Dennis Small

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.