In her weekly dialogue, Helga Zepp-LaRouche proposed that we make 2022 the Year of Lyndon LaRouche. In doing so, we are not only commemorating the 100th year of his birth, but offering a pathway for solutions to the unresolved crises, which threaten humanity at the end of 2021.Zepp-LaRouche reviewed the chronology which we have compiled of the events of the last thirty years of U.S.-Russian relations, which have come to a head today. The present crisis has been deepening for thirty years, with broken promises and betrayal, a continuing series of provocations, which led President Putin to insist that written, legally-binding guarantees of security must be adopted; and that the upcoming meetings, which began with yesterday’s discussion between the two Presidents, and continue with three meetings beginning January 9, must produce results. Otherwise, the world is on a pathway to Hell! She also emphasized the shame of the West in regard to the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan. To allow the present situation to deteriorate is to engage willfully in genocide. The Committee of the Coincidence of Opposites is taking leadership in mobilizing for not just a solution for Afghanistan, but to address the continuing danger explicit in the absence of a modern health system in every nation.

As Presidents Biden and Putin spoke for nearly an hour by phone Thursday, with war-hawks throughout the NATO countries’ governments and think-tanks demanding complete NATO encirclement of Russia, the problem these two leaders should be talking about was expressed in a news headline: “With famine looming over Afghanistan, millions struggle for every meal.” (NBC News, Dec. 30). What does it profit the United States if it gain the encirclement of Russia and China with bases and missiles, and completely lose its soul by letting hundreds of millions die of starvation and pandemic? The sanest experts are warning: Even as you reach for that encirclement and impossible military superiority, you are likely triggering a war which will go nuclear and destroy civilization!Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche has repeated again on Dec. 29 in addressing a commemorative event: President Biden should accept the draft treaty proposed by President Putin and agree that Ukraine, on Russia’s border and part of it for centuries, will not join NATO. Long-time CIA analyst and founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity Ray McGovern, agreed. And on “The Critical Hour” radio broadcast Dec. 27, McGovern brought out that no media or officials are mentioning that 10,000 of the Russian troops who had moved closer to Ukraine in November have now been withdrawn back away from it, and called this a critical part of a negotiation that should be leading to a resolution of the standoff in January. Danish Russia expert Jens Joergen Nielsen, in an interview with EIR today, said he would tell Biden, “It is wise for you to engage with Putin, because the alternative is war.” And retired German Bundeswehr Inspector General Harald Kujat, on radio today, said the security of the NATO nations will be improved if Ukraine is not admitted. But this is not merely a discussion of “strategy,” but of the common aims of humanity, for which the United States was a powerful and leading force. In 1988 Lyndon LaRouche, after five years of “strategic” crisis in which he had forecast the dissolution of the Soviet Union while others forecast it would invade Western Europe, went to Berlin and publicly proposed a “Food for Peace” solution, in which the Western nations would develop the agriculture of Poland so that it could feed itself, and the Soviet Union would accept the unification of Germany. No one else thought these possible, but they occurred then; and promises were made to Mikhail Gorbachev that unified Germany would be the last NATO state; promises then broken by NATO to lead to today’s U.S.-Russia standoff. LaRouche widened his proposals in a “Food for Peace” conference in Chicago in December 1988—“Who will give us this day our daily bread?,” he asked on behalf of hundreds of millions, just weeks before he was imprisoned. Now, a modern healthcare system must be built in Afghanistan; its financial reserves released from U.S. sanctions; and food aid and food production made possible. President Putin proposed this as well, during the current negotiations with the Biden Administration, on Dec. 23. This is a matter for American, Russian, and Chinese collaboration for the common welfare of mankind, or millions will starve in the post-war destruction of that country. Therefore, accept the non-alignment of Ukraine. Take the path out of this potentially thermonuclear standoff into collaboration against pandemic and famine; on to the exploration and colonization of space; on to the development of nuclear power and fusion energy technologies. Those should be the missions of great powers, not to encircle and intimidate each other until the irreversible, unsurvivable war breaks out.

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.

Tonight’s Fireside Chat reviews elements of the year 2021 from the standpoint of the just released new edition of the Leonore Magazine No. 2 and its editorial, "To What End Do We Educate?" Leonore's Anastasia Battle will join David Shavin and Dennis Speed for the discussion.