Remember the energy hoaxes of the 1970s, when alleged boycotts by OPEC oil producers were the excuse given by Kissinger and Schlesinger for soaring gas and oil prices? The same kind of fraud is being perpetrated again, by the politicians run by corporate cartels; only this time, it is not only being used to drive up prices, but to provoke a highly-dangerous military confrontation between the Trans-Atlantic countries and Russia. Putin exposed this in a national televised press conference last week. Did you read about it or hear about it in the western mainstream media?????

“The Extraterrestrial Imperative is a driving force in the natural growth of terrestrial life beyond its planetary limits. As such, it is an integral part of the obviously expansionistic and growth-oriented pattern of life’s evolution. This drive caused life to grow from infinitesimal beginnings into a force that encompasses and transforms an entire planet through its biosphere. More basically, the Extraterrestrial Imperative expresses a ‘first message,’ a primordial imperative, bred into the very essence of the universe, driving the evolution of matter from simplest forms (elementary particles) to highly complex structures (e.g., the intelligent brain). A vast amount of cosmic energy is released by stellar matter in the initial phase of this process—the transformation of hydrogen to helium and heavier elements—and bound up in the later phases, involving the formation and evolution of living matter. By these roots, it is possible to identify the Extraterrestrial Imperative as a basic principle that can be derived from a consistent interpretation and generalization of recurring phenomena common to evolutionary processes.”These words were written in 1971 by Krafft Ehricke (1917-84), the German-American visionary and rocket scientist. His concept of Extraterrestrial Imperative asserted that it was the responsibility of humanity to explore space and exploit the resources of the Solar System, in order to sustain the development of the species. There are no external “limits to growth,” Ehricke insisted, because while the Earth is a “closed system,” the exploration of space opens the entire universe to humanity. For Ehricke, as for his friend Lyndon LaRouche, human creativity has no limits. This concept received a great boost and an inspiring confirmation on Christmas Day, 2021, with the successful launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, a project which involved the work of over 10,000 people from over 14 countries over 25 years. The telescope will be fully functional in June 2022, provided there is success in achieving the extraordinarily complex process of reaching its orbit 1 million miles away from Earth, while opening the apparatus through “50 major deployments … and 178 release mechanisms to deploy those 50 parts,” according to Webb Mission Systems Engineer Mike Menzel in a video titled “29 Days on the Edge.” The telescope will look back in time as much as 13.5 billion years. Perhaps it will discover the secret of the Star in the East on a Christmas Day 2021 years ago. But this burst of progress, and the human optimism and creativity which created it, is confronted by a dark reality on Earth, where multiple crises pose the question of whether or not the human race has the moral fitness to survive. In addition to an out-of-control pandemic, a hyperinflationary explosion and economic disintegration in much of the world, the U.S. and NATO are confronting both Russia and China with thermonuclear war. Certain madmen believe that the U.S. is still the “only superpower,” that their warped view of “liberal democracy” is indeed the perfected “end of history,” and that their threats will force these two great historic nations, both armed with nuclear weapons, to do the bidding of the would-be lords of the world. The Schiller Institute released an emergency Memorandum on Dec. 24, titled “Are We Sleepwalking Into Thermonuclear World War III?”, with a timeline demonstrating how this economic and strategic crisis point came to be, and why it is the responsibility of every citizen on Earth to work with us to stop it. Circulate this Memorandum everywhere.

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.