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Is it entirely a coincidence that the ongoing events in Kazakhstan, which shares the world’s longest land border with Russia, are occurring one one week before a series of strategic dialogues between Russia and the U.S., NATO, and other members of the OSCE?Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has responded to protests that became violent in a way that suggested organization, by changing the government, requesting and receiving security assistance from his Collective Security Treaty Organization partners, refusing to negotiate with violent bandits, and ordering his security forces to shoot perpetrators of violence without warning. He has thanked Russian President Vladimir Putin for his support, and received praise from China’s President Xi Jinping, whose country also borders Kazakhstan. The United States has, predictably, focused on warning that the “world” is watching for (or are the Anglo-Americans hoping for?) human rights violations. What are the origins of these protests? Who ran them? What went into preparing them? Plans for destabilizing Russia, published by the RAND corporation in 2019, included six geopolitical options. The first four—starting with providing weapons to Ukraine—have been implemented; the fifth calls for attacking Russian influence in Central Asia (where Kazakhstan is located). If this is an attempted replay of the 2014 Maidan protests in Ukraine, as seems more than possible, then we should look for that event’s British-American parentage. And that’s precisely where the investigation of a purported leader of the protests leads: to London. While additional inquiry is required to unwrap what is occurring in Kazakhstan, the world context is clear. Next week’s dialogues are an opportunity to make an abrupt about-face on priorities and paradigm, to drop the anti-Russia, anti-China, anti-growth (green), and slavishly pro-finance policies that are leading civilization to the brink of a catastrophe from which there were no return: nuclear war. Far better to look to the heavens, source of endless wonder and discovery. The James Webb Space Telescope, launched on Christmas, will be fully operational by this summer, sending images of galaxies from ten billions years ago, based on wavelengths our eyes can’t see. In this Year of Lyndon LaRouche, we must challenge ourselves to play a successful role in building a worthy, human civilization.

Join us LIVE on Saturday at 2pm EST. In the first week of the 2022 New Year, Tony Blair was officially declared a Knight of the Living Dead and U. S. Former Vice-President Dick "Darth Vader" Cheney was presented at the U. S. Capitol by his daughter as the new Arse-nal of Democracy. What Next for the New Year?As investigators probe the shady story of Tony Blair's long-standing connections in Kazakhstan, and Russia tries to avoid the multiple "bear traps" being set by a duplicitous NATO along its 14-nation border, the prospects for a successful world collaboration against the increasingly-consuming coronavirus pandemic or the breakout of thermonuclear war hang in the balance. A return to morality, by reversing the ongoing, premeditated starvation of millions in Afghanistan, is the prerequisite to building a durable peace through development, but with the likes of former de facto United States president Dick Cheney suddenly re-emerging from the bowels of Dante's Inferno as the "hero-defender of liberal democracy," from whence does America find the moral fitness to survive? Lyndon LaRouche believed that "the content of policy is the method by which it is made." A moral policy cannot come from an immoral method. Harley Schlanger and Mike Robinson will discuss and answer questions concerning the alternative policy methods for 2022.

Fearful that upcoming negotiations between the U.S. and Russia might lead to a de-escalation of the crisis in Ukraine, the City of London/Wall Street globalists are setting up a "bear trap" in Kazakhstan, in an effort to further demonize Putin and destabilize Eurasia. No shock here, to find George Soros and Tony Blair in the middle of things, another Color Revolution which, if successful, will benefit no one but the global oligarchy! The "democratic" self-proclaimed leader of the rioters is a former Energy Minister, a convicted embezzler whose party is coordinating the rampaging rioters from Kiev!

On this anniversary of the "Fedsurrection" at the Capitol, we pause to reflect on how the events of that day have been used as an excuse to pursue what are truly anti-democratic policies. As sickening as the posturing around Jan 6 is, the context is global. A strategic confrontation with Russia and China is intended to try to face down those independent nations as the trans-Atlantic financial system implodes. Will we survive? That depends on our ability to rapidly recruit to the perspective of Lyndon LaRouche. Jason Ross was our guest tonight.

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.”

Today a 30-second video was issued by David Beasley, Executive Director of the World Food Program (WFP) on Afghanistan, showing both hungry children, and also food delivery, with the text: “The situation in Afghanistan may have faded from the front page, but don’t let Afghan families fade from your mind. 8.7 million people are on the brink of starvation. Read that again: 8.7 million people are on the brink of starvation. What we do today has the power to change the fate of more than 23 million people. Act now.” Beasley’s immediate message, tweeted with the video, is for WFP donations. He wrote, “The Year 2021 has been a catastrophic year for the people of Afghanistan. Millions of Afghans are counting on WFP for life-saving food this winter. Help us help them.”However, Beasley’s imperative about keeping in our minds what is important about Afghanistan—the value of human life—is what applies across the board to the crises we now face. Think it through. We are capable of mobilizing the physical resources and logistics to stop mass death in Afghanistan. It takes concerted action. The Schiller Institute will host another conference in mid-January (date to be determined soon) on action in Afghanistan. Look at the pandemic in the same way. The same principle applies. In China, concerted action has kept the COVID-19 case rate and death toll very low, with massive testing and contact tracing, as well as localized lockdowns. In contrast, the pandemic virus is now surging in multiple locations elsewhere in Asia, in the trans-Atlantic, the Americas and Africa. On Jan. 4, the daily case count was 2.594 million cases officially reported worldwide (a big undercount), of which 35%, 885,500 cases, were in the United States alone. The Schiller Institute/Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites is preparing an emergency statement of action points required to save lives, and roll back the virus. The outline and principle are the same as in prior statements, but with measures specific to the unfolding events. (Prior statements: “LaRouche’s ‘Apollo Mission’ To Defeat the Global Pandemic: Build a World Health System Now,” April 11, 2020; ’Global Health Security Requires Medical Infrastructure in Every Country—Major Industrial Nations Must Collaborate Now!" May 14, 2021, submitted to the Global Health Summit in Rome; “Open Letter to Virologists and Medical Experts Around the World To Address the COVID-19 Pandemic,” by former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, Nov. 23, 2021; and others.) There are initiatives in the needed direction. Yesterday, for example, the importance of rapidly expanding medical staff, by calling back into action retirees, was stressed by Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, when he declared an official state of emergency. There are many measures that are clearly bipartisan and nonpartisan, overriding the non-stop partisan shouting going on in the U.S. For example, use the Defense Production Act, as was done under Trump, to get all needed items, from material for construction of hospitals and medical materials, to COVID-19 therapeutics in quantity. Ramp up production of antiviral medications and all kinds of monoclonal antibodies, currently scarce. Mobilizing for emergency action and a world health platform, with a focus on Afghanistan, are entirely consistent with the drive to stop the nuclear war danger. The meetings set for next week, on the initiative of Russia, are critical for that: Jan. 10 in Geneva, between the U.S. and Russia; Jan. 12 in Brussels, between NATO and Russia; and Jan. 13 in Vienna, with Russia and the OSCE. But there are countermoves underway. Today German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock met in Washington, D.C. with Secretary of State Tony Blinken, giving a joint press conference afterward, to snidely play up threats against Russia over Ukraine, and play down any validity to Russia’s concerns over its security. Also today, the EU Foreign Affairs Representative Josep Borrell was in Ukraine, visiting the perimeter of Luhansk, alongside Ukraine Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, to make accusations against Russia. On Friday, Jan. 7, there will be a special online NATO meeting of foreign ministers of its 30 member countries, in advance of the NATO-Russia meeting next Wednesday, Jan. 12. Circulate everywhere the new Schiller Institute Memorandum, “Are We Sleepwalking into Thermonuclear World War III?”

Helga Zepp-LaRouche raised the question today as to whether the rioters rampaging through the streets of cities in Kazakhstan are being deployed on behalf of a Color Revolution designed to derail the upcoming talks between officials of the U.S. and NATO with their Russian counterparts. She said she had been expecting something like this -- we don't know yet if it is, but we will investigate. A leading Russian analyst said he's hopeful that some positive changes may result from the upcoming meetings, pointing out that engaging in a dialogue is in itself some progress, especially after the hostile rhetoric of the recent years. He said the statement of the P5 members of the U.N. Security Council that "nuclear wars cannot be won, and should not be fought," is a "good first step", but must be followed by specific commitments -- such as cooperation in rebuilding Afghanistan.

There are many lies being spread by financial talking heads in the media about what is behind the inflation that is eating up your paycheck and savings. What is not being discussed is how the flow of an unprecedented volume of trillions of dollars to the biggest banks, to cover their speculative losses, is the actual driver of hyperinflation. This is a scandal! As Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup are rolling over tens of billions in overnight loans from the NY Fed -- of which they are the majority shareholders -- there has been a cut-off of credit to firms engaged in physical economic activity. This began before COVID and Green New Deal legislation. It must be ended by re-enacting Glass Steagall banking separation.

Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern has insisted that only a metanoia—a 180- degree spiritual “bootlegger’s turn” away from a self-defeating, self-destructive indifference to promoting the General Welfare of people all over the world—can preserve any nation, including the declining United States. In times of pandemic, this should be clear. This could be done, for example, in consultation with the CIS nations addressed last week by Vladimir Putin, by re-directing the world’s military capabilities to the task of saving millions now threatened with death by famine and by infectious, possibly species-threatening diseases. We could ensure a moral upshift in international relations through establishing a world health platform that reverses the medical apartheid of the past two years (and more) and establishes a world “public sanitation” policy as recently discussed by Russian head of the Federal Service for Supervision of Consumer Rights Protection and Human Welfare, effectively Chief Sanitary Physician, Anna Popova, and as continually discussed by Dr. Jocelyn Elders and Helga Zepp-LaRouche. The stakes are higher than at any time in human history.Now that spokesmen from Russia and China have described their respective roles in securing the recent P-5 re-statement of the 1986 “Reagan/Gorbachev Resolution” that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought (see slugs), what can be done to cause the United States and the trans-Atlantic world to honor that premise? We know, that refuting the presently publicly stated”confront Russia" outlook on Ukraine, as espoused by the Atlantic Council and others, requires an affirmative response to the Russian proposal that the decades-earlier broken promises of NATO and the United States, concerning “no NATO expansion eastward,” now be guaranteed in writing. Given the undeniable record of the United States and Europe in not only breaking their strategic promises, but also “restructuring”—i.e. looting and depopulating—Russia for several years in the 1990s through predatory financial “shock therapy,” that doesn’t seem a lot to ask. We can be sure that the true gravity of the present circumstance has been registered in several, even many, national capitals. It may even begin to episodically puncture the media curtain now drawn around the truth; but if so, that will largely be our own doing, in collaboration with institutions that aid that effort. At home, however, the “Prompt Global Strike” and related “Beyond MAD” digital knuckledraggers of the “Silicon(e) Valley Department of Defense” have, at best, an outdated, post-imperial, Bertrand Russell-like view of “how to handle Russia and China.” In this era of political correctness, they wouldn’t dare say it this way, but in a 1952 interview, on or about his 80th birthday, which can be viewed on YouTube, Bertrand Russel opined," It’s very difficult for anybody born since 1914, to realize how profoundly different the world is now from what it was when I was a child…. A world where ancient empires vanish like morning mist… We have to accustom ourselves to Asiatic-self assertion…It is an extraordinarily difficult thing for an old man to live in such a world." Answering the question as to what part “Asia” would play in the near future, Russell said, “Well, Asia… is not prepared any longer to be subservient to the white man. It hasn’t noticed that Russians are white. If it had, it would take a different line. But it seems to think that Russians are yellow, or black, or some other color. And I think our propaganda ought to be mainly devoted only to saying, Russians also are white. I believe that would be the effective propaganda to use in Asia… if Asia does not overwhelm the rest of the world with a vast flood of population and poverty, Asia must live up to its responsibilities. It must learn the sort of things that we have learned in the West, which is how to maintain a roughly stationary [level] of population…” The Malthusian premise luridly on display then, wears the modest garb of “climate change” today, but it still has Bertrand Russell’s face. Hence, the surprise, panic, and shock now being expressed among “policy-making circles” that have awakened to realize that the China-Russia alliance is real. Yet, out of their depraved indifference to American history, Illiterates are referring to this as “the greatest challenge ever to American power.” They would be horrified to realize that it is precisely this China-Russia alliance, together with the United States, that Abraham Lincoln, Czar Alexander I, Dimitri Medelyev, Ansom Burlingame, Wharton Barker, and the Self-Strengthening Movement of China worked to create in the Nineteenth Century, expressed in the Trans-Continental, Trans-Siberian, and Sun Yat-Sen China national railway designs. It is neither “communist,” nor “capitalist.” It is the transformed physical economy, first called the American System, later transferred to Europe and the world by the German-American economist Friedrich List, and then recently completely revolutionized by Lyndon LaRouche and his discoveries, that is, as of now, more studied, appreciated, and understood in Russia, China, and some other countries than in the United States itself. LaRouche is the only American statesman in the last half-century to offer an advanced conception of American strategic policy, one diametrically opposed to British Liberal-Imperialist Bertrand Russell and his intellectual tradition. Perhaps, in this year of LaRouche’s centenary, several nations and institutions will see fit to discuss this “best kept secret.” LaRouche proceeded in his strategic policy designs from the vantage point of physical economy, as invented by the 26-year-old genius Gottfried Leibniz in his essay “Society and Economy.” Through a series of books and lectures, as well as through his eight United States Presidential campaigns, LaRouche insisted that strategy, as well as political action, must proceed from a philosophical method of a particular type. LaRouche identified that method with the person of Socrates, and the politically-suppressed writings of Socrates’ student Plato and Plato’s School of Athens. In his introduction to the LaRouche organization’s polemically authentic translation of Plato’s Timaeus dialogue, “Plato and the New Political Science,” LaRouche wrote: “Contrary to the myth of Plato the merely contemplative speculator, Plato was the leader of the most active and far-flung political intelligence operations organization of the city-builders faction of the fourth century BC…. Platonic ideas, properly so termed, take as their subject the characteristic features of the mental processes by which hypotheses concerning empirical scientific knowledge are formed. It is therefore such Platonic ideas which rightly appear very modern to informed readers today…. It is only by methods of composition which force the reader’s attention away from primary emphasis on prosaic facts of the ephemeral here and now that the reader’s attention is directed to the relatively transfinite, subsuming successive transformations of knowledge in the ephemeral here and now. We, today, must pursue the same method if we are to arrive, at last, at abstraction of sets of principles which account for the ordered course of the history of civilization in the past, and into the future. “Here is the practical importance of historiography to every citizen, whether a public official or an individual man or woman lacking any conspicuous status in public affairs. What we do—or fail to do—in the present, in our here and now, determines how we and others shall live in our own personal future and in the future of our posterity.” Bertrand Russell’s view of Plato was… somewhat different. “For a time I found a certain satisfaction in the Platonic eternal world of ideas, which has a sort of religious flavor. It gave me a certain satisfaction. But then I came to the conclusion that that was nonsense. And then I was left without any satisfaction with it… And remain so….” This “higher manifold” of intelligence warfare is the real domain of the ongoing strategic discussions of today. The disadvantage for Americans is that Bertrand Russell’s “liberal imperialist” outlook is more popular in the State Department and other institutions than is that of Lyndon LaRouche. As a consequence, until the seminal role of Lyndon LaRouche is at least acknowledged in terms of his role in the strategic dialogue with Russia and China over the past 40 years, even on matters of basic historiography, let alone grand strategy, America is doomed, when it comes to matters of grand strategy, to repeat the same self-defeating mistakes over and over, starting with the axiom that “Great Britain/Iago is America’s/Othello’s closest ally.” It is our job to induce a metanoia, a moral “bootlegger’s turn,” including through the evolving pandemic, and the crime against humanity unfolding in Afghanistan, to give the trans-Atlantic world back the moral fitness to survive.

The Permanent 5 members of the UN Security Council announced their agreement that "Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought", in a statement issued on January 2. To realize this ideal, the practice of geopolitics, which underlies today's obsession with the "Rules-Based Order", and justifies the use of threats and military force to protect it, must be definitively rejected. The alternative to geopolitics is the adoption of the strategic, economic and cultural approach developed by Lyndon LaRouche, which is why Helga Zepp-LaRouche has called for 2022 to be the "Year of LaRouche."

As the year 2022 opened marking economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche’s 100th birthday, the heads of state and government of the five nuclear weapons states, which are also the permanent members of the UN Security Council, consulted as Helga Zepp-LaRouche has insisted they must do, and issued a declaration, for the first time, that “nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought” (see the Declaration in Documentation). The words were used by Presidents Biden and Putin following their Dec. 7, 2021 video conference; and this declaration will now sit over the U.S.-Russian-NATO negotiations on the Ukraine crisis Jan. 10-13.But the fundamental reason for optimism here is not so much the words of this declaration as that the five powers’ leaders acted together against global war. Helga Zepp-LaRouche had publicly called on them to do exactly two years ago—Jan. 3, 2020, in the dangerous period after the assassination of the Iranian General Qassem Soleimani—and has urged it on them many times since. On Jan. 15, 2020, two weeks after Helga LaRouche’s first call, Russian President Putin called for a P5 heads-of-state summit to deal with problems of peace, security, and terrorism—and he, too, has repeated that proposal several times since; and his spokesman emphasized today that it is still necessary after this “nuclear war never” declaration. Already by early March 2020, Helga LaRouche had identified the COVID pandemic—demanding a modern healthcare system be built in every country—as the new requirement for such a major-power summit. This must be done on an emergency basis in Afghanistan, along with food aid and power supply guarantees to save millions of lives. It is the start of, through physical-economic development, the real name for peace; and it points to a new international credit system like FDR’s Bretton Woods, in place of the crash-prone casino we have now. These are the missions uniquely reachable through what Lyndon LaRouche called “the four-power agreement” of America, Russia, China and India. That makes today’s “P5” declaration significant beyond its words. The declaration was posted simultaneously at roughly 11:00 a.m. U.S. Eastern Time on all five Presidents’/Prime Ministers’ websites. “We affirm that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” the statement says. “As nuclear use would have far-reaching consequences, we also affirm that nuclear weapons—for as long as they continue to exist—should serve defensive purposes, deter aggression, and prevent war. We believe strongly that the further spread of such weapons must be prevented.” This rebukes those mad war-hawks like Sen. Roger Wicker who have been raising the “option” of a nuclear first strike on Russia over Ukraine. The five signers also reaffirm the importance of addressing nuclear threats, as well as their commitments to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and its obligation “to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date.” They “reaffirm that none of our nuclear weapons are targeted at each other or at any other State.” They also declared: “We intend to continue seeking bilateral and multilateral diplomatic approaches to avoid military confrontations, strengthen stability and predictability, increase mutual understanding and confidence, and prevent an arms race that would benefit none and endanger all. We are resolved to pursue constructive dialogue with mutual respect and acknowledgment of each other’s security interests and concerns.” Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said, “We hope that, in the current difficult conditions of international security, the approval of such a political statement will help reduce the level of international tensions.” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov emphasized that Moscow still considered a summit between the world’s major nuclear powers to be “necessary.” China’s Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu was quoted by the official Xinhua that the pledge “will help increase mutual trust and replace competition among major powers with coordination and cooperation.” But it is only a step that these nations’ leaders must be kept to. The trans-Atlantic banking and financial system is headed for hyperinflation and crash. What the world absolutely needs is a major-power negotiation process which involves at least India as well, to launch a new international credit system capable of funding real economic development, “TVA-like” thorough development of poorer regions, advanced nuclear power development, technological progress led by space science and fusion power crash programs. The guide and planner of this process, and the world’s leading fighter for it, was Lyndon LaRouche. This begins LaRouche’s year.

Schiller Institute MemorandumDecember 31, 2021 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 which no one would 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 UK-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 laying financial siege to Russia to try to starve it 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 it 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 to within a scarce five minutes’ flight time to Moscow. Russia has presented two draft documents—one, a treaty with the United States, the other, an agreement with NATO—which together would provide legally binding security guarantees that NATO’s eastward march will stop, that Ukraine and Georgia in particular will 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 the Soviet Union was given 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 Chairman Nikita Khrushchev during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, which was successfully defused by the deft back-channel negotiations of JFK’s personal envoy, his brother and Attorney General, Robert 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 documents with Russia—and step back from the edge of thermonuclear extinction. What we chronicle below has been happening, step by step, while most Americans have been asleep at the switch. It is time to wake up, before we sleepwalk into thermonuclear World War III. The Military Component The collapse of the socialist states of Eastern Europe and then the Soviet Union in 1989-91 was a moment of great hope, for an end of the Cold War and the potential for the parties of the Cold War to cooperate in building a new world order based on peace through development. That moment was lost when the Anglo-American elite chose instead to declare itself “the only superpower” in a unipolar world, looting Russia and the former Soviet states, while seeking to either take Russia over, or to crush it. Promises were made to the Soviet Union—and thus to Russia as its recognized legal successor as a nuclear-weapons power—at the outset of this period, all of which have been broken over the past thirty years. Already in February of 1990 in Moscow, then Secretary of State James Baker promised Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachov and Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze that, in the wake of German reunification which came about later that year, if U.S. troops remained in Germany there would be no expansion of NATO “one inch to the East.” (This was confirmed in official U.S. files released in 2017.) At that time, Soviet force structure in East Germany consisted of around 340,000 troops and extensive military infrastructure, weapons, and equipment. The terms of their withdrawal (eventually completed in 1994) and whether or not, under German reunification, NATO forces would replace them in that formerly Soviet-occupied section of Germany, were on the table. Other Eastern European countries, located to the east of East Germany, were still members of the Warsaw Treaty Organization (Warsaw Pact), whose dissolution was not then anticipated; that dissolution happened in July 1991, the month before the Soviet Union itself broke up. But the U.S. Department of Defense was plotting the expansion of NATO eastwards already by October of 1990. Although there were different policies being debated within the U.S. political leadership, planning for expansion was proceeding behind the scenes. On the surface, Russian relations with the trans-Atlantic powers remained non-adversarial for most of the 1990s. In the economic sphere, however, the “takeover” proceeded apace, with the adoption of London- and Wall Street-engineered economic reforms that resulted in the large-scale deindustrialization of Russia, and could have led to the annihilation of its military might. There was some planned dismantling of nuclear weapons in both East and West, with U.S. specialists providing on-site assistance in the transfer of nuclear weapons from Ukraine, Belarus and other now independent ex-Soviet areas back to Russia, as well as in the disposal of some of Russia’s own weapons. On May 27, 1997, the NATO-Russia Founding Act1 was signed, establishing the NATO-Russia Council and other consultation mechanisms. Among other things, the document declared that “NATO and Russia do not consider each other as adversaries.” (Sec. 2, Para. 2) NATO described the document as “the expression of an enduring commitment, undertaken at the highest political level, to build, together, a lasting and inclusive peace in the Euro-Atlantic area.” (Sec. 2, Para. 2) Nonetheless, a shift began to occur in the late 1990s, driven by several events. One was that the imported economic reforms, promoting enormous financial speculation and the looting of Russian resources, led to a blow-out in August 1998 of the Russian government bond market (nearly triggering a meltdown of the global financial system because of bad bets placed on Russian securities by Wall Street and other hedge funds, as ex-Director of the International Monetary Fund Michel Camdessus later acknowledged). In the wake of that collapse, Russia’s London- and Chicago-trained liberal “young reformers” were replaced by a government under the leadership of former Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov and military-industrial planner Yuri Maslyukov, who acted swiftly to stem the collapse of the remainder of Russia’s industry. A second factor in Russia’s troubles at that time was the escalation of terrorist separatist movements in Russia’s North Caucasus region, which Russian intelligence services had solidly identified as being backed and egged on not only by Wahhabite Islamic fundamentalists from Saudi Arabia, but also by U.S. and UK intelligence agencies directly. In summer 1999, these networks attempted to split the entire North Caucasus out of Russia. Also in the late 1990s, NATO boosted its involvement in the Bosnian War and other Balkan Peninsula conflicts among the former components of Yugoslavia, which had broken up. This meddling peaked with NATO’s bombing of Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, in March-June 1999 without authorization of the United Nations Security Council. This action shocked Moscow with the realization that NATO was prepared to act unilaterally, as it wished, without international consensus. In July 1997, at a NATO Summit in Madrid, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic were invited to join NATO, which they formally did in 1999. This was the first of five rounds of NATO expansion. In 2004, all three Baltic countries (formerly republics within the Soviet Union proper), and Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia were admitted. Four more Balkan countries joined in the years following, bringing NATO’s membership up to its current level of 30 countries. Vladimir Putin, in his Dec. 21, 2021 address to an expanded meeting of the Defense Ministry Board, expressed Moscow’s view of the importance of the NATO-Russia Founding Act and its subsequent betrayal by NATO: Take the recent past, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when we were told that our concerns about NATO’s potential expansion eastwards were absolutely groundless. And then we saw five waves of the bloc’s eastward expansion. Do you remember how it happened? All of you are adults. It happened at a time when Russia’s relations with the United States and main member states of NATO were cloudless, if not completely allied. I have already said this in public and will remind you of this again: American specialists were permanently present at the nuclear arms facilities of the Russian Federation. They went to their office there every day, had desks and an American flag. Wasn’t this enough? What else is required? U.S. advisors worked in the Russian government—career CIA officers, [who] gave their advice. What else did they want? What was the point of supporting separatism in the North Caucasus, with the help of even ISIS—well, if not ISIS, there were other terrorist groups. They obviously supported terrorists. What for? What was the point of expanding NATO and withdrawing from the ABM Treaty? As Putin noted, the United States, under the George W. Bush Administration, began to dismantle the system of strategic arms control assembled during the Cold War, beginning in 2002 with the U.S. withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, just a few months after Putin had extended an offer of strategic cooperation with the United States following the 9/11 attacks. The U.S. administration quickly began planning for a global ballistic missile defense system (BMDS) in Europe and Asia, which in Europe led to the first sailing of an American guided missile destroyer equipped with the Aegis anti-missile missiles (the USS Arleigh Burke) into the Black Sea in the spring of 2012. In 2016 would come the inauguration of an “Aegis Ashore” installation—the same system, but land-based—in Romania, and the start of construction of a similar site in Poland. At a conference in Moscow in May of 2012, then Deputy Chief of the Russian General Staff Gen. Valery Gerasimov provided extensive documentation, with video animations, of the fact that the BMDS was not aimed primarily at Iran, but did, in its intended later phases, represent a threat to Russia’s strategic deterrent. Putin and other Russian officials have also emphasized the possibility of the defensive (anti-missile) systems being quickly reconfigured as missile launchers for direct attack. An increasingly sharper Russian response to the U.S./NATO pursuit of these programs and to the rejection of Russia’s offers of cooperation was also evident in the contrast between two speeches President Putin gave in Germany: before the Bundestag (Parliament) on September 25, 2001, and at the Munich Security Conference in 2007. Putin spoke to the Bundestag, in German, just two weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attack on the U.S. in 2001. He had called President Bush within hours of that attack—he was the first foreign leader to call—offering full Russian support for the U.S. in the moment of crisis. He told the Germans: “The Cold War is over,” and posed a vision of global collaboration in building a new paradigm based on collaboration of the nations of the world. Then on February 10, 2007, Putin delivered a landmark speech at the annual Munich Security Conference. The Western media and some people who were present, including the war-monger U.S. Senator John McCain, denounced it as belligerent, and it became a point of departure for the subsequent demonization of Putin. But it was not an aggressive speech. Putin simply made clear that Russia was not going to be trampled underfoot, as a subjugated nation in a unipolar imperial world. Almost all international media ignored how he opened the speech, with a carefully chosen quotation from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Fireside Chat of September 3,1939, two days after the Nazi invasion of Poland that had marked the outbreak of World War II. FDR said, and Putin quoted, “When peace has been broken anywhere, the peace of all countries everywhere is in danger.” This speech was the signal that, speaking in strategic terms, Russia was “back.” In July 2007, Putin attempted to avert the crossing of a line that Moscow defined as a fundamental threat to Russian security, namely the installation of the American BMDS directly at Russia’s borders. Visiting President George W. Bush in Kennebunkport, Maine, he proposed joint Russian-American development and deployment of anti-missile systems, including an offer to the U.S. administration to use the Russian early-warning radar in Gabala, Azerbaijan as part of a mutual Russian-American missile defense system for Europe, instead of the American BMDS planned for installation in Poland and the Czech Republic (the latter was changed to Romania). Putin also offered to give the U.S. access to a radar facility in southern Russia, and to place coordination of the process with the NATO-Russia Council. Sergei Ivanov, then a deputy prime minister, said that the Russian proposals signified a fundamental change in international relations, and could mean an end to talk about a new Cold War: If our proposals are accepted, Russia will no longer need to place new weapons, including missiles, in the European part of the country, including Kaliningrad. Negotiations between Russian and American officials over the Russian proposal were conducted throughout 2008, before petering out. Key to their failure was the vehemence of Washington’s refusal to abandon construction of the BMDS. In the words of then Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Political Military Affairs Stephen Mull: What we do not accept is that Gabala is a substitute for the plans that we’re already pursuing with our Czech and Polish allies. We believe that those installations are necessary for the security of our interests in Europe. Clearly, the target was not Iran, but Russia, and the opportunity for a new paradigm was lost. At the April 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, Georgia and Ukraine were promised future NATO membership, although they were not offered formal Membership Action Plans (MAP). Their bids, nonetheless, were welcomed by many and they were left with hopes of MAPs in the future, maybe the near future—enough so that the Georgians declared: The decision to accept that we are going forward to an adhesion to NATO was taken and we consider this is a historic success. In August 2008, while President Dmitri Medvedev was on vacation and then Prime Minister Putin was at the opening of the Olympic Games in Beijing, Mikheil Saakashvili’s Georgia attacked Russian peacekeepers in the breakaway Georgian province of South Ossetia, leading to a short but ferocious war, which Georgia lost. The fact that Saakashvili acted on the assumption he would have full NATO backing, although it proved wrong in the event, was not lost on Moscow and has influenced subsequent Russian thinking about what would happen with Georgia or Ukraine becoming full NATO members. Ukraine In December 2008, in the wake of Georgia’s military showdown with Russia, Carl Bildt and Radek Sikorski, the foreign ministers of Sweden and Poland, respectively, initiated the European Union’s “Eastern Partnership.” It targeted six countries that were formerly republics within the Soviet Union: three in the Caucasus region (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia) and three in East Central Europe (Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine). They were not to be invited to full EU membership, but were nevertheless drawn into a vise through so-called EU Association Agreements (EUAA), each one centered on a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA). The prime target of the effort was Ukraine. Under the EUAA negotiated with Ukraine, but not immediately signed, the country’s industrial economy would be dismantled, trade with Russia savaged (with Russia ending its free-trade regime with Ukraine to prevent its own markets from being flooded via Ukraine), and EU-based market players would grab Ukraine’s agricultural and raw materials exports. Furthermore, the EUAA mandated “convergence” on security issues, with integration into European defense systems. Under such an arrangement, the long-term treaty agreements on the Russian Navy’s use of its crucial Black Sea ports on the Crimean Peninsula—a Russian area since the 18th Century, but administratively assigned to Ukraine within the USSR in the early 1950s—would be terminated, ultimately giving NATO forward-basing on Russia’s immediate border. Turning Ukraine against Russia had been a long-term goal of Cold War Anglo-American strategic planners, as it was earlier of Austro-Hungarian imperial intelligence agencies during World War I. After World War II, up until the mid-1950s, the U.S.A. and UK supported an insurgency against the Soviet Union, a civil war that continued on the ground long after peace had been signed in 1945. The insurgents were from the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and remnants of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). The OUN had been founded in 1929 from a template similar to that which produced the Italian and other European fascist movements. Its leader, Stepan Bandera, was an on-again/off-again ally of the Nazis, and the OUN-UPA, under an ethnic-purist ideology, committed mass slaughter of ethnic Poles and Jews in western Ukraine towards the end of World War II. In Europe after the War, Bandera was sponsored by British MI6 (intelligence), while CIA founder Allen Dulles shepherded Gen. Mykola Lebed, another OUN leader, into the U.S.A., despite strong opposition from U.S. Army Intelligence, based on Lebed’s record of collaboration with the Nazis and war crimes. Next-generation followers of Lebed, whose base of operations—the Prolog Research Corporation in New York City—was funded by Dulles’s CIA for intelligence-gathering and the distribution of nationalist and other literature inside the U.S.S.R., staffed the U.S. Radio Liberty facility in Munich, Germany for broadcasting into Ukraine, up into the 1980s.2 When the U.S.S.R. broke up in August 1991, key Banderite leaders dashed into Lviv, far western Ukraine—a mere 1,240 km from Munich, 12 hours by car—and began to rebuild their movement. Lviv Region, which for many years had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, not the Russian, was the stronghold of the OUN’s heirs. The Banderites’ influence got a boost after the 2004 Orange Revolution in Kiev. Backed by the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy and the private foundations of financier George Soros, this was a so-called “color revolution,” which overturned the results of a Presidential election and, in a second vote, installed banker Victor Yushchenko as President. He was voted out in 2010 because of popular opposition to his brutal austerity policies (generated by IMF-dictated formulae for privatization and deregulation), but not before overseeing a revision of the official history of Ukraine’s relations with Russia in favor of a radical, anti-Russian nationalism (whereas, historically, there had been a strong tendency among Ukrainian patriots and advocates of independence to prefer a long-term alliance with Russia). The Lviv-based Banderites, meanwhile, recruited and strengthened their movement, and held paramilitary summer camps for young people in the Ukrainian countryside and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. At times, the instructors included off-duty military officers from NATO countries. In 2008, Yushchenko first applied for NATO to grant Ukraine a Membership Action Plan. The turning point for Ukraine’s status as a potential trigger in the current war danger came in 2014. Ongoing efforts to get Ukraine to finalize its EUAA were rejected as untenable by the Viktor Yanukovych government in November 2013, when it became clear that free-trade provisions giving European goods unlimited access to the Russian market through Ukraine would bring retaliatory measures by Ukraine’s biggest trade partner, Russia, to counter this assault on Russia’s own producers, and thus would backfire against the Ukrainian economy. When Yanukovych on November 21 announced postponement of the EU deal, long-laid Banderite plans to turn Ukraine into a tool for isolating and demonizing Russia were activated. Protesters against Yanukovych’s EUAA postponement decision immediately began to assemble in Kiev’s Maidan (central square). Large numbers of ordinary people turned out, waving EU flags, because of the destruction of the Ukrainian economy under “shock” deregulation in the 1990s and the IMF-dictated policies of privatization and austerity throughout the Orange Revolution years. Many had desperately believed, as Ukrainian economist Natalia Vitrenko once put it, that the EUAA would bring them “wages like in Germany and benefits packages like in France.” A disproportionately high number of the demonstrators hailed from far western Ukraine, and pre-planned violence by the Banderite paramilitary group Right Sector was then used for systematic escalation of the Maidan. Bloodshed and victims, all blamed on the regime, were then used to keep Maidan fervor and outrage going through to February 2014.3 Neo-Nazi and other fascist symbols defaced building walls and placards in the Maidan, but they did not deter public U.S. support of this process. Sen. John McCain addressed the mob in December 2013, while Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland passed out cupcakes and negotiated with the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt regarding whom to place in office once Yanukovych was ousted. A Nuland-Pyatt phone discussion of this was caught on tape and circulated worldwide. On February 18, 2014, Maidan leaders announced a “peaceful march” on the Supreme Rada (parliament), which turned into an attack and touched off three days of street fighting. Peaking on February 20—a day of sniper fire from high buildings that killed both demonstrators and police—these clashes killed more than 100. Scrupulous research by Ukraine-born Prof. Ivan Katchanovski at the University of Ottawa, using video recordings and other direct evidence of these events, has convincingly shown that the majority of the sniper fire came from the Maidan’s paramilitary positions, not the government’s Berkut special police forces.4 On February 21, 2014, a trio of Maidan leaders, including Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the man hand-picked by Nuland to be Ukraine’s next prime minister, signed an agreement with President Yanukovych, committing both sides to a peaceful transition of power: constitutional reform by September, presidential elections late in the year, and the turning in of weapons. The foreign ministers of France, Germany and Russia helped negotiate it, with a representative from Moscow as an observer. When this document was taken to the Maidan, a young Banderite militant seized the onstage microphone to lead its rejection by the mob, and threatened Yanukovych’s life if he didn’t step down by morning. Yanukovych left Kiev that night. The Rada unconstitutionally installed an acting president. Among the new government’s first measures was for the Rada to strip Russian and other “minority” languages of their status as regional official languages. (As of the 2001 census, Russian was spoken throughout the country and considered “native” by one-third of the population.) This, with other measures announced from Kiev, fanned major opposition to the coup, centered in eastern Ukraine—the Donetsk and Luhansk regions (the Donbas) and Crimea. Civil conflict erupted in both areas, with local groups seizing government buildings. In Crimea, the insurgency against the coup-installed Kiev regime prevailed. A referendum held March 16, 2014 in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol (a separate jurisdiction on the peninsula), asked voters whether they wanted to join the Russian Federation or retain Crimea’s status as a part of Ukraine. In Crimea, 97% of the 83% of eligible voters who turned out, voted for integration into the Russian Federation; in Sevastopol, the result was likewise 97% for integration, while the turnout was even higher, at 89%. There was no “Russian military invasion of Ukraine.” On March 1 President Putin sought and received authorization from the Federal Assembly (the legislature) to deploy Russian forces on Ukrainian territory, citing threats to the lives of Russian citizens and Russian-ethnic residents of Crimea; these were troops from the Russian Black Sea Fleet facilities in and around Sevastopol, already stationed in Crimea. The fate of two Donbas self-declared republics in Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts (Regions), was not settled so quickly. Support from within Russia for these insurgents was unofficial, including the involvement of Russian military veterans on a volunteer basis. The Donbas conflict turned into heavy fighting in 2014-15, continuing at a lower level until now; more than 13,000 people have been killed in the past seven years. Defeats of Kiev’s forces by the Donbas militia, including their gaining full control of the Donetsk International Airport in January 2015, set the stage for Kiev’s agreement to a ceasefire. After one false start—the so-called Minsk Protocol in September 2014—an interim state of affairs in the Donbas was agreed to in the February 2015 “Minsk II” accord between the regime in Kiev, then under President Peter Poroshenko, and representatives of the self-declared Donbas republics, which was negotiated by Kiev, France, Germany and Russia with support from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). It provided for a ceasefire, pullback of weapons, prisoner exchanges, and humanitarian relief, as well as a political settlement within Ukraine. This envisaged a special status for the Donbas, with extensive regional autonomy including the “right of linguistic self-determination.” Re-establishment of Ukraine’s “full control” over its border with Russia in the Donbas was to occur following provisional granting of the special status and after local elections. The special status was to be enshrined in the Ukrainian Constitution by the end of 2015. The UN Security Council endorsed Minsk II on February 17, 2015. It remains unimplemented, because Kiev almost immediately refused to conduct the elections or fully legalize the special status, until first being given control over the Donbas-Russia border. Today, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government in Kiev refuses even to meet with Donbas leaders for negotiations, and continues to claim that the Donbas is under Russian “occupation,” and therefore Kiev should talk only with Russia, not the Donbas leaders. Sporadic fighting has continued, with a new escalation of shelling across the “line of contact” between the Donbas entities and the rest of Ukraine. A New U.S. War Posture The Trump Administration accelerated the take-down of the entire architecture of international arms-control agreements by withdrawing the U.S. from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, signed by President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachov in 1987, and the Open Skies Treaty, negotiated by NATO and the Warsaw Pact nations in 1992. This left the New START Treaty (Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms, signed by the U.S. and the Russian Federation in 2010) as the last of the existing arms control agreements—the one covering heavy intercontinental missiles. Upon taking office this year, President Joe Biden extended the New START Treaty for five years, a decision welcomed by Moscow. On January 19, 2018, the U.S. Department of Defense released its new National Defense Strategy. “Great power competition—not terrorism—is now the primary focus of U.S. national security,” said the then Secretary of Defense James Mattis in a speech describing the document: We face growing threats from revisionist powers as different as China and Russia, nations that seek to create a world consistent with their authoritarian models—pursuing veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic, and security decisions. Hours later, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said, in response to the release of the new Pentagon strategy: We regret that, instead of conducting a normal dialogue, instead of relying on international law, the United States seeks to prove its leadership through confrontational concepts and strategies. All throughout this time period, Moscow has protested these confrontational actions, but to no avail. “Despite our numerous protests and pleas, the American machine has been set into motion, the conveyer 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 aeroballistic missile, have since been introduced into service. The Economic Component Beginning in March 2014, right after the February 2014 coup in Kiev, the United States imposed financial and economic sanctions on Russia, purportedly over Crimea and the Donbas republics. These sanctions have included five Acts of Congess, six Presidential Executive Orders, ten “Directives pursuant to Executive Orders” and two additional Presidential “Determinations.” This, according to the Treasury Department’s sanctions list. There have of course been other sanctions, property seizures, diplomatic expulsions for other alleged reasons, as well as other forms of economic warfare. All of the Ukraine/Crimea-related sanctions remain in effect; none have been lifted. The last major new round of sanctions was imposed in 2018 (the CAATSA Act), coinciding with new sanctions over the Sergei Skripal poisoning case. According to various estimates, the resultant cost to Russia’s economy of all of these sanctions (in GDP accounting) has been in the range of $250-400 billion, with comparable losses imposed on European economies. In addition, in 2016 and 2017, President Putin accused the Barack Obama Administration of having conspired with Saudi Arabia to lower the price of oil and thereby damage the Russian economy. During the Trump Administration, that appeared not to continue, as Russia and Saudi Arabia made two significant production-pricing agreements on oil, the second in 2019 with Trump Administration participation of some kind. In 2021, the crisis came to a head. 2021 TimelineFebruary 2: The U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings published an article by Adm. Charles A. Richard, Commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, in which he claimed that the risk of nuclear war with Russia or China was increasing and called for action. There is a real possibility that a regional crisis with Russia or China could escalate quickly to a conflict involving nuclear weapons, if they perceived a conventional loss would threaten the regime or state. Consequently, the U.S. military must shift its principal assumption from “nuclear employment is not possible” to “nuclear employment is a very real possibility,” and act to meet and deter that reality. March 15: The U.S. Army-led DEFENDER-Europe 21 exercise began and ran through the month of June, involving 28,000 troops from 27 different countries. The exercise included “nearly simultaneous operations across more than 30 training areas” in a dozen countries, reported Army Times. March 16: The UK Government of Prime Minister Boris Johnson released its Integrated Review of security, defense, development, and foreign policy. The report, among other things, announced that the UK nuclear warhead stockpile would be increased from 180 to 260 warheads. This was decided “in recognition of the evolving security environment, including the developing range of technological and doctrinal threats….” April 1: U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin called Ukrainian Defense Minister Andriy Taran “to discuss the regional security situation,” the Pentagon reported, condemning the supposed “escalations of Russian aggressive and provocative actions in eastern Ukraine.” Austin assured Taran: Washington will not give up on Ukraine in case Russia escalates aggression. [And] in the event of an escalation of Russian aggression, the United States will not leave Ukraine to its own devices, and neither will it allow Russia’s aggressive aspirations toward Ukraine to be realized. April 13: Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu visited Northern Fleet headquarters in Severomorsk, where he said that the United States and its NATO allies were building up naval and land forces in the Arctic, increasing the intensity of combat training, and expanding and modernizing military infrastructure. This activity is typical not only for the Arctic region. Over the past three years, the North Atlantic bloc has increased its military activity near the Russian borders. Shoigu then commented on the DEFENDER-Europe 21 exercise: Now American troops are being transferred from the continental part of North America across the Atlantic to Europe. There is a movement of troops in Europe to the Russian borders. The main forces are concentrated in the Black Sea region and the Baltic region…. In total, 40,000 military personnel and 15,000 units of weapons and military equipment, including strategic aviation, will be concentrated near our territory…. In response to the Alliance’s military activities threatening Russia, we have taken appropriate measures. Within three weeks, two Russian armies and three formations of the airborne troops were successfully transferred to the western borders of the Russian Federation performing combat training tasks. The troops have shown full readiness and ability to perform tasks to ensure the military security of the country. April 15: The Biden White House issued an Executive Order (EO 14024) proclaiming that Russia’s various so-called malign actions “constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.” That EO contained a series of new sanctions against Russia, including expelling ten diplomats, blacklisting six Russian technology companies, sanctioning 32 entities and individuals, and—most importantly—prohibiting U.S. financial institutions from participating in the primary market for ruble or non-ruble denominated bonds issued after June 14, 2021, by the Russian government and its financial institutions. The explicitly stated purpose of the measures was to trigger voluminous capital flight and a “negative feedback loop” that would wreak havoc on the Russian economy. A background briefing by an unnamed senior administration official elaborated: There are elements of this new EO that give us additional authorities that we are not exercising today … We are prepared, going forward, to impose substantial and lasting costs if this [Russian] behavior continues or escalates … We’re also delivering a clear signal that the President has maximum flexibility to expand the sovereign debt prohibitions if Russia’s maligned [sic] activities continue or escalate. The latter was widely understood as a threat that further sanctions could follow barring participation in the far more important secondary bond market, and even escalate to the so-called “nuclear option” of expelling Russia from SWIFT.5 June 14: The EO announced on April 15, 2021 officially went into effect—two days before the June 16, 2021 summit between presidents Biden and Putin. June 23: The Russian Defense Ministry announced that a Russian warship fired warning shots at the Royal Navy destroyer HMS Defender, which it said had violated Russia’s maritime border around Crimea in the Black Sea. HMS Defender had entered waters in the vicinity of Crimea’s Cape Fiolent that are within Russian sovereign territory, and it had ignored warnings to depart the area. Not mentioned in the press coverage but visible on flight tracking websites was an U.S. Air Force RC-135V electronic intelligence aircraft, which was rounding the west coast of Crimea at the time of the Russian naval encounter with the Defender. The BBC, which had one of its own reporters on board the British warship, confirmed that the HMS Defender deliberately entered waters claimed by Russia in order to provoke a response from Russian forces: This would be a deliberate move to make a point to Russia. HMS Defender was going to sail within the 19 km (12 mile) limit of Crimea’s territorial waters. June 23: Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu again warned of the strategic danger facing Europe in an address to the Moscow Conference on International Security: As a whole, the situation in Europe is explosive and requires specific steps to de-escalate it. The Russian side has proposed a number of measures. For example, it put forward a proposal to move the areas of drills away from the contact line. Shoigu also pointed to Russia’s proposal for a moratorium on the deployment of intermediate- and shorter-range missiles in Europe, calling them “a special danger” for Europe because their deployment in Europe “will return to the situation, when the Europeans were hostage to the confrontation between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A.” Speaking at the same conference, Gen. Valeriy Gerasimov, the chief of the Russian General Staff, pointed to NATO as a destabilizing factor: NATO’s naval activity near our borders has grown considerably. Warships outfitted with long-range precision weapons are operating in the Black and Baltic Seas constantly, while reconnaissance, patrol and attack aircraft and also unmanned aerial vehicles are performing their flights. The operations by the warships of the United States and its allies are clearly of a provocative nature…. Preconditions are being created for the emergence of incidents, which does not contribute to reducing military tensions. September 20: NATO kicked off Exercise Rapid Trident 21 at the Yavoriv training range in western Ukraine, with 6,000 troops from 15 countries, including 300 from the U.S. The drills are “an important step towards Ukraine’s European integration,” said Brigadier General Vladyslav Klochkov, co-director of the exercises. October 6: NATO ordered the expulsion of eight diplomats from the Russian mission at NATO headquarters in Brussels, alleging that they were “undeclared Russian intelligence officers.” Moscow retaliated Oct 18 by announcing that Russia’s mission to NATO would shut down and the NATO information office in Moscow would be closed and its staff stripped of their accreditation. “If anyone ever believed in the sincerity of those statements [from NATO], there are none left today. Their true price is clear for everyone,” said Russian Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Alexander Grushko, in response to the NATO action. October 19: U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin landed in Kiev and, speaking at a press conference at the Defense Ministry, promised the regime’s leaders that the U.S. will back it in its conflict with Russia: Let me underscore what President Biden said during President Zelensky’s recent visit to Washington. U.S. support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity is unwavering. So, we again call on Russia to end its occupation of Crimea … to stop perpetuating the war in eastern Ukraine … to end its destabilizing activities in the Black Sea and along Ukraine’s borders … and to halt its persistent cyber-attacks and other malign activities against the United States, and our Allies and partners. He noted that the U.S. has spent $2.5 billion in support of Ukraine’s military forces “so that they can preserve their country’s territorial integrity and secure its borders and territorial waters.” “I think our posture in the region continues to present a credible threat against Russia and it enables NATO forces to operate more effectively should deterrence fail,” Austin said the following day in Romania. “And I think this is borne out of our commitment to sustaining a rotational U.S. force presence.” October 21: The NATO defense ministers, on the first day of their meeting in Brussels, endorsed “a new overarching plan to defend our Alliance.…” The new plan includes: “significant improvements to our air and missile defenses, strengthening our conventional capabilities with fifth generation jets, adapting our exercises and intelligence, and improving the readiness and effectiveness of our nuclear deterrent.” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that the alliance has been increasing its presence on the Black Sea, “because the Black Sea is of strategic importance for NATO.” October 21: Putin warned in a speech to the Valdai Discussion Club in Sochi that Ukraine doesn’t even have to be formally brought into the NATO alliance to pose a strategic threat to Russia: Formal membership in NATO ultimately may not happen, but the military development of the territory is already underway. And this really poses a threat to the Russian Federation … Tomorrow, rockets could appear near Kharkov, what are we going to do about it? It’s not us placing our missiles there, it’s them shoving theirs under our nose. Putin cited NATO’s promise not to move its infrastructure eastwards after the reunification of Germany, a promise which it did not keep: Everyone from all sides said that after the unification, in no circumstances would NATO infrastructure move toward the East. Russia should have been able to at least rely on that. That’s what they said, there were public statements. But in practice? They lied … and then they expanded it once, and then they expanded it again. October 30:The Washington Post, citing unnamed officials, reported that the Russians were engaged in another buildup of troops along the border with Ukraine. The article’s authors said the troop movements have reignited concerns that arose in April. “The point is: It is not a drill. It doesn’t appear to be a training exercise. Something is happening. What is it?” said Michael Kofman, Program Director of the Russia Studies Program at the Virginia-based nonprofit analysis group CNA. November 1:Politico published satellite imagery purporting to show a Russian troop buildup near the Ukrainian border, including armored units, tanks, and self-propelled artillery, along with ground troops massing near the Russian town of Yelnya close to the border with Belarus. Elements of the 1st Guards Tank Army were spotted in the area. The army “has been designed to conduct operations at every level of combat from counterinsurgency to mechanized warfare,” Jane’s analysis reported. Even the Ukrainian Defense Ministry denied the reported Russian military buildup, stating officially: “As of November 1, 2021, an additional transfer of Russian units, weapons and military equipment to the state border of Ukraine was not recorded.” November 2: The Russian Security Council announced that CIA Director William Burns was in Moscow for two days of talks with Nikolai Patrushev, Secretary of the Security Council. According to leaks reported by CNN on November Nov. 5, Biden sent Burns to Moscow to tell the Russians to stop their troop buildup near Ukraine’s border, which the U.S. was monitoring closely. November 8: For the first time, a Resolution passed by both Houses of Congress voiced the demand for “crushing sanctions” on Russia’s economy, purportedly to stop the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, because, in the words of Sen. James Risch, “Russia is creating and weaponizing this energy crisis.” Sen. Ron Johnson said the U.S should “use crushing sanctions to stop the pipeline.” Sen. Tom Cotton added: “The Nord Stream 2 pipeline will expand Russian influence and threaten energy security throughout Europe. Since the Biden administration won’t hold Putin accountable, Congress must take action to ensure our NATO allies aren’t hostage to Russian energy.” November 11: Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov warned that Russia is prepared to act against any NATO provocations: If necessary, we will take measures to ensure our security if there are provocative actions by our opponents near our borders. I’m referring to NATO and NATO forces that are taking rather active and assertive actions in close proximity to our borders, be it in the air, on water, or on land. November 16: British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace met in Kiev with Ukrainian President Zelensky, and signed a joint statement with Ukraine Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov. Zelensky “thanked Ben Wallace for the unwavering support of the UK for the independence and territorial integrity of our country within its internationally recognized borders,” according to a statement issued by his office. Zelensky “also praised the signing of the Ukrainian-British Bilateral Framework Agreement on official credit support for the development of the Ukrainian fleet’s capabilities: The United Kingdom has become our key partner in building the Ukrainian fleet. I expect that future security projects planned under this agreement will be effectively implemented. November 18: During an address to a meeting of the Russian Foreign Policy Board, President Putin protested the repeated flights of U.S. bombers close to Russia’s borders: Indeed, we constantly express our concerns about these matters and talk about red lines, but of course, we understand that our partners are peculiar in the sense that they have a very—how to put it mildly—superficial approach to our warnings about red lines. Putin repeated that Russian concerns about NATO’s eastward expansion “have been totally ignored.” November 19: U.S. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines landed in Brussels to brief NATO ambassadors on U.S. intelligence on the situation and the possibility of a Russian military intervention in Ukraine. NATO’s Stoltenberg suggested that if the new German government (which was still the subject of coalition negotiations) were to pull out of the NATO nuclear sharing arrangement, the B61 nuclear bombs currently stored in Germany could be moved eastwards: Of course, it’s up to Germany to decide whether the nuclear arms will be deployed in this country, but there’s an alternative to this; the nuclear arms may easily end up in other European countries, including these to the east of Germany. That is, even closer to Russia’s border. November 20: Ukrainian military intelligence chief Brig. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov told Military Times, on the sidelines of the Halifax International Security Conference, that Russia has more than 92,000 troops massed near Russia’s border with Ukraine and is preparing for an attack by the end of January or beginning of February 2022. November 21: Bloomberg published a report citing unnamed sources saying that the U.S. had shared intelligence including maps with European allies that shows a buildup of 100,000 Russian troops and artillery to prepare for a rapid, large-scale push into Ukraine from multiple locations, should Putin decide to invade. November 30: Radio Free Europe reported that U.S. Republicans had blocked voting on the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) until Nord Stream 2 sanctions were added to it, objecting that the Russia-to-Germany Baltic Sea pipeline will deny billions in annual revenue to “ally” Ukraine. (The overland pipeline from Yamal in Siberia to Europe traverses Ukraine, which collects transit fees.) December 5: Neo-con Democrat Michèle Flournoy, former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy under President Barack Obama, appeared on “Fox News Sunday” and declared that President Biden, in his upcoming December 7 video-conference summit with Putin, was going to threaten “much more severe” financial/economic sanctions on Russia than anything previously done: [What] the administration is actively considering with our allies, is an escalating set of sanctions that go beyond what’s been done before. I’m sure they are looking at sanctioning the banking system, sanctioning the energy sector, possibly cutting off Russia from the SWIFT system,@5 which enables all of their international financial transactions. So, they’re looking at much more serious means … much greater level of pain than anything [that Russia has faced to date]. December 6: The day before the Biden-Putin video conference, an anonymous senior White House official briefed the press that all NATO allies had agreed on a package of “financial sanctions that would impose significant and severe economic harm on the Russian economy” should Russia invade Ukraine: We believe that there is a way forward here that will allow us to send a clear message to Russia there will be genuine and meaningful and enduring costs to choosing to go forward—should they choose to go forward—with a military escalation…. We have had intensive discussions with our European partners about what we would do collectively in the event of a major Russian military escalation in Ukraine, and we believe that we have a path forward that would involve substantial economic countermeasures by both the Europeans and the United States, We have put together a pretty damn aggressive package. In its coverage, CNN raised the “nuclear option” directly: Officials have also been weighing disconnecting Russia from the SWIFT international payment system, upon which Russia remains heavily reliant, according to two sources familiar with the discussions. This is being considered a “nuclear” option. The European Parliament passed a nonbinding resolution in the spring calling for such a move should Russia invade Ukraine, and the U.S. has been discussing it with EU counterparts. Later the same day, after Biden had personally spoken with European leaders, the White House issued a statement which did not mention financial sanctions or significant economic damage to Russia. It said, “diplomacy is the only way forward to resolve the conflict in Donbas through the implementation of the Minsk Agreements.” December 7: Presidents Biden and Putin held a video conference summit, after which National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan assured the media that Biden— told President Putin directly that if Russia further invades Ukraine, the United States and our European allies would respond with strong economic measures, and would provide additional defensive material to the Ukrainians, above and beyond that which we are already providing, [and that the United States] would fortify our NATO allies on the eastern flank, with additional capabilities in response to such an escalation. Biden himself emphasized later that he was considering Putin’s demand for security guarantees, which later resulted in Russia’s proposals (see below). December 12: The new German Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock, declared on a national television interview that the Nord Stream 2 pipeline could not become operational because, according to the German government coalition agreements, the pipeline was not consistent with European energy law. The previous government of Chancellor Angela Merkel had found the opposite. Baerbock, a war-hawk Green Party leader, did not explain the reversal. The Hill pointed out that the Greens want Ukraine in NATO. December 17: The Russian Foreign Ministry released two draft treaties specifying guarantees for Russia’s security, one, an agreement between Russia and NATO, and the other, a treaty between Russia and the United States. Both documents call for recognizing a principle of “non-interference in the internal affairs” of each other, acknowledge that a “direct military clash between them could result in the use of nuclear weapons that would have far-reaching consequences,” reaffirm “that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” and recognize “the need to make every effort to prevent the risk of outbreak of such war among States that possess nuclear weapons.” The operative part of the U.S.-Russia treaty calls for refraining from taking actions “that could undermine core security interests of the other Party.” Cognizant of the drive for NATO-ization of Ukraine, Article 4 states: The United States of America shall undertake to prevent further eastward expansion of NATO and deny accession to the Alliance to the States of the former U.S.S.R. And, The United States of America shall not establish military bases in the territory of the States of the former U.S.S.R. that are not members of NATO, use their infrastructure for any military activities or develop bilateral military cooperation with them. It goes on to state that the Parties (the U.S. and Russia) will not take military actions outside their own borders that threaten each other’s national security, or fly bombers or sail warships outside of their territorial waters in ways that would threaten each other. On the U.S.’ expansion of its nuclear weapons to include those stored in such locations of Germany, the treaty states, The Parties shall refrain from deploying nuclear weapons outside their national territories and return such weapons already deployed … to their national territories. December 19: An anonymous senior White House official told CNN and other media that there was “only about a four-week window” to compel Russia to de-escalate and that U.S.-planned sanctions “would be overwhelming, immediate, and inflict significant costs on the Russian economy and their financial system.” December 21: In an extensive report delivered to an expanded meeting of the Defense Ministry Board, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu stated: Tensions are growing on the western and eastern borders of Russia. The United States is intensifying its military presence at Russian borders. The United States and NATO are purposefully increasing the scale and intensity of military training activities near Russia. Increasingly, they involve strategic aviation, carrying out simulated launches of nuclear missiles at our facilities. The number of their flights near the Russian borders has more than doubled. NATO pays special attention to the issues of the transfer of troops to the eastern flank of the alliance, including from the continental part of the United States. The exercises are practicing various options for using coalition groups against Russia with the use of non-aligned states—Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. The presence of more than 120 employees of American PMCs [private military companies] in Avdeevka and Priazovskoe settlements in Donetsk region has been reliably established. They equip firing positions in residential buildings and at socially significant facilities, prepare Ukrainian special operations forces and radical armed groups for active hostilities. To commit provocations, tanks with unidentified chemical components were delivered to Avdeevka and Krasny Liman cities. Speaking at that same meeting of the Defense Ministry Board, Russian President Putin himself sounded the alarm: What they [the United States] 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…. 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? 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.

Dec. 26—The world is faced right now with an overwhelming multitude of crises: the pandemic, which is very far from being under control, and has resulted so far in around 800,000 deaths in the U.S. and more than 5 million worldwide; an escalating tendency towards hyperinflation; collapsing infrastructure in the U.S. and European nations; world famine of “biblical dimensions”; a mass-migration crisis affecting more than 70 million people; the list could go on. But probably for the first time in U.S. history, the possibility of a new world war is dawning on people, and that this time it would not just be overseas. If it happens, it for sure will come to the United States. The combination of all of these dangers seems almost too much to bear—unless we realize that none of them are natural catastrophes, but are the result of wrong policies. And that means they can be corrected, provided the political will can be mobilized to do so. The overarching problem is that much of the trans-Atlantic world is dominated by a financial oligarchy that has worked diligently since the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, but especially since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and its coverup, to eradicate, step by step, the principles of economy associated with the tradition of the American System of Alexander Hamilton and replace it with the British System of monetarist policies of profit maximization. When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, these forces—situated primarily in the City of London and Wall Street and more recently also in Silicon Valley—took the demise of Soviet communism as the pretext to create a unipolar world, built upon the much heralded British-American special relationship. This was not stated openly in the tumultuous period spanning the fall of the Berlin Wall, the subsequent German Unification, and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, but behind the scenes the neocons in the U.S. and their London counterparts were already working on what was to become known as the “Wolfowitz doctrine,” i.e., the idea that no country would ever be allowed to bypass the U.S. in terms of economic, military, or political power. Publicly, promises were given to Gorbachev by Secretary of State James Baker III, that NATO would not move “one inch eastward,” if Russia were to allow the peaceful unification of Germany. But that was a deliberate deception from the very beginning. With the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent dissolution of the Iron Curtain. there was an historic chance for a great change. Such chances only emerge at best once in a century. With the borders between Eastern and Western Europe now open, Lyndon LaRouche and his movement proposed the economic program of the “Eurasian Land Bridge,” the idea to integrate the industrial and population centers of Europe with those of Asia through infrastructure development corridors. Such a policy would have created the basis for a peace order for the 21st Century. While there was great support for this visionary policy among many industrialists and peace-loving forces in many countries, the Neo-cons in the U.S. and their British partners had no intention of allowing it. Instead, the CIA published a report in 1991 expressing concern that the nations of the former Soviet Union had a greater number of highly educated scientists and more raw materials than the United States. Therefore, the expansion and upgrading of industrial development could not be encouraged. With the help of the utterly corrupt Boris Yeltsin, Jeffrey Sachs imposed “Shock Therapy” on Russia from 1991 to 1994 and reduced Russia’s industrial capacity to only 30% of its previous level. And the massive population reduction of about one million Russians per year was the result. Organized in institutions such as the Project for a New American Century, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Atlantic Council, and the London-based Henry Jackson Society, these forces had no intention of sticking to the promises made to Gorbachov. They used the occasion of the disappearance of the communist adversary to instead further the transformation of the United States from the Republic that it was created to be by America’s Founding Fathers, into a trans-Atlantic Empire modelled on that very British Empire against which the American Revolution had been fought. With that new orientation came a whole set of policies: further deregulation of the financial markets, including the eventual abolition of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999; and the systematic abandonment of the UN Charter and its guarantee of each state’s national sovereignty, replacing that guarantee with a “rules based order,” in which the rules are made by a few. The introduction of “humanitarian interventionist wars” and the Right To Protect (R2P) policy, led to the “endless wars” in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and other nations. A systematic policy of “Regime Change” and “Color Revolution” against all countries which refused to submit to the concept of the unipolar world was run by this Anglo-American cabal. And, since Russia had been effectively deindustrialized with that “shock therapy,” these Neo-cons thought they could dismiss Russia as a strategic player. They proceed to insulted Russia, to boast that Russia would now be no more than a “regional power,” as Obama proclaimed. Meanwhile NATO moved step by step eastward, not only an inch, but by adding fourteen members, including the seven nations of the former Warsaw Pact and the three Baltic states, and in this way moved closer to the border of Russia with modern weapon systems that reduce the time to reach Moscow to a few minutes. At the same time, the U.S. pulled out of one arms control treaty and other treaties, one after the other: The ABM Treaty in 2002, the INF Treaty in 2019, the JCPOA in 2018, and the Open Skies Treaty in 2020. At the same time, the trans-Atlantic oligarchical establishment arrogantly felt so increasingly self-assured that it decided that it had become safe to maintain its power with a turn to more openly Malthusian green policies, given that the “adversary” had disappeared. And that therefore it was no longer so necessary to maintain state-of-the-art industrial and scientific technology. So, the shift to a more openly and unabashed neocolonial “Transformation of the World Economy” out of fossil fuels and related technologies was promoted. The well-greased propaganda machine of the trans-Atlantic media, under the spell of NATO, escalated the scare about anthropogenic climate change, ignoring the views of thousands of scientists who had challenged the arbitrary models based on tailor-made algorithms about CO2 emissions causing the “planet to boil over,” as Obama famously put it to an audience of African students assembled in South Africa. When these monetarist policies erupted in the systemic crisis of 2008, rather than addressing the root causes of the problem, the money printing machines of QE (quantitative easing) and the zero-to-negative interest rate policy were set into motion, to keep the casino economy of speculation and profit maximization going. Ever more apocalyptic scenarios were put into circulation by the Princes of the British Royal Family and their kindergarten troops of the Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future, increasingly prophesying that the world would end in twelve years unless people stopped eating and driving cars. The more the untenability of the financial system became clear to insiders, the more the determination of the financial oligarchy grew, to transfer their activities into one last gigantic bubble. “Shifting the Trillions” became the new slogan, which was to signify the “decarbonization” of the world economy, whereby investments would, from now on, be directed only to renewable energy and related industries. Meanwhile Prince Charles upped the ante by declaring from mid-2019 onward, that the world had only 18 months left to reach the royally defined climate goals, or otherwise the world would end. What Charles had in mind, however, had little to do with the behavior of the climate of the Earth, which has stubbornly followed its cycles for millions of years, oscillating from warming periods to ice ages and back, depending on processes in the Sun and the changing position of the solar system in the Milky Way galaxy. Prince Charles’ proclamation had very much to do instead with the series of major climate conferences—from the April 22-23 U.S. Leaders’ Climate Summit, to the United Nation’s COP15 Biodiversity Conference in October in China, and culminating in the COP 26 Climate Conference in Glasgow. It was stated in various ways that, by the time of this last of the series of conferences, which would take place in the UK and would be pretty much under the control of the British Royal Family, the climate regime had to be imposed on the entire world, to make the “Shifting the Trillions” maneuver work. So with big fanfare, the two-week extravaganza took place in Glasgow with, according to the BBC head-count, 120 heads of state participating and many top executives arriving in their heavily CO2-emitting yachts and private jets. But COP26 turned into Flop26. First, the leaders of Russia and China did not come, and according to the statements coming from both countries it became very clear, that they were not willing to submit to a global neo-Malthusian scheme, that essentially would condemn the developing sector to giving up any hope of ever overcoming underdevelopment by forcing them to submit to the abandonment of fossil fuels and sign on to something that would effectively be a global eco-dictatorship. The leaders of several developing nations, including Indonesia, India, and Nigeria, made it very clear that they would not give up their right to development by giving up investments in fossil fuel related energy plants and industries, and that furthermore, they completely rejected the arrogant Eurocentric way of thinking of the British elites and their underlings' efforts to dominate them in a neocolonial manner. With the failure of Flop26, the efforts of the U.S. and UK to assert a neo-Malthusian dictate over the world and the attempt to impose this last mega-bubble, the “Great Reset,” to prolong the life-expectancy of the failing financial system, had fallen through. Not much better was the effort by President Biden to rally the designated democratic countries against the so-called “autocratic” regimes, and to get those “allies” to swear allegiance to the “rules-based order.” Several countries abstained from attendance, refusing the demand to essentially choose between the U.S. and China. In the uninvited “autocratic” states on the other side, the self confidence about their own policy successes, for example in respect to economic growth rates or the success in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, was expressed openly. The narrative about the “good” democracies and the “bad” autocratic states had, in the meantime, fallen into a gigantic, almost irreconcilable credibility hole. Not only had the most powerful military machine in the world, the U.S. plus NATO, lost the war in Afghanistan after 20 years of war against essentially 65,000 Taliban fighters, but the circumstances of the hurried withdrawal revealed many other unpleasant realities. Except for maybe a couple of schools and roads, nothing had been built in these 20 years and the whole country was in absolute shambles. In the weeks and months since, it has become obvious that more than 90% of the population had been left food insecure, a euphemism for starvation, and left without medical care. As the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, stated clearly in his address to the Emergency Meeting of the OIC (Organization of Islamic Cooperation) Council of Foreign Ministers in Islamabad in December, when the NATO and U.S. troops left in August, everybody knew that 75% of the Afghan budget had come from international aid. When the donors cut that aid following the Taliban takeover, and then the $9.5 billion in foreign reserve assets belonging to the Afghan people was withheld by the U.S. Treasury and some billions more by European banks, the economy was shut down practically at once. As a result, 24 million of the about 40 million people now living in Afghanistan are in acute danger of starvation this winter, dying of disease without medical care, or freezing to death in the very harsh winter weather of Afghanistan. And this is not the fault of the Taliban, but of the continuation of a war, which could not be won militarily, by other means—the means of financial warfare. If these are the “rules” of the rules-based order, “democracy” has become a bad word. And what had been suspected by many observers is now confirmed by the remarks of Secretary of State Blinken: The purpose of the U.S./NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan was not just to end one of the endless wars, it was to free up forces bogged down in an unwinnable war for redeployment in the Indo-Pacific, and around the crisis with Russia over Ukraine. So essentially the “Western democracies” have suffered three distinct and different defeats during the last four months: first, the defeat in Afghanistan, where NATO did not exactly cover itself with glory; second, the disaster of the Flop26; and finally, the “democracy summit,” where everybody but the most ideologically blind proponents of the official narrative is now convinced that the emperor has no clothes. It is essentially due to the combination of these three defeats on top of a worldwide backlash against the arrogant idea of the U.S. historian Francis Fukuyama about the “end of history,” which he declared with the demise of the Soviet Union. The forces of the unipolar world, announced by Fukuyama, are pushing confrontation with Russia over Ukraine. In a twisted form of a mirror-like inversion, the U.S. and the UK are accusing Russia of preparing a military attack against Ukraine, when it is, in fact, NATO, the U.S., and the UK instigating Ukraine to create security situations that are unacceptable to Russia, and which represent the {de facto} crossing of red lines. In a reaction to what was clearly building up to a military conflict between Ukraine and Russia, with the obvious potential of escalating into a larger war, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on December 17, presented two proposed treaties to the U.S. and NATO, one of which, the “Agreement on Measures to Ensure the Security of the Russian Federation and Member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization,” would require that NATO members commit to no further enlargements of the alliance, including especially to Ukraine. As President Putin and other Russian officials put it, these treaties would retrospectively put in a legally binding form that which was promised to Russia in 1990 in the first place, and which, given the geographical location of Ukraine and its security implications for Russia, is a perfectly legitimate demand. Putin cautioned, however, that even the signing of such treaties would not be a 100% guarantee, given the record of the U.S. pulling out of legally binding treaties. If NATO and the U.S. reject the signing of such treaties, the world will in all likelihood be in for a reverse Cuban missile crisis or something worse. Russia will be forced to respond now as America would, if Russia were to install offensive weapons systems at the Canadian and Mexican borders. There are remedies, but they require a dramatic change, of course. The U.S. and NATO should sign these two treaties, since they are consistent with what was promised to Russia in 1990 and with what is the necessary precondition for a stable security architecture in the world. All nations must cooperate to build modern health systems in every single country on the planet. It should have become obvious to everybody that the pandemic can not be defeated by only providing health care to the rich countries. The incredible suffering of the Afghan people, who have lived under conditions of war for 40 years, must be stopped with “Operation Ibn Sina.” A modern health care system must be built, and the economy must be built up by integrating Afghanistan into the regional projects of the BRI. The U.S. must return to the principles of the American System of economy of Alexander Hamilton and adopt the Four Laws proposed by Lyndon LaRouche. The combination of these policies can bring the world quickly out of the mortal danger we find ourselves in, but they require that you, the American citizen, become active to save the country and save the world!

The torchlight march of neo-Nazi militia through Kiev on New Years Day exemplifies why Russian President Putin is demanding written, legally-binding security guarantees from the U.S. and NATO. These forces, which were at the heart of the February 2014 regime change coup, and proudly trace their lineage to Nazi SS collaborator Stepan Bandera, are calling for the liberation of Crimea from Russia, and crushing the movement for autonomy in eastern Ukraine. They represent a threat not only against Russia, but against Ukraine and NATO, as they are engaging in provocations against Russia. As JFK declared in his October 1962 speech announcing a blockade of Cuba against Russian ships, no country can tolerate "in an area well-known to have a special and historic relationship to the United States...a deliberately provocative and unjustified change in the status quo..." The provocations against Russia, using Ukraine as a tool, is what Putin is reacting to today.

The New Year has the potential to start with a significant shift in the direction of sanity, with the series of meetings next week—held with the U.S., NATO, and the OSCE—to directly discuss with Russia its emphatically stated security concerns. Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche has called on the U.S. and NATO to sign the agreements put forward by Russia, to completely change the world strategic trajectory, which otherwise inexorably leads to what would invariably become nuclear war of global dimensions.Why is the world on such a deadly path, and why are there not enormous protests in cities all across the trans-Atlantic to oppose this deadly course? The Anglo-American financial-military-information oligarchy has no intent of allowing its system of domination to be overthrown by the meteoric economic (and increasingly political) rise of China and the committedly independent sovereignty of Russia. Its anti-growth destructive paradigm demands sacrificing civilization, now on the altar of purported green gods to avert a rumored cataclysm in the future. With the refusal of such nations as India, Russia, China, and Nigeria to “follow the séance” by entering suicidal agreements during the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, more direct, and brutal means are being called to the fore. The sensible course of affairs would be to dissolve NATO, whose raison d’être vanished several decades ago, or at least to limit and undo its Eastern expansion. Consider Finland, which borders both Russia and NATO-member Norway, and whose President Sauli Niinistö had helpfully offered last spring to host a 2025 conference in Helsinki on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Conference of Security and Cooperation in Europe, as a forum for talking through strategic tensions. Niinistö, in comments echoed by that country’s prime minister, has announced that Finland would not rule out joining NATO. This Anglo-American oligarchy, intent on maintaining a rules-based-order in which it makes the rules, is cynically indifferent to the human suffering it causes, whether through war, medical neglect, or the brutal, genocidal treatment of Afghanistan, which is being denied access to its own resources. But this oligarchical model, so powerfully critiqued in dramatic form by Verdi in his opera Rigoletto, can be overcome! As the locus of economic power in the world moves to Asia, the trans-Atlantic world must develop a new role. As Lyndon LaRouche expressed the need for a new type of cooperation already in 2007, the "medieval legacy of predatory power of usury has gained such power that it can not be defeated except through a concert of clearly defined, mutual self-interest among a combination of powerful nation-states. “That is the common interest which we in the U.S.A. and China, share at this juncture. That is the crucial importance of those within the U.S.A. who typify that common interest of the people of the U.S.A. and Asia. It is our awareness of this common interest, which is therefore a crucial factor in world history at this juncture.” Flashes of opportunity for such cooperation can burst forth, powering a mighty engine of growth. How will you catalyze that change? Will we make 2022, the centennial of Lyndon LaRouche’s birth, the “Year of LaRouche”?

Lyndon LaRouche delivered remarks in November 2007 to a Los Angeles conference sponsored by the Institute of Sino Strategic Studies. These remarks were presented by Mr. LaRouche, and translated into Chinese, for a conference titled, “Forum on the U.S.-China Relationship and the Peaceful Reunification of China.” In the excerpt that follows, LaRouche concludes that developing an awareness of the common interest of the people of the U.S. and Asia is “a crucial factor in world history at this juncture.” Emphasis is in the original. Fortunately, monetary-financial systems can be replaced. In the long term, it is the choice of the ruling form of social system on which the design of the physical economy is based, which is essential. When we take into account the knowledge which we have available to us today, the following rule applies: whenever a powerful combination of national governments can arrive at a suitable agreement to change a failed financial-monetary system, a solution for any modern financial crisis can be found.Therefore, my leading point in this report today, is that: Specifically, were the government of the U.S.A. to propose cooperation on a suitable reform, to an initial sponsoring group made up of the governments of the U.S.A., Russia, China, and India, it would be possible to bring the present international crisis under control, and, therefore, to rally a majority of the world’s nations to join in measures which would stabilize the world system, and provide the foundation for a general economic recovery. The last general recovery of the economy of the U.S.A. and western and central Europe, was initiated within the United States under President Franklin Roosevelt. The death of President Roosevelt was a great loss to humanity; but, despite his death, although the policy-changes made under his successor were, generally, a big mistake, the U.S. economy continued to prosper under the continued benefit of the then deceased President Roosevelt’s policies until the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963 (despite the bad policies introduced under President Truman). The effects of the 1964 U.S. entry into the long war in Indo-China, like the more recent, very foolish wars which were launched by the Tony Blair and George W. Bush governments of the United Kingdom and the U.S.A., have led, successively, into the wrecking of the international monetary system in August 1971, and a general physical-economic decline in the economies of Europe and the Americas. This decline over, approximately, the 1968-2007 interval, has led into the consistently worsening physical-economic situation in those nations up to the present time. The decline in those economies of Europe and the Americas, has had many contributing causes, but it was chiefly the result of the introduction, beginning 1971-1972, of a presently continuing, ruinous, pro-Malthusian type of global floating-exchange-rate monetary system. Despite some important trends for improvements in some leading national economies in Asia, the per-capita level of net physical-economic strength in the world as a whole has collapsed. Thus, despite the improvements for a significant portion of the total economy in some leading nations of Asia, the deficit in development for the largest fraction of the populations is critical, at the same time that the productive powers of labor in western and central Europe, and in North America, continue to collapse catastrophically. Therefore, the needed development in even progressive economies in Asia, requires a mobilization of the physical capital and technology needed to raise the level of basic economic infrastructure and physical productivity throughout Asia and Africa, and also in the dangerously decadent, present form of the national economies of western and central Europe and of the Americas. The most crucial among the urgently required actions to be taken jointly a group of nations led by the U.S.A., Russia, China, and India, are the following. The present world monetary-financial system must be placed in a prevalent, juridical status of reorganization in bankruptcy. This means that: As provided by the U.S.A.’s Federal Constitution, all central banking systems heretofore independent of sovereign governments, are placed under the sovereign powers of the relevant constitutional government. This means that: The government, through an institution equivalent in authority to the constitutional design for a Federal Treasury Department elaborated by U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, will assure that: under rules for reorganization in bankruptcy, those payments authorized either specifically or categorically by the Federal authority will be treated in a normal fashion, as prior to placing the old monetary-financial system into receivership, but subject to supervision in the matter of regulating the retirement of outstanding capital-financial obligations. The included objective of these reforms of a system in bankruptcy, is to maintain, and to elevate the level of existing essential levels of employment, payment of ordinary pensions, and so forth, and production of essential goods and services, this with a view to accelerating rates of growth of net physical output, per-capita, and per-square-kilometer productivity of the economy. The physical-economic recovery and net growth of these economies, per capita and per square kilometer of total territory, requires an emphasis on the application of physical improvements in basic economic infrastructure, and the use of capital-intensive investments in basic economic infrastructure as the physical-economic driver for the other forms of production in the economy. The success of such intentions by governments, and others, demands a fixed-exchange-rate system not much unlike the design for the Bretton Woods fixed-exchange-rate system under President Franklin Roosevelt. In other words, the needed reforms must be premised on the equivalent of a pervasive science-driver policy for the economies and territories as a whole. The possibility of success for such required programs, depends to a very large degree on two global considerations, considerations which bear on each part of the world, and the world’s necessary development viewed as a whole. The first, is development and refinement of raw materials supplies. The second, is science as defined in terms of fundamental, universal physical principles. The two are functionally inseparable: there can not be sustained development of needed raw materials supplies without emphasis on fundamental physical-scientific progress measurable in terms of characteristic energy-flux density of modes of production. The realization of those crucial objectives demands a clearly defined shift from what has been, hitherto, the strategic advantage of maritime powers over the quality of power of continental interiors. For most of a period reaching as far back into the times prior to the last glaciation in the northern regions of the northern hemisphere, ocean-going and related development of maritime power has been economically and strategically at a great advantage over the economies of inland habitations. This began to be changed with the so-called “geopolitical” implications of the appearance of the transcontinental railways of the U.S.A. Since that time, the related clash of maritime powers, such as those of the British Empire, with the nations and peoples of continental Eurasia and the U.S.A. had been dominated, strategically, by the challenge to this domination, which had been represented by the victory of President Abraham Lincoln’s U.S.A. That victory had been the root of the reaction against the U.S. success, a reaction reflected as Prince of Wales Edward Albert’s launching of the 1895-1945 war of Japan against China, and by those related imperialist wars of the 1905-1945 interval, which illustrate the challenge which continues in either similar or relevant other expressions still today…. The medieval legacy of predatory power of usury has gained such power that it can not be defeated except through a concert of clearly defined, mutual self-interest among a combination of powerful nation-states. That is the common interest which we in the U.S.A. and China, share at this juncture. That is the crucial importance of those within the U.S.A. who typify that common interest of the people of the U.S.A. and Asia. It is our awareness of this common interest, which is therefore a crucial factor in world history at this juncture.

Jan. 1, 2022: This section of a paper written by Lyndon LaRouche near the opening of this century (Oct. 7, 2002), made clear to all who would open their mind and reason, the gulf between the science of physical economy, and mere monetary economics. Let this century see the former, using LaRouche’s teachings and writings, extinguish the latter. Piercing the Veil of Sense-Certainty Now, I come to the issue of economics as such, by which I signify physical economy, not financial accounting. On this point, the pivotal, systemic quality of difference between Classical and Romantic cultures, is their contrasted views of the matter of sense-certainty. In contrast to both the Classical Greeks since Pythagoras, and the greatest scientific minds of modern European science, the relatively inferior cultures are gripped by the delusion that what is real is that which the senses imagine that they see, hear, taste, smell, and touch. When that childish error of assumption by relatively brutish cultures, such as the Roman Empire’s, is taken into account, it should [not -ED] be difficult to pin-point those pivotal accomplishments of the superior Classical Greek scientific thought, which are summed up in Plato’s Republic, notably, on this account, in his use of the allegory of the Cave. Such an understanding of this problem, is the indispensable starting-point for any scientifically competent body of thought respecting economy. The senses are living organs of our bodies, which reflect, about as faithfully as shadows do, the impact of the experiences which the senses as such can never “see” directly. Science is the practiced accumulation of discovery of what are practically provable to be universal physical principles, principles which can not be seen directly by the senses, but which correspond to those efficiently existing forms of action which increase man’s power in and over the universe, yet are acting from beyond the veil of sense-certainty. Take as an example, the matter of gravitation. Consider, as an obvious choice of illustration, the uniquely successful method of the only original discovery of a principle of universal gravitation, by Johannes Kepler. The continuation of that erroneous Aristotelean method revived and dictated by the decadent Roman Empire, prompted not only Claudius Ptolemy, but also Copernicus and Tycho Brahe, to devise schemes which sought to explain sense-perception of the astronomical heavens (normalized sensual observations) according to Aristotelean principles. Kepler, adding more precise measurements to those of Brahe, showed empirically that the planetary orbits were elliptical, not circular, and did not represent uniform motion. Both the entire system of Aristotle, and also the empiricist hoaxster Galileo, were forever discredited by that single discovery of Kepler’s. This paradox discredited, in fact, all astronomy based on the simplistic view of sense-perception, and led to Kepler’s discovery of universal gravitation, and thus to the founding of the first comprehensive approach to constructing a mathematical physics. Kepler showed, thus, the existence of a universally efficient principle of action, operating as if from behind the shadow-world’s veil of mere sense-perception. Gravitation, like all universally efficient physical principles, is not an object of sense-perception. It is not something which can be merely “learned,” as learning and symbolism are associated with sense-certainty; it can only be known, as an universal hypothesis validated by appropriate experimental methods of proof. As Plato emphasized in his dialogue on the doubling of the square, and as Leibniz and Gauss, among others, showed, our knowledge of these principles is dependent upon proof of their unique power to enable us to change willfully the real world, such as that of nuclear microphysics, which is acting from beyond the mere shadows that real world projects upon our sensorium. This same view of physical science was already characteristic of Classical Greek scientific thought, as from Archytas and Plato through Archimedes and Eratosthenes. Typical are the Classical Greek topics of constructing a square double another square, doubling a cube by construction, and the powerful implications of the series of the five Platonic solids. This was a conception which became temporarily lost to European civilization wherever the relatively brutish, corrosive influence of Romanticism prevailed. These are the same points on which Carl Gauss caused a revolution in modern mathematical physics, founding the concept of the complex domain, in his 1799 report of his discovery of the first valid form of a fundamental theorem of algebra. Plato, in his Theaetetus dialogue, associated this complex domain with the domain of the physical powers, beyond sense-perception, by which things impossible within sense-certainty geometry, were brought into existence, as shadows, within the shadow-world of sense-certainty. Leibniz, similarly, in his discovery of the fundamental principle of a science of physical economy, gave the Platonic name of powers (Kraft) to the effects of application of discovered physical principles to improve the practice of economy. Gauss employs the same notion of powers in defining the complex domain. The Leibniz-Bernouilli proof that the catenary, the characteristic reflection of the complex domain, expresses a principle of universal least-action, is the most efficiently simple demonstration of Leibniz’s physical principle of the infinitesimal calculus, opposite to the famous conceits of Carl Gauss’s adversaries Lagrange and Cauchy. The use of Socratic method, to adduce the efficient existence of those powers called universal physical principles, as acting on our senses from beyond the veil of sense-certainty, is the essential, experimentally defined demonstration of the fundamental difference between the human individual and the lower forms of life. No other species is capable of willfully increasing, again and again, its potential relative population-density. This difference is expressed as the increase of the relative potential population-density of the human species, above the millions possible among species of higher apes, to the billions of today. The potential of the human species, not only to generate an individual’s discovery of an efficient principle of action from beyond the veil of sense-certainty, but to induce the replication of that act of discovery in succeeding generations, is the essential species of action which separates human cultures scientifically from the attributed cultures of the lower forms of life. The general expression of this is the resulting increase of the potential relative population-density of mankind, as measurable per capita and per square kilometer of surface area. Through this cognitive mode of individual and collective reaching beyond the veil, man not only improves his individual power over nature as he finds it, but changes his environment, as by scientific revolutions, and by means of development of capital investment in physical improvements of conditions of production, such as basic economic infrastructure, It is by the maintenance and enhancement of such willful improvements in human knowledge and physical-capital improvements, that the productive powers of labor are maintained and also improved. In the science of physical economy, the mind looks at the shadow-world of sense-certainty from a vantage-point beyond the veil of sense-certainty, and measures the performance of economy in physical, rather than merely financial terms, accordingly. Useful Versus Toxic Money In a sound nation-state system, as under the U.S. Federal Constitution, the power to create and regulate all forms of monetary currency, is restricted to the sovereign power of the state; no monetary power external to regulation by the state is permitted. The properly governing objective of those acts of creation and regulation, is to control the behavior of the effects of circulation of money, that for the purpose of fostering results which will coincide with desired intentions of physical-economic goals serving the maintenance and improvement of the general welfare. That constitutional restriction draws a line of separation between useful and usuriously toxic forms of that purely symbolic, empty form of existence called “money.” The significance of this argument is illustrated most simply, by considering two of the most common expressions of popular but intrinsically psychopathic opinions concerning money. The first, is the delusion that there is a natural rate of interest on loaned money. The second, is that the proper rate of interest on any particular lot of loaned money, is determined by an (actually non-existent) “law of supply and demand.” First of all, contrary to those marginal minds who babble about a non-existent magnitude called “utility,” the investment of money as such will not increase the level of wealth produced by society. Paper remains paper, and, within the bounds of the real world, paper values tend more readily to burn than to breed. Improvement—i.e., physical growth, increased physical productivity, physically improved product—occurs solely through physical investment in the production of those physical effects which tend to increase the average level of the physical-productive powers of labor in the society as a whole. The state, with its unrestricted sovereign authority for the creation and circulation of its currency, must shape the rules of credit and monetary circulation in ways which tend to foster the physically desired long-term physical effects. The emphasis must be as much, or even more, than on the short-term effects. The most difficult challenges are posed by matters lying within the categories of medium- to long-term capital cycles. To define competent policy bearing upon these cycles, one must always consider the physical cycle as primary, and bring the financial reflection of that physical cycle into conformity with the physical valuation. The most elementary type of long-term economic cycle is measured in generations: the investment which must be made, cumulatively, in the development of the newborn infant into an educated, economically efficient young adult, a generation later. For example, the cost and prices of production and exchange, must reflect the incurred physical cost of that investment in the development of a new generation of a certain productive potential. The variation in quality of the physical investment by society in any one generation, were better estimated in terms of the gains in per-capita physical productivity of society over a minimum of two generations, approximately fifty years, and, still more reliably, three generations. The essence of any effective leadership of a nation, is to be measured as the intellectual power of foresight and will, to set effectively into motion today, future generations’ achievement which could not be realized within the bounds of a single generation. In President de Gaulle’s France, this was expressed by the notion of indicative planning of long-range investment priorities. Such “indicative plannning” was the basis for the U.S.A.’s “economic miracle” of 1861-1876, of President Franklin Roosevelt’s recovery program, and the stunning technological benefits, for the economy as a whole, of the Kennedy “crash” space program. Apart from the society’s investment in the typical family household’s development of its successive generations, we must consider several exemplary, other types of long-term cycles of physical investment. There is investment in basic economic infrastructure, such as systems of general transportation, power generation and distribution, water management, land reclamation, sanitation, education, and health-care systems. These involve cycles to be estimated and measured in spans of two or more generations. There is, typically, private capital investment in local productive capacity, as of agriculture and manufacturing. There are also two very special categories of individuals’ activity, in scientific discovery and productive entrepreneurship as such. With the latter pair of capital cycles, science and productive entrepreneurship, we touch most directly on the most crucial features of a modern economy: the sovereign role of the cognitive powers of the individual person in generating progress. Although only some entrepreneurs employed in production perform their function of economic leadership as scientists, all effective entrepreneurship among farmers and manufacturers touches upon the same role of leadership exerted through the sovereign powers of the individual mind so reflected, if in a relatively diluted, and also indirect form. The essential feature of increases in physical productivity in production of agricultural, manufactured, and related physical goods, is the impact of variations in the practiced rate of investment in fundamental scientific progress, and that progress’s determining control over the potential rate of technological progress. These overriding scientific-technological determinants of the boundaries of increased productivity, are expressed mathematically as physical powers, as the Gauss-Riemann domain defines the physical meaning of the mathematical complex domain, contrary to Gauss’s reductionist adversaries Lagrange and Cauchy. No existing financial-accounting system, or methods derived from the reductionist, ivory-tower notions of “systems analysis,” by such clones of Bertrand Russell as Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann, can competently assess such aspects of the physical-economic processes. Financial accounting, systems analysis, and other “ivory tower” misconstructions of economic analysis of real economies, will always, and always does produce wrong-headed policy directives, that as a consequence of the lack of correspondence of such simple-sense-certainty-based mathematical schemes to the real universe within which physical economy actually exists. Put the usually questionable role of the corporate absentee-ownership to one side for a moment. Focus upon the example of the owner-operated small- to medium-sized manufacturing firm whose essential contribution to the society’s economy is either generating, or, more frequently producing technological advances in product and process designs. Compare this entrepreneur’s truly Classical role in society with the contribution of those discovered universal physical principles which Plato, Leibniz, and Gauss, for example, define as the physical powers of the mind to change the real world which exists beyond the veil of sense-certainty. In the latter example, the scientific discoverer, the characteristic physical-economic activity of that individual, is the power unique to the sovereign creative powers of the human individual, to generate valid working definitions of universal physical principles. In the case of the referenced type of entrepreneur, we have a case best understood by comparison with that of the scientific discoverer. Power, as used by me here, has the same connotations as Plato’s use of the equivalent term in his treatment of the construction of the doubling of the square, Leibniz’s use of power (Kraft) in defining a science of physical economy, and the physical meaning of the use of the notion of powers in both Gauss’s 1799 report of his discovery of the fundamental theorem of algebra, and Riemann’s definition of the physical-experimental significance of powers within the concluding portion of 1854 habilitation dissertation. Physical Science and Society The development and use of these qualities of the sovereign cognitive intellect of the individual person, is the underlying, unifying principle of all competent economics knowledge. The modern republic, typified by the intent of the Preamble of our historically exceptional Federal Constitution, is intended to develop our economy as an instrument through which to bring those creative powers of the sovereign human individual into play, as the reigning feature of our medium- to long-range policy decisions. We must recognize that there exists no populist, or other sort of reductionist social or other system, by means of which those specific kinds of fruits of the individual intellect could be generated “collectively.” The function of the proper political design of a republic, is to create the combined social and physical preconditions, under which the development of the creative powers of every individual (as Plato, Leibniz, and Gauss defined “powers”) is fostered, and in which those with developed such sovereign creative powers of the individual mind, from whatever prior station in life, are steered into opportunities to supply society as a whole with the performance of those functions which the creative scientist, entrepreneur, and workman bring to the social-economic process. There is no way to calculate arithmetically the value of such persons and their work; we must rely on producing such persons, and affording them the circumstances to do their work. We measure economic growth, not in simple arithmetic magnitudes, but in powers. Each such power is expressed in the form of a discovery of a universal physical principle. (Physical principles include those Classical-artistic and other social principles for which an efficient, specific physical effect may be demonstrated experimentally. These principles are discovered in the same way in which universal physical principles of abiotic and biological processes are demonstrated. The restriction is, that only those artistic and related social principles which conform to Classical principles can be defined as principles in this manner.) It is the accumulation of the combined transmitted, and new discovery of such principles, as powers, which defines human progress scientifically. Therefore, the most profitable form of national economy is known to be the type of science-driver program which U.S. President Kennedy motivated. Therefore, we must never permit today’s generally accepted definition of a financial-accounting system, or its derivatives, to determine our government’s economic policies. It is the generation, transmission, and application of the discovery of such powers, which is the sole mode of action by which the characteristic productivity of a society (e.g., an economy) is effected. These powers define the physical action, performed on the universe, by means of which the increase of the productive powers of labor may be measured in a meaningful way. Ultimately, there is no valid definition of profit, unless we mean the term “profit” as it might be applied to measuring the performance of a national economy considered as an indivisible unit. Neither an individual human being, nor an economy, actually exists as the sum of its separable parts.

The following is an edited transcription of an interview conducted with Dr. George Koo, by Michael Billington on December 29, 2021. Dr. Koo is one of the leading Chinese-American writers and organizers in regard to U.S.-China policy and on the conditions of Chinese-Americans in the United States, especially the persecution over these last years of Chinese-Americans and Chinese in the U.S.EIR: This is Mike Billington with the Executive Intelligence Review, the Schiller Institute, and the LaRouche Organization. I’m here with Dr. George Koo. Would you like to say a few words about your own history, Dr. Koo, when you came to the U.S., your education and your career? Dr. Koo: Thank you. And Mike, thank you for inviting me. It’s a pleasure to be with you. I started a draft of my autobiography, and my working title is Best of Both Worlds. By that, I mean, of my first 11 years in China, which was in, probably, one of the worst periods of Chinese history—war torn China—I was fortunate. I never saw a single Japanese soldier, and I never lived under the Japanese occupation with all its brutality and inhumanity. What happened was, my parents graduated from, and were affiliated with, Xiamen University. The leaders of that university, in their wisdom, knew that the Xiamen Harbor was too strategic to be {not} occupied by the Japanese troops. So in 1937, they picked up and moved roughly 200 miles into the interior part of Fujian province. China is very mountainous, so 200 miles is actually quite an appreciable distance away from Xiamen, and as a consequence, the Japanese never saw the strategic need to occupy the area, a very small hamlet called Changting. I was born there, and because of that, I actually had a very nurturing, peaceful upbringing by my parents. I was actually a couple of years ahead of my class in the grammar school. When the war was over and we moved back to Xiamen, I went back a year, because all my fellow students were five years older than I was, because they were interrupted by the war. When I came to the U.S., I had graduated from sixth grade, which gave me a nice foundation—not only the Chinese language, but also an appreciation of the Chinese culture and Chinese history. I was fortunate. My father had already gotten a fellowship from the nationalist government. They used some of the war reparations from Japan to send some of their students to continue their graduate education after World War Two, and my father was among them. He was in Seattle already, continuing his graduate studies. He was trained as a marine biologist, and was in the University of Washington to study fisheries. In 1949, a lot of these divided families—where the scholar was in the U.S. for further education but the family stayed behind on the mainland—they all had to make a crucial decision, whether they were going to leave the U.S. and go back to China, or they were going to try to get their families to come to the U.S., or they would face an uncertain period of separation. We were fortunate—we were able to emigrate to the U.S. in 1949. I was eleven at the time, didn’t know a word of English, but the Seattle public school system was really, really outstanding. We didn’t feel that we had to go to a private school, so I was brought up through the Seattle public schools. I caught up with my English by the time I graduated from high school. I was fortunate enough to get a partial scholarship and work program to attend MIT. I went to MIT for my bachelor’s and master’s degrees. I got married—my wife was similarly a Chinese-American who came to the U.S. when she was, I think, six years old. We met at MIT in graduate school. I joined Boeing, worked at Boeing on their Saturn project, and subsequently joined Allied Chemical, continuing my graduate studies, and got my doctorate degree at Stevens Institute of Technology. That’s pretty much the early part of my career. I joined SRI [formerly the Stanford Research Institute] in conducting what is called industrial economic research. From there, I joined Chase Bank and subsequently Bear Stearns to work on China Trade Advisory Business. For an appreciable period of time, I was helping American businesses doing business in China, establishing business relationships and also negotiating joint venture contracts, cooperation, and so on. From that basis, I developed a very basic understanding of China, how China works, where they’re coming from. As we got later into the relationship, I could see that there was a tremendous gap in understanding between China and the U.S., and I sort of took upon myself the role to help bridge the understanding between the two countries. That’s when I began to write about U.S.-China relations. This is, I guess, what we’ll talk about today. Confrontation Is Lose-LoseEIR: A lot of that I didn’t know. I’m glad to learn that about you. You spoke at the Schiller Institute conference on November 13. Your presentation was called “The Survival of Our World Depends on Whether the U.S. and China Can Get Along.” You noted there that the Chinese economy, by certain kinds of accounting, is now larger than that of the U.S., and that the U.S. response has been, as you said, to “push China’s head underwater rather than trying to compete on its own.” I concur with you on that. What would you say is the economic and technological impact of that policy, both on China, and also on the U.S.? Dr.Koo: It’s unfortunately a zero-sum approach that the U.S. is taking First, it assumes that by taking this approach the U.S. will win at the expense of China, and that China will lose. But what will actually happen, of course, in a zero-sum approach, is that each side will try to endeavor to win at the expense of the other. The eventual outcome is lose-lose—both sides lose. It’s arguable whether China will lose more than the U.S., and the reason I say that is because, China has a much more vibrant, healthy trading relationship with virtually all parts of the world compared to the U.S. So, economically, they have a lot more reach and flexibility. Second, it goes without saying that China has a very complete, robust manufacturing base, which we do not. We have already emptied out our manufacturing base, and for Trump to impose a tariff barrier and presume that that will bring the manufacturing base back is very wrongheaded. It shows his, I guess, ignorance on the basic principles of economics. I don’t find, and I don’t expect, that very many manufacturing firms will come back unless the economics is basically favorable. And as you know, the justification for the tariff barriers was that it was going to be “free money” coming to the U.S. Treasury, and the Chinese exporters were going to pay for it. And of course, that was far from reality. The reality is the increased prices the American consumers end up paying, so it’s not free money; it’s coming out of one pocket and going to the other. That just raises the cost of living. There’s no question that by separating or attempting to separate the two economic spheres of influence, if you will, that both will lose. I’m not at all sure that the U.S. will come out ahead in a lose-lose outcome. Ambassador BurlingameEIR: You are also the head of something called the Burlingame Foundation, which is named after Anson Burlingame, the American diplomat in China who actually ended up representing China. Could you discuss a bit about his career, when there was an attempt by the U.S. to establish good relations with China, which was at that time under the boot of the British? Dr. Koo: About 13 years ago I happened to catch, in a very small local newspaper that covers the city of Burlingame, that the Burlingame Historical Society wrote about the life of Anson Burlingame—that’s the first time I heard about him, and that the city of Burlingame was named after him. So I read up on it. I was fascinated because, here is somebody who was a dedicated abolitionist, anti-slavery, who placed the highest importance on human rights and human dignity, and was one of the founders of the Republican Party and an energetic, vigorous supporter of Abraham Lincoln, and helped get Lincoln elected. He worked so hard that he lost his own re-election as a congressman from Massachusetts. So, Lincoln offered to appoint him as an ambassador, first to the Austria-Hungary Empire. But the Austrian government didn’t want Burlingame—Burlingame was very vocal about the suppression of the Hungarians by the Austrian emperor, so he was persona non grata from the get-go. So then Lincoln appointed him to be ambassador to China. He left the U.S. in 1861, but he took his time, landed in Hong Kong, and travelled up through China gradually so that he could learn more about the Chinese culture, the Chinese people, the Chinese history. By the time he got to Beijing, it was already 1862. He made his stand very clear: that China’s sovereignty was to be respected, that he was not there to carve up China for the U.S., unlike the British and other Western powers that were based there. He was very outspoken on what was fair in how to deal with China from a U.S. point of view. In fact, when some American was accused of murdering some Chinese nationals while he was Ambassador, he had him arrested, presided over his trial, and accepted witnesses from China—Chinese witnesses, which was unheard of if you were a British court or a French court or some of the others. He then pronounced him guilty and sentenced him to be executed. (I think he never got executed, because he escaped, but that’s a different story.) All of that very much impressed the regent behind the throne. His name was Prince Gong, Gong Qing Wang in Chinese. Prince Gong was so impressed with Anson Burlingame and his integrity that when Burlingame was all set to return to the U.S.—that would have been 1867—Prince Gong went to see him and said, “Mr. Burlingame, we need to go to the Western countries and try to renegotiate the various unequal treaties that have been imposed upon us. We have a team all set to go, but we need someone of international stature to lead this group. Would you be willing to lead it?” Burlingame immediately accepted the appointment, wrote a letter to his boss, the Secretary of State, William Seward, and said, “Hey, I’m coming back, but I’m coming back as an Ambassador from China,” and that’s what happened. He came to the U.S. in early 1868, took the train that the Chinese had helped to build, the Transcontinental Railroad, celebrated all along the way, got to Washington, and negotiated a treaty called—in shorthand—the Burlingame Treaty of 1868. That treaty recognizes the mutual sovereignty, the equal rights of citizens from one country living in the other, the mutual rights to emigrate from one to the other. It was the first treaty that China enjoyed with the Western countries of that kind, and that set a different relationship between the U.S. and China that had lasting effects, even though the Chinese exclusion laws of 1882 canceled the Burlingame Treaty. One of the lasting effects was the Chinese Educational Mission that was organized, I think, starting in 1871. This mission was organized by a guy by the name of Rong Hong, or in Cantonese, Yung Wing. He had been brought over [to the U.S.] earlier by American missionaries, and was a graduate of Yale. When he went back to China, he was entrusted by the Manchu government to be the intermediary between the U.S. and China. He brought a munitions plant—a turnkey plant—from the U.S. to China, and convinced one of the senior officials there that China should send young boys somewhat like himself to the U.S. to get a U.S. education. Through a lot of effort on his part, he convinced families, mostly families in the Guangzhou area, to send 120 boys to the U.S. to be educated. Thirty boys a year were sent over a four-year period. The first batch landed in 1871. They were all 12, 13 years old, if you can imagine. They ended up in Connecticut, in New England; they were being hosted mostly by Christian families in their area and educated in American schools. Some of them became old enough to attend college, such as MIT, Yale—a lot of them went to Yale because of Rong Hong—and Columbia—and some others of the best schools on the East Coast. It only lasted four years. The third- and fourth-year batches of young kids never got to finish or attend college, because the internal politics of China became very negative, watching these young Chinese kids becoming “too Americanized,” and losing their Chinese roots and Chinese culture. So, they brought them back and interrupted their education. Nevertheless, this group of Western-educated young Chinese later on went on to have a tremendous influence, especially after the fall of the Manchu dynasty and in the Republican government. One of them, who was actually an outstanding baseball pitcher and hitter when he was in the U.S., was appointed Ambassador to Washington. He got to be good friends with Teddy Roosevelt — he was the one who convinced Roosevelt, by the time he got to be President, that the indemnity funds which the Chinese were paying to the U.S.1 could be better used by sending them back to train and educate Chinese in the American system of education. Some of that money funded the building of Tsinghua University that we now know in Beijing, and also funded some of the outstanding students from China to be educated in the U.S.2, starting in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s, including my father-in-law, by the way. He was sent to get a bachelor’s degree from MIT, a master’s from Pennsylvania, and a doctorate in electrical engineering from Harvard. Boeing’ chief engineer, Wong Tsu, was one of that batch. He went to Boeing, designed the first sea plane, which the U.S. Navy bought, and that got Boeing started. Then Wong Tsu went back to China. There’s a whole list of people which that particular mission created. Now back to Burlingame. After he successfully negotiated the Burlingame Treaty of 1868, he then took the Chinese delegation and went to Europe. He visited the British, the French, and others, trying to convince them that they should do the same. Of course, none of those countries were interested in recognizing China on an equal sovereignty basis. But they also didn’t want to antagonize somebody of Burlingame’s stature. So, they just sort of fobbed him off and stalled. Eventually he ended up in St. Petersburg in February of 1870. There he contracted pneumonia and died within four days. He was a few days short of his 50th birthday when he died in the service of China. This story, by the way, is pretty much forgotten in the U.S. especially, but also in China. But one of the young reporters that he befriended on his way to China was a beginning reporter by the name Sam Clemens, who later on, as you know, became Mark Twain. And Mark Twain wrote probably the best eulogy on Anson Burlingame when Burlingame died. So the reason for me and some of the others to start the Burlingame Foundation was really to remind the people of the world, especially in the U.S. and China, that there was a point in time in history when the relationship between the two countries was really exemplary, and we would like to see it go back to that basis again. Sun Yat-sen and the American SystemEIR: Yes, indeed. As you know, Dr. Sun Yat-sen was not educated in the United States, exactly, but he and his brother went from the Guangzhou area to Hawaii to work, where he was taken under the care of a missionary family who were part of the Henry Carey School, who had studied the American System of economics developed by Alexander Hamilton. When Sun Yat-sen then came back to China and ended up organizing the Republican movement that led to the overthrow of the dynasty in 1911 and the establishment of the Chinese Republic, his organizing was based on what he called the Three Principles of the People, which was based on the ideas of Abraham Lincoln, who said “government of the people, by the people and for the people.” In particular, Dr. Sun understood and taught the American System as it was invented by Alexander Hamilton. He even understood the factional differences within the United States, that Thomas Jefferson, although he wanted independence, was a follower of the British laissez faire system, including slavery, and so forth. This was Sun Yat-sen’s legacy. But that, too, is generally unknown in the United States. So, I’m wondering what you think about the impact of Sun Yat-sen in China and in the United States, how that is impacting things today, because it’s clear that the Chinese economists who are leading the miracle in China today are very, very familiar with this tradition. Dr. Koo: Yes, I think it’s fair to say that the influence of Sun Yat-sen, or in Chinese, Sun Zhongshan, continues to be a legacy that is still admired and studied, even in today’s China, even though he was not a leader of the Communist Party movement. However, while he was alive—and unfortunately, he didn’t live very long after the revolution—he wanted to accommodate both the Kuomintang (the Nationalist Party), and the Communist Party, and wanted them to work together, which was not to be, as we know. No question that his Three Principles is taken directly from Abraham Lincoln; he was an unabashed admirer of the American System and democracy as defined by the U.S. To a large extent, I think, as you said, the Communist Party, since the founding of the PRC [People’s Republic of China] very much did follow Sun Yat-sen’s doctrine along the way. One of Hamilton’s principles was the protection of homegrown industries through tariff barriers, and we saw China do that. They did protect their homegrown industries—they called them the pillar industries. They would protect them from competition, up to a certain point. But they also understand that there is an endpoint to when protective barriers, tariff barriers, cease to be working in their own interests. A lot of other emerging countries don’t understand that. Once they set up the tariff barriers, they don’t seem to have the ability or the wherewithal to remove these barriers, and the long-term consequences of having tariff barriers forever is to keep your own homegrown industries protected, but never competitive, because they’re not able to compete in the open trade situation. Now, we know that China has surpassed that handicap, because once they joined the WTO, and Premier Zhu Rongji started to remove the protection, it’s a sink or swim situation for the Chinese companies. Those that didn’t make it, that sank, were absorbed in the Chinese economy. Fortunately, I think the Chinese economy grew fast enough to take up the slack of the under- or unemployed as a result of having to face world competition. War Over Taiwan?EIR: Let me address the strategic crisis that we’re living through now between the U.S. and China. Ambassador Chas Freeman, who was the interpreter for Richard Nixon on his famous 1972 visit to China and who went on to have an esteemed diplomatic career, is a China scholar and expert. In an interview with EIR last month, said he thought that the U.S. had gone beyond the “red line” of China vis-à-vis the Taiwan situation, beyond the “One China, Two Systems” policy, by backing up the Democratic Progressive Party’s [DPP] policies in Taiwan, calling for independence. The U.S. appears to be sleepwalking into war both in the Russian and the Chinese situations, which could be, of course, disastrous for mankind. Dr. Koo: Right. EIR: You’re very familiar and knowledgeable about the developments in Taiwan. What do you think about how Taiwan got to the point that they’re now being used as a lever for a very evil policy? Dr. Koo: Unfortunately, the party in power in Taiwan, the DPP, probably doesn’t see the situation the way you just enunciated. I think they’d like to see themselves as a tail trying to wag the dog. Unfortunately, the Biden administration, like the Trump administration preceding it, is encouraging them on that line of thinking. By that, I mean, they are encouraged to push the line in the sand, if you will. I think we’ll have to go back to when the DPP came to power, with Chen Shui-bian their first elected President.3 It’s a very strange politics in Taiwan. Chen Shui-bian was elected because there was a bullet that made a right turn and grazed his belly on the night before the election, and also hit his vice president candidate in the knee. It created such an uproar that he successfully got enough sympathy votes to put him over and got him elected. Once he was elected, he changed the core [school] curriculum for grades K-12 and disconnected the Taiwan history from that of the mainland, so that the Taiwan kids growing up no longer know that they’re a part of the Chinese culture, Chinese history, and that their characters and poems and literature came originally from China. So the disenchantment, or this disaffection, of the Taiwan people started with Chen Shui-bian, or perhaps even from Lee Teng-hui, when Lee Teng-hui was President.4 Gradually, the people in Taiwan have become more and more detached from any sense of affiliation with the mainland. That’s a very important factor that’s happening here. The other thing is that the DPP has very successfully convinced the people of Taiwan that they are infinitely better off than what’s going on in mainland China, despite the fact that, if they were fortunate enough to go to Shanghai and go to other places, they could see for themselves what a difference it is. In fact, the elites, the better educated, better motivated, which is maybe a couple of million of the young Taiwanese people, are living and working in mainland China, establishing their careers there. A lot of them are working for Taiwan companies that are based in mainland China. They know the difference, but when they go back to Taiwan on home leave, they can’t even talk about it, because the local Taiwan folks would hoot at them and heckle them, and don’t believe what they’re saying. So there’s a dichotomy here between Taiwan and mainland China. Beijing feels that time is on their side. Eventually, the people in Taiwan will recognize that it’s in their benefit to be part of China and not to be trying to be the fifty-first state of the United States of America, which will never happen, even though the DPP seems to be deluded in that sense and that feeling. Is Taiwan a spark? I think Taiwan could be a spark for a war and conflagration if that’s what the United States wants. If the U.S. pushes to the point where Beijing feels that they have to respond, then we will have a disaster in our hands. But as you know, the way the situations are being portrayed by our mainstream media and by our politicians is totally distorted. Whether it’s about Taiwan, about Xinjiang, about Afghanistan, about any part of the world where we have troops and we have bases. Somehow, we’re there to save the world and the Chinese and the Russians are there to destroy the world. Whereas in actual fact, it’s just the opposite. U.S. Destabilization in Hong KongEIR: You mentioned Hong Kong. I know you’ve been very active in business, as well as just knowledgeable about Hong Kong for a long time. As you know, in 2020, just as there were rioters in the streets across the United States burning down shops, shopping centers, attacking police and so on, the same thing had been going on in Hong Kong the year before, where masked, black-clad young people were driven to go out and set fires and attack police and so on. And yet this was called, in the U.S. press, in regard to he Hong Kong riots, “peaceful protests for democracy.” So, what is your view of the role of Hong Kong today in regard to China, as well as in its relations with the West? Dr. Koo: I’m glad you brought it up, Mike, because this is a classic example, a fabrication and distortion, of what’s going on in Hong Kong. The riots in Hong Kong started in 2019. It all started because a young Hong Kong couple went to Taiwan and the boyfriend murdered the girlfriend, who was pregnant at the time, and cut up her body and put it in a suitcase, and then went back to Hong Kong by himself. And because there were no extradition treaties between Taiwan and Hong Kong, he basically went home scot-free and was free to roam around the streets. The law enforcement couldn’t do anything about it. So, that brought home the point and the need to have an extradition treaty between Hong Kong and rest of the world. In fact, at the time, Hong Kong was one of the few territories or countries that did not have extradition treaties, neither with Taiwan nor with Beijing. So when the Chief Executive of Hong Kong started to enact an extradition treaty, the opposition, the “democracy movers” of Hong Kong, objected, created a riot, and insisted that they must not have this extradition treaty, because, they claimed, that with it they could be extradited, they could be arrested and be sent to Beijing at any time, and they would be threatened. That really created the unrest and the riot. What we found out afterwards, is that those protesters were being funded by the NED, the National Endowment for Democracy, which is a CIA-funded arm whose mission is to create unrest, instability, and disturbance anywhere in the world, in countries where the power that reigns is not to our liking. That’s what happened in Hong Kong. The media not only considered it a democracy movement—one of our leaders, the Speaker of the House, as a matter of fact, publicly said, “What a beautiful sight that was!” Well, when the riots happened in the United States, I didn’t find anybody saying that they were a beautiful sight. It was clearly destruction and lawlessness and so on. So today what we have in Hong Kong, we now have an extradition treaty in place, we have a pledge of allegiance to the Beijing government in place, and we have a voter turnout to elect a batch of legislators for the Hong Kong government. All three things are cause for the Western media to criticize and say this is lack of democracy in Hong Kong. Well, let’s look at it, OK? The voter turnout was very low, was 30%, to elect the legislators. This just happened. Well, guess what? The normal turnout in New York City is 26%. So, do we say New York City is lacking democracy? Well, maybe it does lack democracy, but certainly you won’t find mainstream media reporting it on that basis. The Pledge of Allegiance? Well, it seems to me, we, in school, pledge allegiance to the flag all the time, and nobody complains about it as being an illegal maneuver. So, we’re looking at double standards, and it’s always to the benefit of us looking good and China looking bad. Pompeo and BBC Lies About the UyghursEIR: Perhaps the most extreme example of that was when Mike Pompeo began saying that China was guilty of genocide in Xinjiang against the Muslim Uyghur people, while anybody who would travel to Xinjiang would know how absurd that is. But nonetheless, it’s repeated in every newspaper, in the Congress, and in the White House. What can you tell us about the actual economic and social conditions of the Uyghur population in Xinjiang? Dr. Koo: There is a purpose to Mike Pompeo and his successor, [Antony] Blinken, and the media coverage to emphasize, “human rights violations in Xinjiang,” to the point that now Biden is actually forbidding Americans from buying cotton from Xinjiang. What is the purpose? Well, the purpose is to keep the Uyghurs in Xinjiang poor and underemployed. And why do we do that? Because wherever there’s instability, that’s what we want. That’s how we, the United States, maintain control. We thrive on instability anywhere else in the world. I’ll give you an example of a distortion. CGTN, which is the China Global Television Network, had a documentary that covered why China had recruited young Uyghur women to go to work in factories and in cities in other provinces. The idea of employment is income for her, skills for her to make a decent living, raise her living standard to the point that she could even afford to get her parents to move from Xinjiang for a better living. Uyghur women in Xinjiang do not get the proper education, they tend to stay home, marry young, have kids, and never have a chance to improve their living standard. The documentary also showed that the first time that she had to leave home to go to a faraway city in China, she was crying, because this was the first time that she was going to leave home. Well, BBC took that documentary and skillfully cut and pasted so that it comes out with the message: “See? Beijing is exploiting slave labor again, forcing these young women to leave home to work for peon wages somewhere else.” The same goes with picking cotton in Xinjiang: “Look at all these poor women picking cotton in Xinjiang.” Well, actually most of the cotton nowadays in Xinjiang is done by machines, and the machines are sold by John Deere, a very well-known American company. There’s so much fabrication and distortion going on. Mike Pompeo was actually very open compared to Blinken. Mike Pompeo said: “We lie, we cheat, we steal”—came right out in the open. Blinken does the same thing, but he’s a little smoother, so he doesn’t say, “We lie, we cheat, we steal.” But that’s what he does. He talks about, “China needs to follow the rules-based international order.” What is the rules-based international order? Well, if you listen to Blinken, it turns out the “rules-based international order” is whatever he says it is, not by the United Nations or by a multipolar type of definition. And of course, he has continued to parrot the Xinjiang human rights violations. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this guy by the name of Adrian Zenz, a German right-wing nut who’s been to Xinjiang maybe once, many years ago, and continues to spout all this fabrication about what’s going on in Xinjiang. You also have this Australian research institute [Australian Strategic Policy Institute, ASPI—ed.] that continues to fabricate reports one after another about what’s going on in Xinjiang and elsewhere in China. We have a deliberate effort on the part of Washington and on the part of Western media to blacken China for no other purpose than to justify attacking and making everything negative, so that the American people are thoroughly, thoroughly brainwashed. It’s not possible for the American public to make a separate judgment. We don’t have any politicians of stature willing to come out and say, “Hey, we are going down the tubes if we continue on this path, because we’re going to come out lose-lose. Our economy is going to go in the tank. We’re not going to be benefiting from any collaboration, and we’re not going to solve any of the global problems like the pandemic, like climate change,” and so on and so forth. So, I am very, very sad about where we are at this point. I applaud the Schiller Institute and Helga LaRouche and all the effort that you guys are doing, trying to get the message out. You probably have a better listenership in China and Russia and elsewhere. And somehow, we need to get your voice louder here in the United States. Democracy for the PeopleEIR: Well, of course, their argument is that America is good, and China and Russia are bad because we are a “democracy” and they’re an “autocracy.” In fact, as you know, Biden just held the so-called Democracy Summit, trying to create an alliance of countries who are deemed by the U.S. to be “democratic” against those that are “authoritarian.” In fact, the question of what democracy is, is a very interesting and important discussion, and the Chinese have been talking about that. How would you describe democracy in the U.S. compared to democracy in China? Dr. Koo: I think in the U.S., we are very flexible as to what democracy really is. If you’re a country on our side, you have democracy. If you’re against us, you have no democracy. Now, what is the example of our democracy? Let me count the ways: Our democracy is where the two Parties bicker, nitpick, and get nothing done. We don’t look at the global issues, the bigger issues of what’s good for our country. We don’t move on infrastructure. We don’t invest in health care. We don’t really care much about education that we talk about. We care about who gets elected. We care about, how to maneuver the election mechanism so that the other side has a disadvantage and we have the advantage. We have people who violate the Constitution and the rule of law, and they’re still walking free, and we don’t seem to be able to do anything about it. These are some examples of democracy as we practice in America. We also have democracy exercised in that if you live in the ghetto and if you’re Black, you don’t have a chance; you’re presumed guilty of everything we accuse you of, and it’s up to you to prove innocence. And that goes, by the way, for the Chinese-American scientists in this country. We can talk about that a little bit later. But democracy has become a very handy-dandy label, to blacken anybody that we don’t like and to pat ourselves on the back because we are supposed to be a democracy. Now, I can’t explain fully what China means by democracy, but I do know that they respect the human life of every person in their country. They have spent a great amount of effort alleviating poverty for their remote poor, for the villagers who live in some of the worst situations and worst conditions. Admittedly, it may be a propaganda film, but I saw some films of Xi Jinping walking up these muddy trails to visit remote villages to find out how they’re living and how they’re doing. Do they have enough to eat? Do they have warm clothes to wear? Do they have enough blankets, and so on and so forth. He would hold little village conversations with the people and ask them what problems do they have and what issues do they have that they would like to bring up? This is almost unheard of here. Here, when a politician comes to visit and have a town hall meeting, they usually have their hand out because they’re looking for political donations. This whole country’s election is run on money, and if you’re not in a position to write a big check, your voice really doesn’t count. So, there’s a very different way of practicing and exercising democracy, and we’re just kidding ourselves in this country that we all have “one man, one vote” type of equality. Russia and Sun TsuEIR: Before I ask you more about the persecution of the Chinese and Chinese-Americans, let me ask about President Biden. As I’m sure you know, at this moment, the crisis over Ukraine is extremely intense, and yet meetings have been set up between the U.S. and Putin and the representatives of Russia to attempt to deal with this crisis, to guarantee some security for Russia. In fact, it was announced today that Biden is going to talk to Putin tomorrow [Dec. 30]. He also has had several long discussions with Xi Jinping. Do you see this President as having the intent or the ability to try to override this extreme anti-Russia, anti-China hysteria within the press and the Congress, and even within his own administration? Dr. Koo: I’m doubtful that he could, because the situation that Russia and the U.S. is in, didn’t happen overnight. The NATO organization, for example, has been pushing and pushing, collecting members eastward, if you will, from Western Europe to the neighboring countries of Russia. And of course, this threatens Russia and Putin. And finally, Putin had to do something that will catch the attention of the West. The way he did that—I learned this from one of the analysts from China—is really in accordance with Sun Tzu’s Art of War. You negotiate from power and from strength. By amassing Russian troops on the border of Ukraine, it’s sending a very unequivocal message, which is that if we don’t get the reasonable settlement of cease-and-desist of the encroachment by the West, we have the upper hand. We can go in and take the eastern Ukraine at will, and there’s nothing you can do about it. And that’s the fact. I think that’s what the Pentagon realizes and understands. Whether Biden can effectively settle anything remains to be seen, because what Putin really wants, he’s made it very clear—he basically says, “Hey NATO, you need to sign a document that says you will cease and desist and not continue to expand your sphere of influence.” I think maybe some of the EU countries would be willing to go along, but NATO obviously is controlled by the U.S., and whether that’s going to happen remains to be seen. FBI Witch-Hunt Against Chinese in AmericaEIR: It’s very dangerous. So, on the persecution, you know that we’ve been very involved in documenting and opposing the effort by the Department of Justice and the FBI—starting actually a long time ago, but especially under Christopher Wray and the Trump administration and continuing today, with Wray still Director of the FBI—basically accusing anybody who is Chinese working in America, or Chinese-Americans who have any contact with China, are thereby automatically suspected of being spies. There have been some atrocious operations attacking leading scientists, who were helping to solve cancer and other diseases, who have been accused of spying, lost their jobs, lost their laboratories, and so forth. I know you’ve been an outspoken opponent of this, so I’d like you to say what you think needs to be said about that whole crisis in America today. Dr. Koo: Again, for Chinese-Americans or ethnic Chinese and to some extent, Asians—because our FBI and our government officials don’t always tell the difference between one Chinese and another Asian—so we’re all being tarred. The system of justice, as applied to us, is justice on its head. You are guilty until you prove you are innocent. It’s very, very difficult to prove a negative, as we all know. When a federal prosecutor comes after you, they have infinite resources in supporting them. You can be driven to poverty from the mounting legal defense bills. Frequently, the hapless Chinese scientists basically have to cop a plea just to get out from under the pressure and get out from the financial ruin that they face. This actually goes all the way back to J. Edgar Hoover. The bias against Chinese started from him. We had a “Chinese expert,” Paul Moore, not long retired now from the FBI, who basically said, if you see three Chinese at a cocktail party, they’re probably talking about the espionage and the intelligence that they’ve gathered. Just any three Chinese, or maybe Asians, could be guilty of spying. This guy used to be the carpool buddy of Robert Hanssen. They used to go to work together. Robert Hanssen, if you don’t remember, or don’t know, was indeed the biggest double agent for the Soviet Union before he was finally caught and sent to jail. He [Moore] never smelled a rat sitting next to Robert Hanssen, but he could see three Chinese standing on the corner as spying for China. Moore also promulgated the “grains of sand” theory of espionage. What is “grains of sand”? Well, we have hundreds of thousands of Chinese in this country, and they are loyal to China. They gather any little tidbits of information and they send it to Beijing. The implication is that there’s a supercomputer in the basement of some building in Beijing, cranking through all this little intelligence, through this computer, and out the other end comes the design of the multi-headed missile. That’s the kind of logic that we are facing from the FBI and the Department of Justice. There are even FBI agents that came right out and admitted in their testimony that they lied because they had to fill their quota of cases against Chinese-Americans. I think the long-term implication of this kind of bias is that we are going to lose. And the reason is, because the greatest source of STEM—science, technology, engineering, and math—graduates are coming from China. It’s proven through history that they have made tremendous contributions to American technology, American science, and also as American professors and teachers raising the next generation of students. So we are cutting our own nose to spite our face, because we are discouraging them from coming. And they are indeed not as enthusiastic about coming to the U.S. More and more of them—I saw as many as 80% of the Chinese students who come in and graduate are now going back to China, because it’s just too damn risky for them to stay here and work here. The Belt and Road in AmericaEIR: And all the time, the U.S. also is criticizing China for going out to the rest of the world with their development policy, what they learned in transforming their own country from poverty to one of the greatest economies in history. They are taking that to the rest of the world through the Belt and Road Initiative, which you’ve praised often, for trying to convey to other poor countries that the trick to getting out of poverty is building infrastructure and actually creating the conditions for a modern industrial country. You can only think that the attacks on the Belt and Road are coming from those who want to keep the world poor and divided and to keep China down. Dr. Koo: Right. EIR: Here in the U.S., our infrastructure is a disaster. We just passed a small infrastructure bill, which will barely dent the deficit we have. What can we do to get the U.S. to accept Chinese investment in U.S. infrastructure, which they wanted to do before this hysteria began? And even more important, how can we get the U.S. to recognize that it’s in its own interest to work with China on developing the real physical economies of nations in Africa and Asia and South America? Dr. Koo: I think, Mike, you made an important summary statement, which is, what can we do to convince the American people it’s in our interest to work with China? There are plenty of examples of the benefit that can accrue. For example, the Hamilton Bridge, which is the extension of the George Washington Bridge that goes over the Harlem River. That bridge was refurbished and rebuilt by a Chinese construction company that was based in New Jersey. That came within budget and on time. It employed American workers. Some of the management came from the China side, but the workers, the employment was good employment for the American workers. And that happened a few years ago. I wrote about it maybe two years ago. Another example? The subway cars in Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles are being replaced by Chinese subway cars. These are coming from China, partially in kits, and are assembled in the U.S. The U.S. plant, I think, is outside Springfield, Massachusetts, and there may be another one being built outside of Chicago. The idea was, the state-of-the-art design and the siding and some of the important keys are being provided by China. But the inside air-conditioning, some of the other units, and so on are being provided locally, sourced in the U.S. The content of these cars is about 60% local content, meaning U.S. content, or more than 60%. So, it does qualify, according to the rules of satisfying being made locally. It’s a win-win situation, because these subway cars are state-of-the art. They’re quieter, they’re safer, and they’re more economical. Their prices are lower than third-party sources. In point of fact, in the United States, we no longer have the capability of making these subway cars, so we have to outsource. The other outsources are more expensive than the Chinese source. When the first car was delivered in Boston, there was a big hullabaloo, a source of celebration. The next targets the Chinese were looking at were New York and Washington. Then the politicians got into the act, and they said, “No, no, no, we can’t do that, because the Chinese could put in all these listening bugs in the subway car and spy on us while the cars are rolling into work.” Can you imagine you and I having a conversation? “Hey, Mike, how are the Yankees doing? You know, do you think they’re going to win the pennant this year?” And that goes to Beijing as espionage? How about that? The Common GoodEIR: I think one of the primary issues which exemplifie why the world has to work together, is the out-of-control pandemic, this COVID pandemic. As I think you probably know, Helga Zepp-LaRouche and former U.S. Surgeon General in the United States, Dr. Joycelyn Elders, have formed something they call the Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites, an idea taken from the 15th-Century genius Nicholas of Cusa, who was largely responsible for the Renaissance in Europe. Cusa said that to overcome conflicts between religions or ethnicities or nations, you have to think of the higher principle of the common needs and desires of mankind as a whole. This pandemic cannot be cured unless it’s cured everywhere, as we’ve seen by these variants coming back to bite us, because we refuse to build modern health care delivery systems in most countries and we’ve even hoarded vaccines from Africa and elsewhere. Zepp-LaRouche and Dr. Elders are calling for is that we must build a modern health system in every country in the world, which would include not just the hospitals and doctors, but clean water and electricity, of which many countries have none. This is certainly the kind of aim that the Belt and Road Initiative is targeting. Do you think this health issue is a means whereby we can overcome this division and geopolitics and get the world to come together for the common aims of mankind? Dr. Koo: Whether we get to the point you just summarized, will require a significant change in attitude in the United States. In China, people seem to naturally understand what’s for the greater good is more important than my individual druthers, my individual “exercise of freedom.” But that’s not the case here in the U.S. We even have people who object to vaccination because it’s an infringement on their personal freedom. If we have the inability to recognize what is the greater good in our own country, we will have even greater difficulty recognizing what is the greater good in solving the problem on a worldwide, global basis. We’re lucky in the sense that we are richly endowed in water compared to many other places in the world. Therefore, it’s hard for us to appreciate the importance of water elsewhere, whether it’s in Africa or Asia or elsewhere. We are so concerned and care about where we come down on these issues, we don’t even think about the fact that these issues affect all of us and not just in our little circle, our little world of the United States. So, I think the task ahead is a monumental one for the organization, unfortunately. Confucius in AmericaEIR: Maybe we should look back to Ben Franklin, who, as you probably know, was a great admirer of Confucius and the meritocracy system in China, and wanted to bring this idea of the common good—or the general welfare, as our Constitution calls it—into the U.S., in building the United States. But as you said, this has been lost in the process of so-called libertarian individual freedom. Dr. Koo: Right. It’s way overdone. EIR: Do you think we can teach Confucius to the American people? Dr. Koo: Well, we’re throwing them out. You know, these Confucius Institutes are being thrown out rather than being welcomed at this point. And again, they’re being victimized by the biases that we have here. I mean, we have this Senator from Arkansas [Sen. Tom Cotton—ed.] who says, “Hey, we can’t let the Chinese in unless they want to come to study Shakespeare.” And I added, well, they could go to Oxford and Cambridge to study Shakespeare, not come to the University of Arkansas. Maybe they can study how to be a top football team in the AP poll in Arkansas. EIR: Are there other issues you’d like to address to our audience and to the readers of EIR? Dr. Koo: Well, Mike, it’s really nice having this conversation. I just feel so disappointed on the path the United States is taking at this point. We seem to be insatiable in wanting to pick fights. We seem to need a common adversary to justify our military budgets. There is only one issue that has overwhelming bipartisan support in this country, and that is increasing the military budget. You have to ask, the American people need to ask: Why do we need an increased military budget? We can blow the world apart many times over with what we’ve got. What’s the point of intimidating everybody else? By intimidation, we think that we have other countries on our side. Actually, most countries fear us but do not like us, and do not admire what we’re doing. That’s why I’m so glad we’re having this conversation. I just wish that we can help turn some people around, and encourage not just thought leaders, but politicians, to understand what’s at stake and start to speak out on what would be sensible and in the interests of our country. EIR: Thank you very much; I appreciate this discussion. I think it should have ramifications throughout our country and hopefully around the world, that we can change America. I thank you again for doing our interview. Dr. Koo: It’s been a pleasure. Mike, thank you for inviting me.

This coming year is going to be one in which a lot of very crucial strategic issues will come to a head, where humanity is being confronted with choosing a path; either a path to solutions which will bring mankind into a New Paradigm, or a path to Hell. That is why I want to officially declare 2022 the year of my late husband, Lyndon LaRouche, because it is his 100th birthday. There is no more adequate way to celebrate this great man and the incredible richness of the works he had produced, than to declare 2022 the year of Lyndon LaRouche. I already can promise that we will conduct many meetings, conferences, and seminars. We will publish the second volume of his collected works—by the LaRouche Legacy Foundation. We will do everything possible so that the solution which Lyndon LaRouche offered to the strategic situation, to the economic crisis, to the cultural crisis; that these solutions will be on the table for every responsible government and parliament around the world to consider. I think this will be a very fruitful endeavor, so I invite all of you to join with us in the celebration of Lyndon LaRouche for the entire year.

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.

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.