Don’t Be Diplomatic: We Are Facing a Civilizational Failure That Must Be Reversed

With the Ukraine crisis careening rapidly towards a strategic showdown, President Joe Biden called President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday to propose that the two leaders hold “a summit meeting in a third country in the coming months to discuss the full range of issues facing the United States and Russia,” according to a White House read-out. The intent would be for “the United States and Russia to pursue a strategic stability dialogue on a range of arms control and emerging security issues.”

Even as Biden was speaking with Putin, his emissary, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, was in Brussels egging on Ukraine into a flight-forward demand to join NATO immediately, which all sides know is a tripwire for Russia. At the same time, the U.S. has deployed two warships into the Black Sea, which Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov described as a provocation “designed to test Russia’s nerves.” He warned that U.S. military support for Kiev is turning Ukraine into a “powder keg,” and that “if there is any aggravation, we of course will do everything to ensure our security and the safety of our citizens.”

What more is behind the Biden-Putin phone call is unclear at this writing. But two things are clear: 1) that the Ukraine flashpoint and the broader war danger are driven by the systemic collapse of the entire trans-Atlantic financial system, which has also unleashed a pandemic, famine, and mass unemployment across the planet; and 2) that no solution for any single crisis will work, unless the entire civilizational collapse is addressed and reversed.

“I think it is dawning on more and more relevant people that we are looking at a potential complete and utter failure of civilization,” Schiller Institute founder and President Helga Zepp-LaRouche stated today. “You cannot respond to any one crisis, or collapse, or danger, as an individual phenomenon; you have to really address the entire picture as one. Because either we can catalyze some moral response from people who are willing to recognize that what is going on is a civilizational collapse, or else I think we are on a short road to disaster.”

Zepp-LaRouche added: “I find it quite remarkable that this subject of a civilizational failure is becoming an issue among numerous important people, the most recent one being UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, who yesterday reviewed the global response to the COVID-19 crisis and the situation of world famine, poverty, and unemployment, and he told a gathering of the UN ECOSOC that no element of the multilateral response has gone as it should. He said that last year more than 3 million people died of Covid, 120 million have fallen into extreme poverty, and the equivalent of 255 million full-time jobs have been lost. And the crisis is far from being over. He said that the crisis is ‘putting multilateralism to the test, and so far, we have failed.’ He added that a complete paradigm shift was needed.”

Zepp-LaRouche went on to draw a moral line in the sand: “You have these absolutely incredible pictures of children dying right before the world’s eyes in Yemen and elsewhere, but that doesn’t stop the richest people in the world from having made a $5 trillion increase in their wealth in the last year. How can a Bezos or a Gates or all of these other creeps like Soros, how can they live with themselves, when they know that their mass of wealth is built on the corpses of so many millions of people? I think we should say it that way,” she insisted.

She urged LaRouche movement organizers to not be diplomatic, but to get under people’s skin. “I think anybody who sees the combination of the war danger escalating, the famine killing millions of people in several countries, COVID raging—they must react. And against this, the leading elites are showing they are utterly incapable of dealing with this crisis.”

“But I’m convinced that this fight can be won,” Zepp-LaRouche concluded, “because it beats the alternative.” The old paradigm is crashing, but if we do our job right, a new paradigm can be won, she stated. But to do that, “I think that the moral question needs to be addressed.”