb. 28. And it remains the constant drumbeat from the British financial press and their American shadows today.President Biden was also coached to dedicate the first fifteen minutes of his March 1 State of the Union address to an “I’m-a-tough-guy” aggressive barrage against Russia, never once addressing the very real, and very legitimate, security concerns repeatedly raised by that country about the NATO encroachment up to their very borders. This is not a crisis unleashed by nations, but by the supranational financial oligarchy which runs the bankrupt trans-Atlantic financial system. In the face of their own looming bankruptcy—does anyone really think that $2 quadrillion of financial speculation can ever be paid off?—the policy of that financial Establishment is to “shift the trillions” behind a Global Green Reset. This is a Malthusian policy of depopulation to be imposed by forcing a down-shift to low energy-flux-density forms of economic activity, and by shutting down industrial activity around the world. With that policy being imposed across the trans-Atlantic sector that they control, the City of London and Wall Street Establishment clearly cannot allow China and Russia to develop and prosper, and thereby serve as an example for the rest of the world. Thus, the all-out war—military, economic and psychological—targeting Russia and China, and which is engulfing the planet today. When Prince Charles stated at last year’s COP26 meeting that, in order to implement his Green Reset policy, “we have to put ourselves on a war-like footing” and “we need a vast military-style campaign,” he surely had in mind what has now been launched against Russia. People in all nations are beginning to realize that they have to buck these policies of green deindustrialization and war, if they are to survive. All the more so, since there is an alternative to the suicidal policy course that has been adopted in the West. Top representatives of the Chinese government continue to extend a hand to the United States and Europe, as well as developing sector nations, inviting them to join with the Belt and Road Initiative global infrastructure policy. President Xi Jinping first proposed it to then-President Obama, who rejected the offer out of hand. The same happened with President Trump. And as recently as Feb. 28, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi reiterated that China is open to the United States participating in the Belt and Road Initiative. This is precisely the economic policy direction that is needed as the framework for the new international security and development architecture that the Schiller Institute has called for. Please sign and circulate the Schiller Institute’s call, Convoke an International Conference To Establish a New Security and Development Architecture for All Nations—and organize to have this policy discussed and debated out internationally. Just as the Federalist Papers were needed to flesh out the U.S. Constitutional form of self-government, so today is an in-depth dialogue required to establish an international security and development architecture to allow for the self-government of the world community of nations—and the City of London and Wall Street be damned!

March 1 (EIRNS)—In the atmosphere of a “Captain Ahab-like” increasingly unhinged recklessness being expressed by several trans-Atlantic governments, and their reluctant but captured “allies,” all now driving the world, wittingly or not, to thermonuclear war, it is essential not to divert from the policy proposal: “Convoke an International Conference to Establish A New Security and Development Architecture for All Nations” authored by Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp LaRouche. That way lies a restoration of sanity.The problem we are facing is the addiction to the dying, imperial monetarist world order that the City of London and Wall Street still insist must be saved. That axiomatic, unachievable obsession is the actual underlying impulse for war, for which the surface conflict called “the Ukraine crisis” is but today’s most momentarily prominent symptom. Notice how no one is now talking about the unfolding deliberate deaths of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions in Afghanistan—far more people than are in danger of death in Ukraine. There is no uniformity, no standing together with the “forces of democracy” to save those people’s lives. Insight into the “Bertrand Russell” mind-set in play in the drunken judgmental processes of the “Hooray For Doomsday” crowd is provided by considering the evaluation offered Monday by General Sir Richard Barrons, ex-head of the British Joint Forces Command. He stated (despite what had been said by White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki—see slug) that Ukraine’s “no-fly zone” request might be granted by NATO, leading to a war with Russia by the end of the week: “A no-fly zone is feasible. So, it’s Monday night. By Wednesday, Russian heavy artillery will be around these Ukrainian cities. And they may be firing indiscriminately, and destroying large chunks of the city, and killing civilians, and when they do this, they will be 300 miles from the border with NATO and the European Union, a day’s drive, or half an hour in a military jet. So I think one of the issues, for about Thursday or Friday of this week, is, how does public opinion in the UK and other countries react, to seeing people who look and live like us being slaughtered. And at that stage, I think there will be a different conversation, led by public opinion, about the application of NATO military power—perhaps through the sky, and definitely against heavy weapons.” In another example of manic, potentially-fatal hubris, French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire was caused to quickly withdraw recklessly arrogant statements he made in an interview concerning the use of sanctions against Russia. "I do not want to leave any ambiguity about the European determination on this issue. We are going to wage an all-out financial and economic war against Russia. Q: "Against Russia or against Vladimir Putin? BLM: “Against Russia, against Vladimir Putin, against his government. But the Russian people will also pay the consequences. Let’s be clear. We want to target the heart of the Russian system, we target Vladimir Putin, we target the oligarchs, but we also target the entire Russian economy.” Le Maire was answered with a stern response from former Russian President and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, now deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, and withdrew the statement. But as American analyst Scott Ritter recently stated, “President Putin has often complained that the West does not listen to him when he speaks of issues Russia deems to be of critical importance to its national security…The question is, is [the West] capable of comprehending the seriousness of the situation? So far, the answer seems to be no.” This present path, no matter the wishful thinking otherwise, must surely lead, sooner or later, to total war. Another road must be taken. “The fault behind the onrushing doom of the world’s present financial system, lies not with individual policy decisions, but in an ultimately fatal pattern of policy shaping innovations…. That point should be repeated. The fault lies not in any particular decision, as such; the fault lies in the social and ideological characteristics of today’s ‘Atlantic establishment,’ just as the collapse of the Soviet system flowed from the ideological and related characteristics of its establishment. The fault lies in the habituated, ideologically charged pattern of changes of decision, and ordering of changes which shape the ‘planetary orbit’ of the net affects so produced. We say, therefore, that the fatal trajectory of events is, like a planet’s orbit, essentially systemic, not the result of several isolable policy decisions on direction made along the way…. “The rabbit who is killed by the automobile, had the physical ability to avoid that risk: it was the characteristic of the rabbit’s nature, to choose the new decision which then doomed it to serve the pleasure of the waiting crows.” Lyndon LaRouche wrote that in his November,1988 preface to the book Genocide: Russia and the New World Order, written by economist Sergei Glaziev. Glaziev, for decades a prominent minister in government in Russia, wrote on Feb. 25 that “sanctions are the agony of the outgoing imperial world economic system based on the use of force. In order to minimize the dangers associated with it, it is necessary to accelerate the formation of a new—integral—world economic order which restores international law, national sovereignty, equality of countries, diversity of national economic models, principles of mutual benefit and voluntariness in international economic cooperation.” For such a design to occur, the worst of enemies will have to decide that the choice is neither “my way, or no way,” nor even the more civilized “nonviolence or nonexistence.” The choice is between the destruction of all mankind, or the development of all mankind. Economic development is the only pathway to peace, and the LaRouche Four Laws, discussed at the conclusion of the Zepp-LaRouche proposal, are the standpoint from which the International Conference to Establish A New Security and Development Architecture for All Nations can succeed.

Feb. 9—“The world is currently in an incredibly dangerous situation, with a Cold War that threatens to become a hot war at any moment,” Helga Zepp-LaRouche stated in an interview on Pakistan PTV World’s “Views on News” broadcast today. We are the proverbial 100 seconds away from the midnight of a nuclear catastrophe, a war danger that is playing out around the extreme tensions around Ukraine. The United Kingdom and the United States are putting massive pressure on Europe to fully join the drive to push Russia into a strategic corner and launch scorched-earth economic sanctions and attacks on that country. But, as of this moment, Europe is not fully on board—as can be seen in German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s trip to Washington, and especially French President Emmanuel Macron’s six-hour discussion in Moscow with Russian President Putin. They are increasingly aware that the current policies of confrontation, driven by the breakdown of the trans-Atlantic financial system, cannot continue, or they will succeed in blowing up the entire world.But we are also witnessing the beginnings of a gigantic international political and economic realignment as well. “I think we should not underestimate the incredibly historic meeting which took place between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin during the Olympics, where they concluded a new strategic partnership which is a new model for international relationships,” Zepp-LaRouche stated. What this reflects is the fact that the unipolar world is over, and countries around the world—from Pakistan to Argentina to Hungary—are responding to that new reality. “It takes politicians and the media a while before this reality sinks in,” Zepp-LaRouche noted. “Europeans right now are really completely scared about the possibility of the Ukraine crisis going out of control,” Zepp-LaRouche stated, "and they are trying to put a new model on the table. But I believe that something else is needed. We are right now at a branching point of all of history, and we need a new model of international relations, where thinking in terms of geopolitics, in terms of blocs, in terms of wars of one against the other within a zero-sum game—this has to be overcome." A new international security architecture based on the universal economic development of all nations must be forged, even as we stand at the very edge of a terrible existential danger. “We must fill people with hope that it can be accomplished,” Zepp-LaRouche told a meeting of Schiller Institute associates today. Americans in particular must ensure that the United States joins with Russia and China in forging constructive solutions to the world’s problems. The Feb. 10 joint seminar of the Schiller Institute and the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC) on “The Humanitarian Crisis in Afghanistan: Toward a Long-Term Solution,” is one such urgent forum.

"A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought" Schiller Institute International Online Conference, two panels Saturday, February 19, starting 10 a.m. EST The Schiller Institute will hold an international online conference on Saturday, February 19 to reassert that very sane declaration by the five nuclear powers and permanent members of the UN Security Council, which they affirmed in a joint statement on Jan. 3 of this year. The conference will also present a {solution} to the current crisis: the establishment of a new security architecture that guarantees all nations the right to security, and to economic and cultural development. To do that, a dialogue about the causes and the cures of the current crisis is urgent.In the last week of January, the U.S. Strategic Command launched the Global Lightning exercise to test the readiness of US nuclear forces under a nuclear war plan, operative since 2019, based on the assumption 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. President Putin had announced Russia's new nuclear weapons systems in 2018, including the Avangard hypersonic missile, the hypersonic cruise missile Kinzhal, nuclear-powered cruise missiles, fast underwater drones, and laser weapons. This was an enormous shock to the western military establishment. But President Putin was responding to the 2004-2014 color revolutions and so-called "humanitarian" wars against all governments who opposed having their own nations looted. The $5 billion spent on NGOs in Ukraine alone is well known, which eventually became the Nazi Maidan coup of February 2014, on Russia’s very doorstep. On Dec. 17, 2021, Putin presented two draft treaties to the United States and NATO, insisting that there be no further eastward expansion of NATO (especially into Ukraine), and no offensive weapon systems stationed on Russia's borders. Given the lack of serious response so far, Putin has announced "military-technical measures" in the event of a definitive refusal.One American expert has written that he thinks Russia’s “military-technical measures” may include deploying 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. More and more people are waking up to the fact that there are only the proverbial hundred seconds before midnight left on the Doomsday Clock.To stop the clock, the causes of war must be addressed: 1) The hyperinflationary final phase of the trans-Atlantic neoliberal financial system; and 2) the deadly fantasy of the financial establishment in the City of London, Wall Street and Silicon Valley that they can impose their "rules-based order" in their eternal unipolar world.The root causes trace back to the 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. This caused the increasing shift away from investments in the productive physical economy and towards speculation in increasingly exotic derivative-based financial products, and now "shifting the trillions" into the Green New Deal.From the standpoint of the physical economy, this policy of driving investments into 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. Far too many people are confused about monetary values, as distinct from real wealth. They have bought into the illusion that the share values of listed companies say something about the productivity of the economy – which they do not.Some more level-headed voices have spoken out in favor of a new pan-European security architecture including Russia and Ukraine, 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 indivisibility 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.Just such a proposal is elaborated in a recent article published by Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche: “100 Seconds to Midnight on the Doomsday Clock: We Need a New Security Architecture!” 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 requires a total and definitive renunciation of Malthusian politics, and requires universal 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 classical traditions of all cultures at the highest humanistic level.Who can deny that we are an indivisible community of destiny?We have a choice: Either we let the clock tick away 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.

On Dec. 17, 2021, Russia publicly presented two draft treaties for urgent adoption—one with the United States, one with NATO—which addressed Russia’s existential security concerns regarding the inexorable eastward expansion of NATO and the placement of threatening weapon systems on its borders. Russia demanded immediate written responses to their urgent proposals, in order to brake the rush to war emanating from the West.On Jan. 26, the U.S. and NATO did provide private written responses to Russia. But on Feb. 1 Russian President Vladimir Putin stated at a press conference: “Let me note that we are closely analyzing the written responses received from the U.S. and NATO on January 26. However, it is already clear … that the fundamental Russian concerns were ignored.” Putin then turned the tables on the entire matter: He told the press that the U.S. and NATO weren’t really concerned with Ukraine’s security, but were using that issue as a kind of bear trap, as an excuse to launch all-out economic warfare against Russia in order to destroy its economy and prevent the country’s industrialization. “Its main task is to hamper Russia’s development…. Ukraine just serves as a means to achieve this goal … by drawing us into some kind of armed conflict.” The next day, Kremlin adviser Yuri Ushakov announced that Putin will meet Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on Feb. 4, making it clear that the two countries are deeply allied on both economic and security matters. The two Presidents will issue “a joint statement on international relations in the new era and global sustainable development … [that] will reflect the shared views of Russia and China on the most important global problems, including security issues,” Ushakov reported. Helga Zepp-LaRouche today welcomed the emphasis on the underlying economic crisis behind the war danger, and also on the needed total international economic transformation required to forge a durable peace. Recent threats from American and especially British officials of their intention to totally wipe out Russia’s ability to industrialize and develop, are finally waking people up to the reality Lyndon LaRouche warned about for decades. Zepp-LaRouche stated in her Jan. 28 weekly webcast: “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?… If you read the language, how this is written, it portrays a mindset which is the mindset of a party declaring war already.” Zepp-LaRouche continued: “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.” Zepp-LaRouche took note of the fact that, in many countries around the world, there are the beginnings of some significant opposition to the war drive, and even to the economic policies that are causing it: some people are becoming conflicted and uneasy, and rightly so. “This is an opportune moment to focus the growing war anxiety in many nations around the world, against the British,” Zepp-LaRouche stated, “who, after all, are the policy authors of the global drive towards superpower warfare. This could ruin their capability for good.” Zepp-LaRouche again drew attention to the unspeakable genocide underway in Afghanistan, where half the population is in danger of starving to death over the winter, in large measure due to the illegal freezing of the country’s assets abroad and the merciless economic sanctions being imposed on the country. Those most immediately threatened include 1 million children who are so malnourished that, were they in a developed country, they would belong in hospital ICU facilities. This is a crime against humanity underway before our very eyes, and it is being committed by the same British and American financial interests that are behind the war drive against Russia and China.

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

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken began three days of critical meetings in Europe on Wednesday, Jan. 19 to discuss the Ukraine crisis and Russia’s adamant insistence that, if security talks with the U.S. are to continue, Russia must receive written responses to each of the points raised in the two draft treaty proposals they presented to the world on Dec. 17. Those proposed treaties, one with the United States and the other with NATO, state that Russia’s national security is gravely endangered by the threatened deployment of NATO advanced weapon systems on their very border, and by the proposed admission of Ukraine to the NATO alliance; and that therefore Russia must be given written guarantees that neither will occur—or else they will have to take “retaliatory military-technical measures” of their own.On Wednesday, Blinken travelled to Kiev, Ukraine to meet with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. On Thursday, Jan. 20, he will go to Berlin to caucus with the foreign ministers of Germany, France and war-drive ring-leader United Kingdom. And on Friday, Jan. 21 he will go to Geneva to sit down with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Blinken’s trip is not just another round of diplomacy: war or peace between the U.S. and Russia hangs in the balance. Putin has warned repeatedly that Russia is being driven to adopt “appropriate retaliatory military-technical measures” of its own, which Gilbert Doctorow, a Brussels-based political analyst, believes would include deploying nuclear-armed SS-26 Iskander-M short-range ballistic missiles to Belarus and Kaliningrad to threaten NATO’s frontline states and eastern Germany, as well as possibly placing nuclear-armed Zircon sea-launched hypersonic cruise missiles off the coast of Washington, D.C., which, Doctorow further points out, “Russia has previously stated could be utilized to destroy the U.S. capital before the President could escape on Air Force One.” In his talks with Zelenskyy, Blinken set the tone for his Jan. 21 talk with Lavrov by yet again aggressively blaming Russia alone for the crisis, and demanding that they “de-escalate” by stopping the deployment of troops on their own territory, near the Ukraine border, or be prepared to be hit with scorched-earth economic warfare by the West. Lavrov, for his part, restated the Russian position after talks on Jan. 18 with German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock: “We are now awaiting answers to these proposals (the two draft treaties), as promised, in order to continue the talks.” “The war danger is greater than ever, and we are on the verge of World War III,” Helga Zepp-LaRouche warned today. “We are now down to the wire and things will have to break one way or the other in the days ahead.” Although there is a growing chorus of voices calling for sanity in the U.S. and Europe, the control of U.S. policy by the British and their American war party confederates has not been broken. Furthermore, Zepp-LaRouche stated, the descent into war is being driven by the systemic breakdown of the trans-Atlantic financial system, which is now going out of control, as Lyndon LaRouche repeatedly explained. But there is a second dynamic underway in the world, which is the emerging realignment of nations of all continents around China and Russia, and the Belt and Road Initiative as an alternative to the policy of Malthusian depopulation being promoted by the dying trans-Atlantic system. One indication of this is the visit of Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi to Moscow, where a 20-year package of development deals is under discussion. Another is the upcoming visit to Moscow and then Beijing by Argentine President Alberto Fernàndez, where he plans to sign a memorandum of understanding on the Belt and Road Initiative. If the United States remains hostile to this policy alternative, and continues to defend the City of London and Wall Street’s bankrupt system, then the world will in all likelihood careen toward thermonuclear war. If the U.S. joins with the Belt and Road, as Lyndon LaRouche advocated from the outset, then the prospects for peace and development are excellent. We join with Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s call to make 2022 the Year of Lyndon LaRouche, and of the adoption of his policies.

Between Monday and Wednesday of this week, the world has moved dramatically closer to the brink of thermonuclear war.The United States and NATO dug in their heels in their respective Jan. 10 and Jan. 12 high-level security talks with Russia, and proclaimed their intent to continue expanding NATO eastward up to Russia’s very border, and to deploy threatening nuclear attack systems also on that border, five minutes flight-time from Moscow. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko emerged from today’s Russia-NATO Council meeting to report that not only was there no unifying positive agenda between Russia and NATO, but that the U.S. and NATO have reverted to the full Cold War strategy of “containment” towards Russia, including “full spectrum dominance.” Russia is being left with no option but to respond in kind to the policy of containment, deterrence and intimidation, he stated. The Monday U.S.-Russia discussions ended on a similar note. These results are not surprising, Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche commented today. Other than any possible back-channel or private communications between Presidents Biden and Putin that may be underway and which offer a more rational approach, there could well be a quick counter-action on the part of Russia. As Putin and many top Russian leaders have warned repeatedly over recent weeks, Russia cannot back down to the threats being posed to its very sovereignty and existence. Russia is faced with a reverse Cuban Missile Crisis, only this time with a far shorter hair-trigger to war. Recall the words of JFK sixty years ago: “Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island (Cuba).” To do this, he reminded the world, “in an area well-known to have a special and historical relationship to the U.S., is a deliberately provocative and unjustified change in the status quo which cannot be accepted by this country.” Zepp-LaRouche warned that, if the bellicose statements and confrontation continue, then the world is most likely in for a sudden showdown—which could escalate to the thermonuclear threshold nearly instantly. A broad mobilization of forces worldwide is urgently required to stop this descent into hell, and quickly develop new options that will guarantee security and wellbeing for all parties. • A new, global security architecture is needed to immediately replace the NATO organization and policy, which has brought the world to the brink of war. The driving force that is impelling the world towards thermonuclear war is the breakdown crisis of the entire trans-Atlantic financial system. For their system to survive, the predatory speculators of the City of London and Wall Street must impose fascist levels of economic looting, and bring Russia and China to heel to ensure that there is no real opposition to that policy. • The trans-Atlantic system must be put through bankruptcy reorganization along the lines specified by Lyndon LaRouche in his 2014 Four Laws. Put that system out of its misery, and you remove the danger of World War III. Throughout his life, Lyndon LaRouche repeatedly explained this intimate connection between the collapsing financial system and the drive to war. One of his clearest expositions was in a Dec. 23, 2011 statement, “To Stop Thermonuclear War, Bring on the World Economic Recovery,” which we have previously quoted in this space, and excerpts of which are the editorial appearing in the January 7, 2022 issue of Executive Intelligence Review. As that editorial notes, LaRouche’s remarks from 2011 “confirm the prescience of this genius, and demonstrates why Helga Zepp-LaRouche has called for the year 2022—the 100th anniversary of his birth—to be known as ‘The Year of Lyndon LaRouche.’” LaRouche warned in his 2011 presentation: "We are now on the verge of what must be called World War III: This will be thermonuclear World War III—not pre-nuclear war, not nuclear war, but thermonuclear war. The targets, principally, are Russia and China. These are the two principal targets…. “The issue is as follows: The present world system, the economic system, is in the process of disintegrating. Exactly how that will occur is uncertain, but it is happening. The intention is to eliminate two nations—Russia and China—and this means nuclear weapons; it means thermonuclear weapons. That part is engaged…. “Now, at this point, the United States, nations of Europe, Russia, China, and other countries, are poised for exactly this war. “The background of the war is the fact that the entire world is going bankrupt, especially the trans-Atlantic region, especially Europe, and also the United States, and the nations of South America and elsewhere, as well… “The bankruptcy from the United States’ standpoint, was set into motion back in 2007, when the beginning of the bailout process was set into motion. Since that time, the entirety of the trans-Atlantic region, particularly the United States and Europe, have been trapped into a bailout crisis, a hyperinflationary bailout crisis. At this point, the debt which has been accumulated since 2007, under this program, is such that every part of Europe at this time, under the present rules and the present arrangements, is hopelessly bankrupt! They could never recover as living nations, under the present degree of indebtedness they have. The same thing is true of the United States; Europe is a little more acute. That’s what’s happened…. The author of this thing is the British…. “Now, what we have to do—there are solutions for this bankruptcy. First of all, we have to put the world through bankruptcy—that is, a legitimate bankruptcy operation. We can do that, by, first of all, in the United States, for example—and other nations can copy this measure in cooperation with the United States—we go with a Glass-Steagall law, a U.S. Glass-Steagall law. And there are nations of Europe who are thinking of adopting the same Glass-Steagall law. “Under a Glass-Steagall law, the greater part of the debt of European nations, and the United States and others, will be wiped out, in effect, because under Glass-Steagall, the gambling debts, which are the major part of the indebtedness of the United States, will be simply put into a special category where somebody’s going to try to figure out how to get these debts paid—and they will never be paid! They will simply be wiped off the books; there’s no other solution. “Wiping that debt off the books, canceling the bailout debt, will mean that the United States, and Europe if they join, will be in a position to reorganize their finances, to create a credit system, and actually going into a new kind of Hamiltonian kind of credit system, a banking system which will enable the United States, and also Europe and other nations if they join, to organize a financial recovery. “In other words, what would happen, immediately: Remember, most of this bailout debt, the Wall Street debt, the London debt, the other bailout debt, is absolutely worthless! It can never be repaid! It never could be repaid: And the only solution, of course, for this thing, was to have this war. And if the British Empire came out as the victor in such a war, with the support of the United States, then they would cancel their debts, and they would go about their business. But, the population of the world would be reduced, greatly, through hunger, starvation, and so forth, which is about to occur anyway.”

With but a few days to go before the scheduled Jan. 10 talks between high level Russian and American diplomats on Russia’s demand for “immediate” written security guarantees from the U.S. and NATO, powerful circles in London and Washington who oppose moving back from the brink of thermonuclear war, have launched yet another provocation against Russia: the violent destabilization of Kazakhstan. Tony Blair, George Soros, and endless numbers of international NGOs are all over the operation.A “color revolution” in Kazakhstan has clear security implications for Russia. Kazakhstan has the longest border with Russia. It is the location of Russia’s principal space launch facility, the Baikonur Cosmodrome, a city that Russia today rents from Kazakhstan. It would appear that powerful circles in London and Washington are intent on provoking the Russian bear to respond with repressive violence in Kazakhstan, or to do the same in Eastern Ukraine, to then turn around and use this as a pre-packaged excuse to launch withering economic warfare against Russia. In a word, if they can get Russia to go for the “bear trap,” they will then give Russia the “Afghanistan treatment”—economic sanctions and warfare so severe as to starve the country into submission… or try to. In that sense, the impending Afghan genocide of more than 20 million people is also a precursor to World War III. Helga Zepp-LaRouche drew out the strategic significance of these developments, in her weekly webcast: “If you would have asked me a week ago, do you expect some effort to disturb the diplomatic offensive coming mainly from Russia and China to defuse what was building up, clearly, as a double ‘Cuban crisis’ with the development around Ukraine and Taiwan, I would have said, one should absolutely expect a provocation to disrupt these meetings, and here we are… “Now, let me first state the positive aspect: There was a certain breakthrough just a few days ago, on Monday, that for the first time the P5 UN nations, that is, the permanent five nuclear weapons states agreed on reaffirming the very important statement which was negotiated between Gorbachev and President Reagan in Reykjavik in October 1986, that a nuclear war can never be won and therefore must never be fought.” That is positive, Zepp-LaRouche said, but now "the words must be followed by deeds. And that statement as such, while it is extremely important, does not yet defuse the crisis around Ukraine, nor the crisis around Taiwan, but, as I said, it’s a very important first step…. “But we need a hundred percent turnaround, because this confrontation against Russia and China is suicidal…I think we need a complete reversal in priorities, and the population has to wake up, that their indifference, your indifference—some of you—against Afghanistan is what allows these rotten policies to go on in our own countries. And we have to have a mobilization for a new paradigm, both within our own countries and also in relations among nations, because these are expressions of the same problem in the system.”

Every year for the last five years, the Schiller Institute has led a solemn memorial ceremony to mark the tragic death on Dec. 25, 2016, of Russia’s fabled Alexandrov Ensemble, along with humanitarian workers and others, in a plane crash near Sochi, Russia. Over the years, the ceremony has been held at the Tear of Grief monument in Bayonne, N.J.—a monument gifted to the people of the United States by the government of Russia in honor of the fallen victims of 9/11—and each time it has been moderated by a representative of the City of Bayonne Fire Department, and it has heard from an official Russian representative at the United Nations. Every year, the enduring friendship of the Russian and American people has been its message and song.This year was no different, in those regards. And yet the ceremony held today carried with it a special urgency for action, given the extraordinary danger of thermonuclear war now facing the planet in the form of a kind of “reverse Cuban Missile Crisis” between the United States and Russia, as Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche put it in her remarks read to the event. Can such a threat be defused, and its causes degraded? Perhaps. Yesterday the State Department announced that the dates have now been set for three meetings to address the Russian government’s demand for written security guarantees to stop the relentless eastward drive of NATO up to its very borders, and the positioning of defensive and offensive strategic weapons in those countries. High-level Russian officials will meet with their U.S. counterparts on Jan. 10—preceded by another direct conversation between Presidents Biden and Putin on Dec. 30. On Jan. 12 there will then be a Russia-NATO meeting to also address these security matters. And on Jan. 13, Russia will meet with the OSCE. Substantive progress must come from these talks, including the signing of the two draft treaties that Russia has already proposed to the United States and NATO. Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s remarks read to today’s Alexandrov Ensemble memorial, sends the requisite message: “In the name of the Schiller Institute, I send you my thoughts on the anniversary of the tragic loss of the members of the Alexandrov Ensemble and a number of other Russians on their way to Syria five years ago. In the artistic work of that choir was and is expressed that quality which makes us human. “Unfortunately, our species finds itself right now in an incredible danger, in which the world is faced with a reverse Cuban Missile Crisis, to which the President of your country has reacted in an unmistakable fashion: He insists, rightfully, that the promises given to Russia around the time of the German Unification, that NATO would not move eastward, closer to the borders of Russia, and which were broken repeatedly, now belatedly be restated in a written and legally binding form—at least as it concerns Ukraine and Georgia. Indeed the history of the last 32 years is a history of an unbelievable series of lies and deceits to create a narrative to justify the vilification of Russia—to what end? “The Schiller Institute fully endorses the demand by Russia that these treaties must be signed, and that the world must be pulled back from the brink of the abyss. We must shift all efforts to solve the great catastrophes of a pandemic out of control; a famine of biblical dimensions; the greatest humanitarian crisis on the planet, in Afghanistan; and to eradicate poverty for billions of people. We must reach a new paradigm of our civilization, or we may not exist. “Let us revive the spirit of the cultural contribution of the Alexandrov Ensemble to mobilize the strength in ourselves to create a more human civilization!” Watch the video of the event here.

Vladimir Putin’s statement during his marathon press conference of Dec. 23 that “the first thing to do here is to unfreeze Afghanistan’s assets, the money it had in foreign, primarily American, banks, in order to provide the required assistance to the Afghan people. Otherwise, the country could plunge into famine; there will be grave consequences that will affect the neighboring states as well,” should be read as not necessarily identical to, but congruent with, Russia’s proposals concerning stopping the extension of NATO farther eastward. Putin’s statements represent a summary rejection of the Malthusian military outlook characteristic of both trans-Atlantic policies, each of which is based on population reduction in a different way. That same outlook was fought at the COP 26 Halloween Summit, and must now be fought in the worldwide war against pandemics. The Schiller Institute proposal, the pro-life, pro-development “Operation Ibn Sina,” to provide food, water, and medical treatment and supplies, now, is the proper springboard for immediate action and follow-up in Afghanistan, once funds were indeed released.This is the season of Hope. We don’t know, but have been told, and pass on for corroboration to any who can help verify the rumor, that signs have begun to appear in offices in and around Washington, including at the State Department, Pentagon, the House of Representatives and Senate, among other locations—even the CIA and FBI. They read, “WARNING: Marijuana and other drugs can severely compromise your ability to operate government machinery.” Perhaps with the assistance of the newly-launched James Webb telescope, signs of intelligent life can once again be spotted somewhere near the Washington Beltway. The return to sanity, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, in deliberative exchanges with nations such as China and Russia, might be the greatest present that the world could expect to receive from the United States at the beginning of the New Year. The appearance yesterday in the New York Post of an article entitled “Top Russian official likens Ukraine standoff to Cuban Missile Crisis” has broken the near-blackout in American media on the reality of the ongoing strategic confrontation between Russia and China on the one hand, and the United States on the other, which is most advanced at the moment in Ukraine. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, no stranger to the United States (he served in the Russian consulate to Washington from 2002-2006 and is fluent in English), “has compared Moscow’s standoff with the West over a possible invasion of Ukraine to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the tense 1962 confrontation between the US and the Soviet Union that led the world to the brink of nuclear war.” More of Ryabkov’s remarks, as well as those of Sergei Lavrov and President Putin appear below. Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, a co-founder of the Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS,) has asked why the United States agreed so quickly, as reported by Ryabkov yesterday, to meet with Russia on Monday, January 10, the first day after the end of Russia’s Christmas season. McGovern called attention to an address given to the Russian military by Putin two weeks after his December 7 phone discussion with Biden, in which Putin reported: “Incidentally, during our conversation he [Biden] actually proposed appointing senior officials to oversee [Russian concerns over U.S. missile deployments in Romania, Poland, and possibly Ukraine]…. It was in response to his proposal that we drafted our proposals on precluding the further eastward expansion of NATO and the deployment of offensive strike systems in the countries bordering on Russia." The Russian proposal was drafted as a response to an initiative proposed by the United States President. It is no”ultimatum." The chronology is significant. The Washington Post printed the story, “Russia planning massive military offensive against Ukraine involving 175,000 troops, U.S. intelligence warns” on Dec. 3, with the New York Times following suit on Dec. 5. Russia’s head of foreign intelligence, Sergei Naryshkin, had already responded a week earlier, on Sat., Nov. 27, to assertions made the day before by Karen Donfried, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, about a planned attack on Ukraine. At that time, according to Reuters, “U.S. President Joe Biden said he was concerned about the situation in Ukraine…and added that he will ‘in all probability’ speak with his Ukrainian and Russian counterparts Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Vladimir Putin.” The Putin-Biden conversation then occurred on Dec. 7, followed by the release of the Russian proposal, and its being reported in the New York Times on Dec. 17: “Russia Lays Out Demands for a Sweeping New Security Deal With NATO.” The Post further reported, “Asked if he was exaggerating by comparing the Ukraine situation to the stalemate over the deployment of Soviet missiles in Cuba, Sergei Ryabkov said, ‘No, not too much,’ Russian media reported Monday…. ‘We are not bluffing. These are our real proposals. The West’s awareness of this needs to be facilitated and we are going to make every effort to achieve it,’ Ryabkov, who is known for his over-the-top rhetoric, said in an interview with a Russian foreign affairs magazine….” LaRouche Organization forces know that since the 1970s, on several occasions, the impending danger of thermonuclear war precipitated dialogues involving "“East” and “West” in which this organization played a decisive, if marginal role. Lyndon LaRouche’s personal backchannel negotiations with the then-Soviet Union over the course of the Fall of 1981 through early 1983 resulted in the “miracle” of the Strategic Defense initiative (SDI) policy being adopted by President Ronald Reagan over the fierce opposition of the globalist forces against which FDR, LaRouche, and in this instance Reagan had campaigned for decades. Now, in the face of one of the greatest threats in humanity’s history—the inaction in response to the emergence of increasingly treatment-resistant bacteria and viruses worldwide, something to which LaRouche called attention as a threat five decades ago—Helga Zepp-LaRouche proposed a World Health Platform, as an international strategic intervention, to be organized by a “Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites.” She also indicated how a tactical-strategic instance of the application of this “Coincidence of Opposites” principle, as in Afghanistan’s “Operation Ibn Sina,” would provide the means to supersede war, famine, and disease. At the ongoing 30th anniversary meeting of the heads of state of the nine nations of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS,) Putin, addressing the coronavirus pandemic as the number one issue on the agenda, introduced Russia’s Chief Sanitary Physician, Anna Popova, to brief people on the current worldwide situation. “Considering the proximity of our states, the commonality of epidemic threats and the level of integration, one of our key tasks is to build a unified system for epidemic response and relief,” she said. Putin himself spoke about “joint scientific activities, the development of medications and preventive drugs, as well as exchanges of test kits and means of overcoming this disease.” Lyndon LaRouche’s Fall, 2001, “National Defense Against Germ Warfare,” in the section subtitled “National Defense As Sanitation,” identified something with which Putin is familiar, and that any sane head of state should quickly learn: "The most important principles of national defense against bacteriological and related forms of warfare, were consolidated as knowledge in the experience of World War II and the war in Korea. Those lessons were featured in the adoption and implementation of the Hill-Burton legislation adopted shortly after the close of World War II…. “We must situate the role of the medical profession, both in care for the sick and in other ways, as an essential, subsumed feature of public sanitation….” Once again, by returning to the outlook of the United States of Franklin Roosevelt, the true self-interest of a United States facing tens, if not hundreds of millions of cases of infectious disease in the short term, can be re-established by organizing the worldwide symposium proposed by Helga Zepp-LaRouche and Dr. Jocelyn Elders, and extending that to the world as a whole as rapidly as possible. That way lies hope, and humanity’s immediate way forward.

The following is the introductory section of a Schiller Institute memorandum issued Dec. 24, “Are We Sleepwalking Into Thermonuclear World War III,” which is available in full on the Schiller Institute website.You are being lied to. Russia is not planning to invade Ukraine. Putin is not a “bad actor” out to recreate the Soviet Empire. Ukraine is not a fledgling democracy just minding its own business. As a summary review of the documented record shows, Ukraine is being used by geopolitical forces in the West that answer to the bankrupt speculative financial system, as the flashpoint to trigger a strategic showdown with Russia, a showdown which is already more dangerous than the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and which could easily end up in a thermonuclear war that no one will win, and none would survive.Consider the facts as we present them in the abbreviated timeline below. Russia, like China, has been increasingly subjected to the threat of being destroyed by two distinct kinds of “nuclear war” by the bellicose and bankrupt U.K.-U.S. financial Establishment: 1) “first-use nuclear action,” as stated most explicitly by the demented Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS); and 2) the “nuclear option” in financial warfare, measures so extreme that they would be tantamount to laying financial siege to Russia to try to starve the nation into submission, as is being done against Afghanistan. Russia has now announced, for the whole world to hear, that its red line is about to be crossed, after which Russia will be forced to respond with “retaliatory military-technical measures.” That red line, it has made clear, is the further advance of U.S. and NATO military forces up to the very border with Russia, including the positioning of defensive and offensive nuclear-capable missile systems a scarce 5-minutes flight time from Moscow. Russia has presented two draft international treaties—one with the United States, the other with NATO—which would provide legal guarantees that NATO’s eastward march will stop, that Ukraine and Georgia in particular would not be invited to join NATO, and that advanced weapons systems will not be placed at Russia’s doorstep. These are neither more nor less than the verbal guarantees given to the Soviet Union in 1990 by the duplicitous Bush and Thatcher governments, guarantees that have been systematically violated ever since. They are neither more nor less than what President John F. Kennedy demanded of Khrushchev during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, which was successfully defused by the deft back-channel negotiations of JFK’s personal envoy, his brother Bobby Kennedy, out of sight of the pro-war military-industrial complex. It is urgently necessary that the United States and NATO promptly sign those proposed treaties with Russia—and step back from the edge of thermonuclear extinction. What we chronicle below has been happening, step by step, while most people around the world were asleep at the switch. It is time to wake up, before we sleepwalk into thermonuclear World War III. The Military Component The past 30 years of strategic relations between the U.S. and NATO on the one side and Russia on the other is littered with broken promises, beginning immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November of 1989. Already in February of 1990, then-Secretary of State James Baker was in Moscow promising Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze that in the wake of German reunification, which was to come about later that year, that if U.S. troops remained in Germany, there would be no expansion of NATO “one inch to the east.” But it wouldn’t take long before the Department of Defense would be plotting exactly that, with the process getting fully underway during the administration of President Bill Clinton. The first round of post-German unification expansion of NATO came in 1999 with the admission of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, followed in 2004 by all three Baltic states, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Four more Balkan countries joined in the years following, bringing NATO’s membership up to 30 countries. In the middle of that process, during the George W. Bush Administration, the U.S. also began to dismantle the system of strategic arms control assembled during the Cold War, beginning with the U.S. withdrawal from the 1972 ABM Treaty. The Trump Administration accelerated the process by withdrawing the U.S. from the INF Treaty and the Open Skies Treaty, leaving only the New START treaty, which was extended by President Joe Biden shortly after he took office, as the only nuclear arms control treaty remaining between the U.S. and Russia. The turning point in the current war danger came in 2014. The ongoing efforts to pull Ukraine into the EU common market through the Ukrainian-European Association Agreement, were rejected as untenable by Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych government in late 2013, when it became clear that it would de facto associate Ukraine with NATO and grant European goods unlimited access to the Russian market. Yanukovych’s turn against the EU led to the “Euromaidan” protests by proponents of aligning Ukraine with the European Union, which in January 2014 escalated into deadly clashes as these demonstrations were taken over by pro-Nazi elements, including those associated with the figure of Stepan Bandera, the notorious Ukrainian Nazi who worked closely with Hitler during World War II. In February, the violence escalated, and Yanukovych was driven from office, and the new government began to adopt strong measures against the Russian-speaking minority in Ukraine, especially in Crimea and the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in eastern Ukraine. All of this was done with full backing from London and Washington, with U.S. State Department official Victoria Nuland playing a prominent role. EIR published a detailed fact sheet and several in depth reports in its February 7, 2014, issue. The fact sheet is available at this link. On March 16, 2014, a referendum was held in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the local government of Sevastopol, asking the populations whether they wanted to join the Russian Federation or retain Crimea’s status as a part of Ukraine. In Crimea, 97% voted for integration into the Russian Federation with an 83% voter turnout; in Sevastopol there was also a 97% vote for reintegration into the Russian Federation with an 89% voter turnout. There was no “Russian military invasion of Ukraine,” nor forcible changing of any borders. All throughout this time period, Moscow protested NATO’s eastward march, but to no avail. “Despite our numerous protests and pleas, the American machine has been set into motion, the conveyor belt is moving forward,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in his dramatic March 1, 2018 Address to the Federal Assembly, in which he publicly announced the new generation of strategic weapons that Russia had under development, at least two of which, the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle for ICBMs and the Kinzhal air-launched ballistic missile, have since been introduced into service.

The Russian government is shouting from every rooftop that their strategic red lines are about to be crossed, and that they will respond unless the U.S. and NATO start negotiating seriously. Yesterday’s expanded meeting of the Defense Ministry Board served as the forum for extensive comments about this by both President Vladimir Putin and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. Putin also spoke by phone on Dec. 21 with India’s Narendra Modi, Germany’s Olaf Scholz, and France’s Emmanuel Macron, and hammered on the same point with each of them. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov also had blunt comments on the matter.These developments are being widely covered by live Russian TV broadcasts, while they are by and large blacked out in the West, whose population continues to live in the Valley of the Clueless as the world careens towards another Cuban Missile Crisis. TASS reported that, after listening to Shoigu’s report to the Defense Ministry Board, Putin stated: “They [the U.S.] simply do what they want [in other parts of the world]. But what they are doing on the territory of Ukraine now, or trying to do and going to do — this is not thousands of kilometers away from our national border. This is at the doorstep of our home. They must understand that we simply have nowhere to retreat further.” Putin went on: “The United States does not possess hypersonic weapons yet, but we know when they will have them…. They will put hypersonic weapons in Ukraine, and then, under their cover—that does not mean that they will start using them tomorrow, because we already have Zircon [hypersonic missiles] and they do not—they will arm and push extremists from the neighboring state against Russia, including into certain regions of the Russian Federation, for example, Crimea, when they think circumstances are favorable…. Do they think we don’t see these threats? Or do they think that we are so weak-willed to simply look blankly at the threats posed to Russia? That is the problem: we simply have nowhere to move further, that’s the question,” Putin said. Sputnik further quoted Putin: “As I have already noted, in the event of the continuation of the obviously aggressive line of our Western colleagues, we will take adequate retaliatory military-technical measures, and react toughly to unfriendly steps. And, I want to emphasize, we have every right to do so, we have every right to take actions designed to ensure the security and sovereignty of Russia…. We are extremely concerned about the deployment of elements of the U.S. global missile defense system near Russia.” Putin then carefully explained: "We already see that some of our detractors are interpreting them [Russia’s draft treaty documents] as Russia’s ultimatum. Is it an ultimatum or not? Of course not…. Armed conflicts and bloodshed are absolutely not our choice. We do not want to see events go that way. We want to use political and diplomatic means to resolve problems but we want to at least have clearly formulated legal guarantees. This is what our proposals are all about. We set them down on paper and sent them to Brussels and Washington, and we hope to receive a clear and comprehensive response to these proposals. “There are certain signals that our partners appear to be willing to work on that. However, there is also a danger that they will attempt to drown our proposals in words, or in a swamp, in order to take advantage of this pause and do whatever they want to do.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping held what amounted to an emergency summit meeting today by video conference. Announced only two days ago, the summit directly addressed two distinct kinds of “nuclear war” being threatened against the two countries by the bellicose and bankrupt U.K.-U.S. financial Establishment: The Dec. 7 call by Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) to consider “first-use nuclear action” military strikes against Russia, using the Ukraine crisis as justification. Wicker is the second ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Despite the storm of protests from the left and the right that his remarks unleashed, the Senator has yet to retract his demented provocation. Moreover, the NATO drive eastward, along with the arming of Ukraine and other nations on Russia’s very border, is continuing relentlessly—a drive which Russia continues to warn is crossing a red-line and will lead to a Russian response. The repeated call to carry out the “nuclear option” in financial warfare against Russia—expelling them from the SWIFT global financial payments system. This would be tantamount to laying financial siege to Russia, to try to starve them into submission, as is being done against Afghanistan. This “nuclear option” was called for just last week by U.S. Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, the architect of the 2014 Nazi coup d’état in Ukraine, and it was publicly threatened by Secretary of State Tony Blinken right after the Dec. 7 summit talks between Biden and Putin. Similar threats were voiced by President Biden himself immediately before his June 2021 meeting with Putin. What did Putin and Xi discuss today when the cameras for the press were turned off? They clearly reviewed the danger of war, and their commitment to help strengthen each other’s security in the face of threats surrounding both Ukraine and Taiwan. Otherwise, the public account provided by Kremlin adviser Yuri Ushakov provides further insight: “Particular attention was paid by the two leaders to the need to intensify efforts to form an independent financial infrastructure to service trade operations between Russia and China,” Ushakov reported. “We mean creating an infrastructure that cannot be influenced by third countries.” Does this mean that Russia and China are about to announce that they are breaking with the dollar system, and decoupling their economies from the West? Probably not. Does it mean that they have put in place defensive measures to deal with a financial “nuclear option” launched against them? Probably so. Helga Zepp-LaRouche commented today that if Russia and China are driven to adopt full-scale countermeasures against the SWIFT system, this could well be the straw that breaks the camel’s back of the entire bankrupt trans-Atlantic financial system. Fortunately, the potential of China’s Belt and Road Initiative is available to take its place, and to replace today’s Malthusian policy of deindustrialization and depopulation with a new system focused on high-technology physical economic growth. Take a step back and consider Putin’s recent diplomacy—the same Putin whom Lyndon LaRouche frequently described as a “strategic genius” who should not be underestimated. Putin made sure to flank his critical Dec. 7 summit with President Biden: before, with a Dec. 6 summit meeting in New Delhi with India’s Prime Minister Modi; and after, with today’s emergency summit with President Xi. Another topic raised between Putin and Xi, according to Ushakov, was the intention of holding a three-way summit of Russia-India-China in the immediate future. And the United States? President Biden, along with circles that might be described as “realists” in Washington, seems inclined to seek a negotiated solution to the crisis surrounding Russia and Ukraine. But his policy palace guard—Blinken, Sullivan, Nuland et al.—is not, and for now they are dominant in Washington. Nor are the owners of the Western speculative financial system in a mood to negotiate—they can’t. Their system is in a breakdown collapse, and their only hope is to force through a transition to a fascist, Malthusian order. America, to survive and prosper, will have to adopt the pathway long-recommended by Lyndon LaRouche, of establishing a four-power alliance with the power to usher in a New Paradigm of global development—an alliance among the U.S., Russia, China and India, acting on behalf of all humanity.

Ten years ago, in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 20, 2011 murder of Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, Lyndon LaRouche wrote an article on Oct. 28, 2011 titled: “Threat of World War III: Qaddafi’s Death” In it. LaRouche stated:“In the opinion of certain relevant, higher placed circles in the trans-Atlantic region, the extraordinary mass-execution of the former Libyan principal Muammar al-Qaddafi and his companions, in their attempted flight from Libya, signals a potential for an early outbreak of more general warfare within Europe, the Mediterranean region, and beyond: potentially a new general state of warfare throughout much of this planet. This were probably the included outcome, unless a radical correction in trans-Atlantic financial and related policies were made more or less immediately. The object is to prevent that general warfare from occurring…. “The manner in which British-directed interests, acting in concert with the British puppet known as U.S. President Barack Obama, have created and manipulated the recent warfare within Libya, has now created a serious, more or less immediate threat-potential of a ‘Third World War.’ This is a threat potential which is coincident with the immediately threatened, general breakdown-crisis of the already hyper-bankrupt, trans-Atlantic monetarist system…. It is the accumulated potential triggered by the Libya affair, which has now cocked the potential for a sudden eruption of a pattern of active general warfare. “Long nurtured potentials for the greatest of wars, explode into great wars which have been prepared, in fact, over long periods when the victims were sleeping.” Three months later, in a Jan. 18, 2012 webcast, LaRouche elaborated on the British Establishment’s intention of launching war against Russia and China. “Now, the purpose of doing this was not to conduct a war against Syria and Iran—that was not the purpose. That was the sideshow. What you had, if you looked at the map, and looked at the Eastern Mediterranean and the bay around Iran, you saw the greatest concentration of thermonuclear-warfare capabilities on this planet, represented by the forces of the United States, Britain, and other powers. Why would they have to have the thermonuclear capabilities of major powers and others combined, against two small nations—a relatively very small nation, Syria, and a medium-size small nation, shall we say, Iran: Why? “Because their target wasn’t Syria, their target wasn’t Iran. Their target was—as we know now, from the diplomatic scandals that have broken out in Washington and Europe—the target was Russia and China. What does that mean? Why should Britain and the United States, and other nations, wish to launch thermonuclear war, against two great thermonuclear powers, Russia and China? And you have a nuclear power, Pakistan; and India’s also a thermonuclear power…. “So therefore, what’s the point? The British now say, what’s the purpose of this? They told you: The purpose is, as the Queen of England and others have insisted, their intention is to reduce the population of the planet, from 7 billion people to 1 or less! Their argument is the Green policy! And therefore, if you want to have a Green policy, and what that connotes, you can not tolerate Russia’s existence; you can not tolerate 1.4 billion people in China; you can not tolerate 1.1 billion people in India, and other nations. Therefore, this is a British operation, run under the Green policy of Her Majesty the Queen and her cohorts to change the character of the planet, in this way. In other words, these guys make Hitler look like a piker!”

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

On Nov. 26, the Foreign Ministers of Russia, India and China—the RIC cooperation organization—held an online video-conference meeting which produced an agreement among these three powerhouse nations on a set of substantive strategic policy issues: the need for a coordinated global fight against COVID-19; the urgency of international aid for Afghanistan, to stop the looming starvation in that country; the need to jointly fight against the drug trade and related terrorism; and the need to organize a new system of international relations based on win-win cooperation.Given the serious tensions between India and China over recent years, which the British have manipulated and exacerbated to keep India out of the Belt and Road Initiative, the RIC results were a significant strategic advance. Also yesterday, the Foreign Ministry of India announced that Russian President Vladimir Putin will travel to India Dec. 6 for his first in-person summit in two years with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Their agenda will be quite broad, and will include cooperation on major infrastructure projects; partnership in nuclear, space and defense sectors; and deepening India’s ties with the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU). What London and Washington most fear is that the Putin-Modi summit could play a useful role in helping India get on track for in-depth cooperation with China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Although still tentative, these Asian-centered developments point in the right direction for the planet. In the West, however, a new Olympic record of policy failure on top of policy failure is being set almost daily. Right on the heels of the COP26 fiasco, the world is now being struck by a new COVID-19 variant—the Omicron variant—which scientists fear could be about to break through the existing vaccine protection. And if it is not Omicron, if we get lucky and dodge this bullet, it will be the next variant, or the one after that. The point is, the slow and woefully incomplete vaccination of the entire world, along with the lack of modern health systems in every nation, has left us vulnerable to such a disaster. What is happening is exactly what Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche warned would happen, if we did not adopt the necessary policy of universal vaccination and a world network of advanced health systems in every nation. These are precisely the policies promoted by the Open Letter to virologists and other medical experts by former U.S. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, and by Zepp-LaRouche’s Operation Ibn Sina. It may be five minutes to midnight, but it is not too late to adopt these policies, and get the United States and the nations of Europe on a sane policy path. As Lyndon LaRouche repeatedly emphasized in his call for the formation of Four Power Alliance to replace the current bankrupt international system, the United States has to join with Russia, India and China in that effort. LaRouche’s Nov. 18, 2008 international webcast was forcefully clear on that point: “Now, you have two ways to go: Either you collapse the world, with starvation and mass death, and those effects. Or, you put the thing through bankruptcy reorganization. And how do you do that? Well, what I specified is very elementary: I have four nations in mind that can take the lead on this thing. And the four nations, which together, represent the greatest consolidation of power on this planet: These nations are the United States, Russia, China, and India, as joined by other nations, which join in the same deal. We put the world through bankruptcy reorganization. How do we do it? We use the U.S. Constitution to do that…. “Now, if the United States says, that we are going to back up our dollar, and enters into an agreement with Russia, China, and India, to join us, with other countries, in doing the same thing, to put the world through bankruptcy reorganization, in which we will cancel most of the outstanding financial obligations: It has to happen. Otherwise, no planet! If you try to collect on quadrillions of dollars of outstanding claims, from whom are you going to collect, by what means, and what’s the effect? It is against natural law, to collect on that debt! How many people are you going to kill, to collect that debt? How many countries are you going to destroy, to collect that debt?”

The manifest failure of the COP26 summit to get the entire world to drink the Kool-Aid of the British Empire’s Malthusian Green Reset policy—thanks principally to the resistance of developing countries such as India, Nigeria, Indonesia, China and also Russia—has bought the world a little time. But only a little.The entire trans-Atlantic sector is still in the throes of a systemic breakdown crisis. Hyperinflation is still spinning out of control, now hitting food as well as energy supplies with increases of 30% per year and more. The physical economy continues to plummet, threatening the survival of entire nations. The COVID-19 pandemic is still rampaging out of control, worsened by the mass psychosis of the medievalist anti-vax cult. And the danger of U.S.-NATO geopolitical wars against Russia and China is rising by the day, deploying nuclear weapons closer and closer to Russia while the State Department explicitly threatens to take up arms against China. “We have to have a rethinking,” Helga Zepp-LaRouche demanded in her weekly international webcast on Nov. 19. "The United States, Germany and other European countries should stop this geopolitical confrontation and say: ‘We have a pandemic, we have mass famine, we have a refugee crisis of biblical dimensions, and we must join hands and build the infrastructure, hospitals, schools, industry, agriculture, in all of these countries, and then all the migrants would want to go home.’ Because most countries, and most people prefer to stay in their home country, than to be displaced in some corner of the world, where they don’t understand the language and have to suffer many aggressions. “So let’s just build infrastructure! Let’s build up Africa!” Zepp-LaRouche insisted. “This is the natural thing, and the Chinese are doing the natural things and we should stop bickering about it, because we should take a moral lesson from the Chinese in this respect,” and join with the Belt and Road Initiative which this week celebrated the eighth anniversary of its announcement in 2013. Zepp-LaRouche continued: "People should wake up, because this is a moment in history when decisions will be made. Whether mankind tumbles into a new crisis, sleepwalks into a new war, goes into a new depression; or, if we take the alternatives which exist. And they emphatically exist in the form of the Belt and Road Initiative which, China has said many times, is open for every country: for the United States, for Europe, for all. “So rather than having this geopolitical obsession, I think people should just say: We have to concentrate on the common aims of mankind, and then we can all build a beautiful future together”—with the economic, political and cultural road map developed by Lyndon LaRouche, and presented at the Schiller Institute’s just-concluded conference of Nov. 13-14.

As the British Empire licks its wounds over the failure of COP26, as Prince Charles and the western banking elite failed to force the developing nations of the world to commit suicide by shutting down their fossil fuels, several leaders of the western powers today took the most unusual—and most welcome—step of trying to pull back from the brink of military confrontation with Russia and China.U.S. President Joe Biden spent three and a half hours, until after midnight, in a virtual face-to-face discussion with President Xi Jinping, potentially pulling back from the saber rattling over Taiwan and collaborating in facing the world health crisis. German Chancellor Angela Merkel spent nearly an hour speaking with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, undermining the war party’s campaign to hold a color revolution against the Belarus President and provoking military action on the Poland-Belarus border. French President Emmanuel Macron spent one and three-quarter hours on the phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin, addressing the migrant issue on the Belarus-Poland border, but also other hotspots, including Ukraine and Libya. In all three cases, the war party was not pleased, as you will see below. It is not a coincidence that these quite sane diplomatic initiatives take place at this time. The failure of the climate-disaster hoax in Glasgow was followed by an historic Schiller Institute conference on Nov. 13-14, which addressed real solutions to the existential crisis facing mankind today, with leading speakers from around the world demonstrating that: 1) the strategic confrontation pitting the U.S. against Russia and China is both insane and avoidable; 2) the hyperinflationary explosion now underway is intentional, but can be resolved with LaRouche’s Four Laws and a new Bretton Woods conference; 3) the notion that carbon causes global warming, justifying the destruction of productive economies worldwide while ignoring mass starvation in places such as Afghanistan and Haiti, is a conscious lie; and 4) the cultural disintegration into a new Dark Age of drugs, sexual perversity, and glorified violence can, and must be, reversed through a global renaissance, drawing on the greatest periods of every nation’s cultural heritage. President Biden assured President Xi that the U.S. does not want a Cold War, will honor America’s commitment to One China, and intends to maintain regular contact between “old friends.” President Xi, while appreciating such a retreat from the war provocations and economic sabotage of the past four years—including from the Biden Cabinet—hoped there would be “concrete actions” to back up the words. “The right thing to do is to choose mutual benefit over zero-sum games or the I-win-you-lose approach,” said the Chinese President. Global TImes reported that Biden made three promises: that the U.S. would not seek to change the Chinese system; that the U.S. revitalization of alliances would not be aimed at China; and that there would be no intentional clash with China. Taking a long view of history, as Lyndon LaRouche insisted throughout his life, Xi said: “The most important event in international relations in the coming 50 years will be for China and the US to find the right way to get along. History is a fair judge.” He called for the US and China to work together, especially in addressing the global health emergency. But the international crisis has not been resolved. The danger of global war is greater than at any time since World War II. The financial breakdown is accelerating. The COVID19 pandemic has doubled over the past two weeks, not abated. The drug scourge has doubled over the past decade, while mindless politicians across the US continue legalizing the poison which is destroying their children. Yet the introduction of beauty through Classical music, which opened each of the four panels of the Schiller Institute conference, is the language of the creative spirit which unites all mankind. The Schiller Institute is increasingly seen around the world as the platform for the “heavy” ideas and the universal search for truth and beauty, both in scientific investigation and in artistic expression, which can lead mankind out of this crisis to a new paradigm of a truly human civilization. If you have not already, take the time now to watch the conference here.

“Every person, indeed, expects from the arts of imagination a certain liberation from the bounds of the real world…. True art, however, does not aim merely at a temporary play; it intends not to transpose a person into a merely momentary dream of freedom, but to make him really and in fact free, and to accomplish this by awakening in him a force, exercising it and developing it, to thrust the sensuous world, which otherwise only presses upon us as crude material, bearing down upon us as a blind power, into an objective distance, to transpose it into a free work of our mind, and to achieve mastery over the material with ideas.” —On the Employment of the Chorus in TragedyWith the announcements that France intends to build a new nuclear power plant for the first time in decades, and that Netherlands and Sweden have now joined the ten (now twelve)-nation European “nuclear club,” the Erineyes are coming home to roost at the ever-decomposing COP 26 “cluster-flub.” Of Glasgow, we can paraphrase Sir Winston Churchill: “Rarely have so many said so much about so little.” Ridicule about Flop 26 has blossomed in the world of social media, with multiple lists of failed climate predictions appearing in several versions and satires. What will be the fate of the Glasgow silly season, that calls for $130 trillion in expenditures for a problem that does not exist? Remember Paul “Population Bomb” Ehrlich’s infamous August 1969 forecast, reported in the New York Times? “The trouble with almost all environmental problems is that by the time we have enough evidence to convince people, you’re dead. We must realize that unless we are extremely lucky, everybody will disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years.” We did not disappear in 1989, but the Berlin Wall did, on November 9 of that year. It was an event beyond the imagination of nearly all, especially the Malthusians. It seemed, even as it happened, to be impossible, except to one statesman, who had “visualized the complex domain” of world strategy. Lyndon LaRouche’s October 12, 1988 Kempinski Hotel speech indicated the necessity for a unified US/Soviet Union “committee of coincidence of opposites” approach to the then-strategic crisis of the Soviet Union’s and the Warsaw Pact’s inadequate food supplies. The reunification of Germany was posed in the context of a joint, multinational project for peace—Food For Peace—pivoted around a project for the advanced industrialization of Poland: “Let us say that the United States and Western Europe will cooperate to accomplish the successful rebuilding of the economy of Poland. There will be no interference in the political system of government, but only a kind of Marshall Plan aid to rebuild Poland’s industry and agriculture. If Germany agrees to this, let a process aimed at the reunification of the economies of Germany begin, and let this be the punctum saliens for Western cooperation in assisting the rebuilding of the economy of Poland. We, in the United States and Germany, should say to the Soviet bloc, let us show what we can do for the peoples of Eastern Europe, by this test, which costs you really nothing. Then, you judge by the results, whether this is a lesson you wish to try in other cases…. The state of the world as we have known it during the postwar period is ended. The only question is, whether the new era will be better or worse than the era we are in now.” The only question today is, as it was then, what it to be done to change the tragic course of current history, a “current history” whose cause the poet Dante Alighieri described over 700 years ago: “But turn your eyes to the valley; there we shall find the river of boiling blood in which are steeped all who struck down their fellow men." Oh blind! Oh ignorant, self-seeking cupidity which spurs us so in the short mortal life and steeps us so through all eternity!! —Dante, Inferno, Canto XII A relative handful of individuals, assembled as patriots and world-citizens, unafraid to recognize the greatness of the contributions of all cultures to all others, and prepared to challenge all false ideological constraints in favor of extending technological progress to every sector of the planet, now has the ability to wrest control from the failed “armies of the night.” Even at the “silly summit,” on its sidelines, the application of nuclear power to the world energy grid is finding inevitable momentum, albeit through the false “saving carbon emissions” distortion. As we go into the final days of organizing for the conference, “All Moral Resources of Humanity Have to be Called Up: Mankind Must Be An Immortal Species!” let us note that, whether in Afghanistan, with Operation Ibn Sina, or Haiti, with our development program, or with the World Health Platform to overcome the pandemic, the Schiller Institute, as an anti-Malthusian resistance, must sound the morally certain trumpet. “It is not true, as one usually hears the claim made, that the audience degrades art; the artist degrades the audience, and at all times when art degenerated, it fell because of the artists,” Schiller tells us. We must create a new, optimistic cultural force in the trans-Atlantic world, by upholding the standard of truth, not popular opinion. For example, when it is pointed out that 1.1 billion people in sub-Saharan Africa have the same energy-generating capacity as the 83 million people of Germany, we should point out that Germany is energy poor, because it destroyed 11 of its 17 nuclear power plants. Africa’s energy needs will be met, only if there is a full recommitment of the world, especially Germany and other once-advanced nations, to an “Apollo Project-style” gear-up of the industries of all nations to fill the worldwide energy gap. This means the immediate construction of hundreds of nuclear power plants (perhaps a thousand or more with the SMR designs) over the next 10-20 years. Tragedy is not the natural condition of humanity. COP 26’s parade of circus acts could not pass muster. We are free to make the same “species-type” of miracle that occurred on November 9, 1989, but only by using the method of physical economy taught by Lyndon LaRouche, the man who saw the way to unify nations, and to do it without war, for the benefit of all people.