Statement by Helga Zepp-LaRouche recorded on February 28, 2022.
Sign our petition, “Convoke an International Conference to Establish A New Security and Development Architecture for All Nations.”
I’m speaking to you because I want to give you an extremely important message. As you know, since a few days, Russian troops are in Ukraine, in a military operation. As a reaction, the West has imposed very, very harsh sanctions on Russia, which are going to have incredible effects, not only on Russia, but also on the whole world. President Putin has put the Russian nuclear weapons on alert. Any further escalation of this situation has the danger of things going completely out of control, and in the worst case leading to a nuclear exchange, and World War III, and if that happens the chances are that nobody will survive this. This could be the extinction of the human species.
Now, to understand how we got to this point, one has to look at the recent history of at least the last 30 years, because we have been sleepwalking from a point, which was incredibly hopeful, into a worsening of the situation—step by step, step by step—and most people were completely indifferent to what was happening.
You should remember that in 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, many of the young people were not even born then, and don’t have a very good idea of what this period was: This was a moment of incredible historical potential, because you could have built a peace order, because the enemy was gone, or about to go; the Soviet Union did not represent a threat any more because Gorbachev had agreed to the democratization of the Eastern European countries, and this was what we called the “star hour of humanity,” one of those rare moments when you can shape history for the better.
Well, the Soviet Union did not represent a threat then, and therefore, it was quite normal that [U.S. Secretary of State] James Baker III, on Feb. 9, 1990, in a discussion with Gorbachev, promised, “NATO will not expand one inch to the East.” Now [NATO Secretary General] Stoltenberg nowadays says never was such a promise given, but that’s not true. Jack Matlock, who was U.S. Ambassador in Moscow at that time, has stated many, many times that, indeed, there was such a promise. There is a video with former German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, where he confirms the same thing, and just a few days ago, the then-French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas made an interview where he absolutely confirmed this, and said, yes, we did promise this, and a new document has appeared which is in the British Archives.
So there is overwhelming evidence that such a promise was made. And therefore, when Putin says now, that he feels betrayed, there is actual evidence, because also Putin came to Germany in 2001, and he addressed the German Bundestag, in German, and it was full of offers, full of hopes to build a common European house, to have cooperation. He talked about the German people, the people of culture, of Lessing, of Goethe.
And there was the potential to really even undo in the 1990s, with Yeltsin and the shock therapy. Because at that time, unfortunately, what had happened is that certain circles in great Britain and in the United States decided to build a unipolar world. Rather than building a peace order, they said, OK, now is the opportunity to build an empire based on the model of the British Empire, based on the special relationship between Great Britain and the United States: It was called PNAC, the Project for a New American Century. And slowly, step by step, they started to go for regime change of everybody who didn’t agree with that, for color revolution, for eventually humanitarian interventionist wars, which gave us Afghanistan, Iraq, which was based on lies; the incredible lying to the UN Security Council in the case of Libya; the attempt to topple Assad [in Syria]; wars which have caused {millions of people} to die, millions of people to become refugees and have a destroyed life.
So this was one area where Ukraine, from the very beginning, was big in the calculation. There were altogether five waves of NATO expansion, and in 2008, at the summit in Bucharest, it was promised that Ukraine and Georgia would become part of NATO, which, from the standpoint of Russia is really not acceptable. Because if you have rather than having NATO not moving “one inch to the East,” it moved 1000 km to the East! It’s sitting now in the Baltic countries, at the border of Russia, but Ukraine would mean that offensive weapons systems could reach Moscow in less 5 minutes, and make Russia, de facto, indefensible. You have to understand that that is the vital security interest of Russia, which, if NATO would include Ukraine, it would violate that interest, and that is why all this discussion that the Ukrainians have the right to choose their own alliance is really not true! Because it’s also a principle, in all the official documents, that you cannot have the security of one country at the expense of the security of another one, which would be Russia, in this case.
So what happened was, when the EU tried to include Ukraine in the EU Association Agreement at the end of 2013, Yanukovych, the President at that time, recognized that that was unacceptable, because it would have opened up the Black Sea and NATO practically for the Ukrainian ports, so he pulled out of the agreement. And then, immediately, you had the demonstrations on the Maidan; and it is always said these were only democratic people—sure, there were democratic people who wanted to be part of Europe and part of the West. But from the very beginning, there were elements which were kept by intelligence services since the Second World War, the networks of Stepan Bandera, that was the person who had cooperated with the Nazis in the Second World War, and Stepan Bandera became actually an agent of the MI6; his networks had offices in Munich, they were part of the anti-Bolshevist bloc of nations, they were kept by the intelligence services, the MI6, the CIA, the BND, for the case of a confrontation with the Soviet Union. And these networks were mobilized in the Maidan as part of a regime change operation, a color revolution, and then finally the coup, for which the United States, according to Victoria Nuland, had spent $5 billion to build up NGOs and basically trying to manipulate the population to think that if they joined the EU, they would be rich like Germany overnight, which naturally was never in the cards.
So then, naturally, the coup happened, and with the coup in February 2014, networks came to power which were extremely repressive against the Russian language, the Russian population, and that was why the people of Crimea voted to be part of Russia. It was not Putin who annexed Crimea, it was a measure of self-defense of the Russian-speaking people in Crimea to have a vote in a referendum. And the people in East Ukraine decided to declare independent republics for the very same reason.
Now, the Minsk agreement was supposed to find a negotiation to give these independent republics more autonomy within Ukraine, but the Ukraine government {never} pursued that, and Germany and France which were supposed to be part of the Normandy discussions, including Germany, France, Ukraine and Russia, they never put any pressure on the Ukrainian government so it did not go anywhere at all. In the meantime, you had more and more maneuvers around Russia, and this escalated to the point where, in November, there were maneuvers even flying planes testing and rehearsing a nuclear attack on Russia up to 14 miles within the border of Russia.
Now, it was that feeling of increasing encirclement, which is the reason why Putin declared on December 17 of last year, that he wanted to have security guarantees, for Russia, from the United States and NATO that they would guarantee legally binding the security of Russia, which would include: NATO not expanding any further to the East, Ukraine never becoming a member of NATO for the reasons I had mentioned earlier; and not to put offensive weapons on the border of Russia.
Now, he did not get an answer. He got an answer from the United States and NATO, basically responding to secondary issues, like a certain agreement to go back into arms negotiations, but he did not get an answer to the core demands. And that is why, for example, I think Russia and China have now moved into a very close strategic alliance, which happened on February 4, and Putin was trying to test out if there would be a willingness of European nations like Germany—whose Chancellor Scholz went to Moscow, French President Macron went to Moscow—but he came to the conclusion that there was no willingness to stand up against the continuous push by NATO and by the United States, to keep with the encirclement of Russia.
Now, you can say war is very bad, and naturally, it is the most horrible thing which can happen. But you have to understand that if you put the core security interests of Russia into jeopardy, well, that’s what you get! You have to understand the history of Russia: Because two times there was an invasion of Russia already. One was with Napoleon, who if you remember or if you know history, had an enormously big army and was going into the very wide region of Russia. And there was a plan to defeat Napoleon by luring him into the far regions, by having him draw a long operational line, by using the fact that Napoleon was destroying everything on the way in, to basically make it impossible for him to have any more requisition of food and other materials; they even allowed the burning down of Moscow, to make sure there was nothing with which Napoleon could survive the winter, so he had to make the decision to return, in the winter, with the snow. And when Napoleon’s troops finally came back at the end of the borders of Russia, there were only a few people from a previously gigantic army. This was a traumatic experience, already, there.
Then, naturally, you had Hitler, who also invaded Russia, and for the Russians this is an experience, which is deeply ingrained in their DNA, one can say, because they lost 27 million people! And for them, to defend Russia, it’s the most important—it’s a life-and-death question.
So, what happened now, is when all of this escalated, Russia said, we absolutely put a red line, when these red lines were not respected, then this was an action which was supposed to make very clear, and Putin said he will take a “military-technical reaction,” and I don’t think Russia has the intention to occupy Ukraine; I think they want to have some neutralization, they want to have a de-Nazification, and frankly, with the present combination—sure, Zelenskyy was democratically elected, but the Azov Brigade is still there as part of the defense forces, you have still in the parliament, a lot of right-wing elements, and Zelenskyy has changed from a peace-loving, or promising peace President, into somebody who is completely a tool, not even daring to bring up Minsk 2, because he feels under threat that if he goes for Minsk 2, he will be toppled or worse.
So, it is a situation where we have to accept the fact that a de-Nazification is not Russian propaganda, but it has a real element to it. And it’s a complete scandal that the West, with their so-called freedom-loving, Western values, “rules-based order,” democracy, human rights—which has become a little bit shale, after all these interventionist wars, and especially what was done, and is being done in Afghanistan, where people are left to die and it’s all a conscious policy, because people knew what would happen if there would be such a hasty withdrawal, leaving the Afghanistan people with absolutely nothing.
So we are in a very, very dangerous situation. On Sunday, an epochal shift has happened: Germany, which has good reasons to say “Never Again” do we want war, because we had two world wars on our soil, and in the memory of everybody, especially the older people, we have the stories of our parents and grandparents in our ears of what war does when it is on your soil! So on Sunday, there was an earthquake, which is I think an absolute catastrophe, because Chancellor Scholz made a government declaration in the parliament, which was turning the German government de facto into a war cabinet. They now want to have a beefing up of the Bundeswehr; they created a special fund of €100 billion for this year alone; they want to increase the military spending; they already are sending weapons to Ukraine, which was really against any principle Germany had, because it had the idea to never send weapons into crisis areas.
So all of this is happening. The German population is in a complete state of brainwashing. In France, it’s not very different, but in Germany it’s much worse. And people on the scene, who know both situations, were reporting that it can only be compared to the shock the American people had after 9/11. I was in the United States at that point, and I remember, you couldn’t talk to anybody, because people were completely crazy, hyped up, whipped up, and this is now the situation in Germany.
When I heard the speech of Chancellor Scholz yesterday, it reminded me of this horrible speech of Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm, Emperor Wilhelm II, on Aug. 6, 1914, when he announced Germany basically preparing for World War I. And we all know that at the beginning of World War I, nobody expected that it would be four years in the trenches, back and forth, back and forth, meaningless killing, and at the end, a whole generation was destroyed, and the Versailles Treaty was an unjust treaty, which was just creating the precondition for World War II.
So, what do we do now? I think the only chance is that we get an immediate international mobilization for an international security architecture which must take into account the security interest of every single nation on the planet, including Russia, including China, and the United States, Europe nations, and all other nations on the planet. The model for this is the Peace of Westphalia Treaty. That treaty came about because you had 150 years of religious war in Europe, the culmination of which was the Thirty Years’ War, and it led to the destruction of everything: One-third of assets, of people, of villages, of animals—so that eventually, people came to the conclusion that if they continue this war, there will be absolutely nobody left to enjoy the victory. And from four years, from 1644-1648, people were sitting together, working out a treaty which established very important principles. The most important principle was that peace can only be won if a new arrangement takes into account the interest of the other. And then it had other principles, such as, for the sake of peace, you have to make foreign policy on the basis of love; you have to forget the crimes on either side, because otherwise you would never get to an agreement; and it established the principle that in the reconstruction of the economy after the war, the state must have an important role, and that led to cameralism in economics.
This Treaty of Westphalia was the beginning of international law, and it is reflected today in the Charter of the United Nations, and it is that model which must be taken for nations to sit together, to say, what are the principles how we can give ourselves an order which allows the peaceful coexistence of all nations? And the equivalent of the cameralistic principles of the Peace of Westphalia must be that this new security architecture combination, must address that which is the real cause of war, which is the pending collapse of the Western financial system, which is about to blow long before this situation with Ukraine developed, but it will be aggravated now by the sanctions and all the consequences; and it must apply those measures which Lyndon LaRouche has defined already many years ago, namely, there must be an end to the casino economy, because that is what is driving this confrontation; there must be a global Glass-Steagall banking separation agreement; you must have a national bank in every single country in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton; and there must be a New Bretton Woods system to give a credit system for long-term development to uplift the developing countries through industrial development. And all of that must focus on the pressing issue of the pandemic: We need a world health system, because without that this pandemic and future pandemics will not go away; we need an increase in world food production, because we have a famine of “biblical dimensions” as David Beasley from the World Food Program is continuously saying; and we need to have an effort to overcome poverty in all countries where it is a threatening fact, such as those in Africa, many Latin American and Asia countries, even pockets in the United States and in Europe. And the framework is obviously the offer by China for the United States and Europe to cooperate with the Belt and Road Initiative, to maybe join the Build Back Better program of the United States and Global Gateway of the European Union, to not look at it as competition but as the chance for cooperation. Because only if the nations of this world work together economically, to the benefit of all, do you have the basis of trust to establish a security architecture, which can function.
So I think we have issued a call for such a conference, and such a new international security architecture, and I’m calling on your to promote that idea, to get many people to sign this petition, to get people to write articles, comment about it, create an international debate, that {we do need a new paradigm}: Because any continuation of geopolitics of the so-called “enemy image” of one or the other can only lead to a catastrophe, and if it comes to that, there will be nobody left to even comment about it, because it will be the end of humanity.
So I’m calling on you: Join our mobilization, because it is your life and all our own future.
