The Schiller Institute is very happy to release today, September 8, 2022, the First Edition of the “Festschrift for Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., September 8, 1922 – February 12, 2019 on the Centennial of His Birth.” Contributions continue to come in to commemorate Mr. LaRouche and we expect to have a Second Edition soon available.
On Wednesday, September 7 at 11 a.m. EDT, Executive Intelligence Review (EIR) hosted an international press conference on its just released reports, “Kiev’s ‘Info Terrorist’ List: ‘Global NATO’ Issues Hit on Advocates of Peace,” and follow-up article, “Ukraine’s Deathlist Database: myrotvorets.center,” by an EIR Investigative Team.
Scott Ritter, Ray McGovern, Col. Richard Black (ret.), Diane Sare, candidate for U.S. Senate, and other Americans targeted by Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD), who have also demanded Congressional action to stop the U.S. funding of the CCD, will be available to speak to the media. Simultaneous interpretation will be available for several languages (for more information concerning interpretation, contact us by email).
The EIR report states that, “Rapid, decisive international action is required to force the closure of the Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD), which operates under and answers to Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council. A blacklist issued by the CCD July 14, 2022, naming more than 70 leading journalists, academics, politicians, military, and other professionals from 22 countries, as ‘Kremlin propagandists,’ is a hitlist, posing a grave threat to the personal security of those named therein.”
And that EIR report further states that it has now confirmed that at least five of those fingered by the CCD are included in the list of “criminals to be eliminated” published by the avowedly fascist “Myrotvorets” gang in Ukraine: Schiller Institute founder and leader Helga Zepp-LaRouche; Schiller Institute spokesman Harley Schlanger; former CIA officer and active anti-war activist Ray McGovern, the co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), who has participated in Schiller Institute conferences; former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter; and former U.S. Congresswoman and Democratic presidential pre-candidate Tulsi Gabbard. The Myrotvorets list is reported to have accumulated nearly 200,000 names since it was started in 2014 and, given the difficulties in using its search engine, others from the CCD blacklist may also be on the Myrotvorets hitlist.
The report documents that, “Although the CCD operates under the Office of the Presidency, it is not Ukraine’s “Ministry of Truth”; it is, rather, Global NATO’s. It is funded and closely advised by the U.S. State Department, British intelligence, and NATO in every step it takes.”
Responsibility for the CCD/Myrotvorets hits, both those which have occurred and those threatened, will rest squarely on those international sponsors—including members of the U.S. Congress who vote in support of continued funding for the CCD operation.
by Helga Zepp-LaRouche
One hundred years ago, on September 8, Lyndon LaRouche was born, a person whom many people throughout the world, including myself, consider the greatest thinker of our era. For the Trans-Atlantic Establishment, on the other hand, he is the most hated, feared and slandered person and that, in the time of Donald Trump, Vladmir Putin and Xi Jinping, speaks volumes. As I was fortunate enough to be married to him for 41 years, and to have worked with him for half a century in building up an international movement, I can add my personal judgment that he was the most beautiful soul, in the sense of Friedrich Schiller, that I have ever met. That means that, for him, freedom and necessity, passion and duty were one, and he was precisely the type of individual that corresponds to the characterization Schiller gave of a genius. And what is truly excellent, is that his ideas are alive today and influential in many countries of the world.
Lyndon LaRouche had unparalleled knowledge and an unfailing sense of the coherence of philosophical, epistemological, cultural, and scientific concepts, which allowed him to be at home in the history of such ideas, and to immediately recognize their essential nature. Based on this ability, he rejected in the early 1950s the information theory and systems analysis of people such as Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann as inadequate for describing economic processes, and developed his own scientific method of physical economy, which built upon Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Friedrich List, Henry C. Carey and Bernhard Riemann, among others.
From this point of view and with the benefit of his vast knowledge of two thousand five hundred years of the history of European culture and science and of universal history in general, he recognized, much more clearly than anyone else, the potentially catastrophic effects of the drug-sex-rock counter-culture of the 1960s on the cognitive potential and, thus, on the long-term productivity of the population. What is likely his most significant forecast, however, was his assessment of President Nixon’s abolition of the Bretton Woods System through the introduction of flexible exchange rates and the decoupling of the dollar from the gold standard on August 15, 1971. He warned at that time that if the change in course that assumed—toward a purely monetarist financial system aimed at profit maximization—were to be maintained, the world would necessarily head toward a new depression, a new fascism, and the danger of a new world war, unless a totally new and just world economic order were established.
Unfortunately, the Trans-Atlantic Establishment did not listen to LaRouche. That is why, 50 years later, the world is now precisely at the point he had forecast. Over the course of the ensuing decades, every time the Wall Street and City of London financial oligarchy promoted the process of market deregulation to the detriment of the real economy, he put his finger on the wound, and analyzed the consequences of this policy. The Carter Administration’s policy of “controlled dis-integration of the economy,” Volker’s high interest rates, outsourcing to cheap labor markets, just-in-time production, the policy of mergers and acquisitions, Reaganomics and Thatcherism, the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, the shareholder-value society, derivatives speculation, the fatal consequences of the miraculous monetary expansion of QE and the zero-interest policy—he denounced all of these milestones of the neoliberal financial system as fundamental errors that were ultimately just stations on the way to the systemic crash.
Rather than using his analyses to correct their mistakes, the financial oligarchy regarded LaRouche from the beginning as a deadly danger for their system, and launched a decades-long international crusade to suppress his ideas and thereby his influence. A veritable army of agents of influence in the media and all kinds of institutions, including diplomats around the world, was deployed internationally to pressure anyone who showed interest in whatever form in his proposals.
The hundreds, if not thousands, of razor sharp analyses and assessments that LaRouche provided over the years would have absolutely sufficed to prevent the current strategic catastrophe. But at the same time, he also used his warnings to present concepts for a solution. When several heads of state began in the early 1980s to take up his ideas and implement them, the financial oligarchy basically decided that LaRouche had to be eliminated. Mexico’s then President, José López Portillo, had asked LaRouche to write for him a program in defense of the peso and the economy, which he began to implement on September 1, 1982. India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi began at the same time to implement LaRouche’s proposed 40-year program for the economic development of India. And on March 23, 1983, U.S. President Ronald Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) that LaRouche had proposed, which was the most extensive proposal for a new global security architecture that anyone had designed up to that time, which would have overcome the NATO and Warsaw Pact blocs and initiated a large-scale development perspective for the developing sector. President Reagan was ready to change the strategic constellation at the time, while the Arbatov-Ogarkov-Gorbachov faction in the Soviet Union rejected this proposal, and thereby chose a path that significantly contributed to the early demise of the Soviet Union.
LaRouche ran for President of the United States eight times, seven of them in Democratic Party primaries. Just reporting on the sabotage operations run against him by the party leadership apparatus associated with Al Gore, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the current leadership would fill an entire book. When LaRouche candidates began to win elections in 1986—taking the second and third highest positions for state office in primaries in Illinois—the decision was made to attack him for good. On October 6, 1986, the FBI staged a raid on LaRouche’s home and offices, deploying 400 heavily armed law enforcement officials, armored vehicles, and helicopters, an operation that makes the recent raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate by 40 FBI agents look like a child’s birthday party. The objective of the raid on LaRouche and myself was nothing less than to eliminate us physically, which was only prevented by an intervention from the White House.
What followed were trumped-up charges, the illegal use of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), rigged trials, and finally the incarceration of LaRouche and a number of his associates.
At an international tribunal initiated by civil rights activists and African-American state legislators after LaRouche was released from prison, the former U.S. Attorney General of the Johnson administration, Ramsey Clark, who took the initiative of intervening on his own, described the actions of the Administration as follows:
But in what was a complex and pervasive utilization of law enforcement, prosecution, media, and non-governmental organizations focussed on destroying an enemy, this case must be number one. There are some, where the government itself may have done more and more wrongfully over a period of time; but the very networking and combination of federal, state, and local agencies, of Executive and even some Legislative and Judicial branches, of major media and minor local media, and of influential lobbyist types, the ADL preeminently—this case takes the prize. The purpose can only be seen as destroying—more than a political movement, more than a political figure—it is those two; but it’s a fertile engine of ideas, a common purpose of thinking and studying and analyzing to solve problems, regardless of the impact on the status quo, or on vested interests. It was a deliberate purpose to destroy that at any cost….
I participated in this tribunal. I insisted emphatically that the greatest crime against LaRouche was not to have unjustly condemned such a great and wonderful mind to prison, but rather that the massive slander campaign of his name and his ideas prevented to a large extent the American population, and beyond that, the international public, from grappling with his ideas and above all with the solutions he proposed.
Today, 27 years after that tribunal, on the 100th anniversary of the birth of Lyndon LaRouche, we can study the result of the financial oligarchy’s attempted campaign to destroy him. The trans-Atlantic financial system is about to end in hyperinflation, the “rules-based order of values” and NATO are a colossus with feet of clay, and there is a transparent attempt to control the “narratives” by muzzling the entire population and immediately slandering anyone who voices an opinion of their own on the causes of the war or inflation as an “agent of Putin.” If the West continues like this, we will fail.
On the other hand, LaRouche’s ideas have had enormous success. His proposals for the development of infrastructure in developing countries, which he has presented since the early 1970s, and his program for the New Silk Road, which has become the World Land-Bridge and was his response to the collapse of the Soviet Union, are now being realized by China and its Belt and Road/Silk Road Initiative. The new economic and financial system being realized today by many countries and institutions in the Global South is based on his concept of physical economy, while economists in many countries, especially in Asia, are studying LaRouche’s writings and implementing them for the benefit of their countries.
LaRouche was a patriot of the America that fought the first successful war of independence against the British Empire, but he was also a world citizen, who always put the interest of mankind as a whole first. People could sense that, and when LaRouche traveled in developing countries or Europe, they often expressed their utmost trust in him, in a way that only true friendship would allow.
In rejecting LaRouche’s ideas, the West did itself no favor. That the United States treated its greatest son so ignobly will remain a stain on its history forever. The countries that apply his ideas are already economically successful, and will be even more so in the future. Although official success was denied to him by Western countries during his long and incomparably productive life, he led a rich, extraordinarily fulfilling and happy life, because he was inwardly the most free and most creative person on Earth. Was Socrates successful, even though he was murdered? He certainly is, while his murderers are forgotten dust.
Lyndon LaRouche is the Nemesis of his enemies and the joy and pride of a future, better era for mankind. He is immortal.
Aug. 16—The following statement was issued this month, to crossfire international support, after farm and ranch leaders from four countries met on the crisis.
We stand together with the German farmers in their protest demonstrations in August. They are on the front lines, alongside the Dutch farmers, in protesting to stop the dictates that will shut down farms, and cause mass food shortages, ordered by their governments, and by the European Union in Brussels.
Dutch farmers face mandates to cut livestock by as much as 30%. The excuse for this is to reduce emissions and run-off of nitrous oxide and ammonia. German farmers face mandates to drastically cut use of fertilizer, pesticides and cropland itself. Similar mandates are coming down in the Americas, and other targeted agriculture regions. The year 2030, and earlier are the deadlines.
The originators of these deadly mandates operate through an international constellation of globally powerful, private banks, NGOs, transnational corporations, and captive government offices. They must be stopped. They know full well their directives mean depopulation.
We must expand, not cut, food production. We have a world food shortage emergency. Over 800 million people go hungry, and millions of them are headed to death by starvation. These numbers could double in a year. The world grains harvest is going down.
Our support for the German and Dutch farmers is a call to action among our fellow citizens, in whichever country we may be, to restore national sovereignty, and stop the destructive dictates and the trans-national finance and cartel powers behind them.
We need sovereign government action, and collaboration among nations, to expand independent food producers everywhere, and mobilize emergency and long- term measures to vastly increase food production. Double it! We need mutual-interest trade and foreign relations, and cancellation of economic sanctions. Use anti-trust to bust up the monopolies. Re-regulate banking on the Glass-Steagall principle. Build infrastructure (water, power, public health, transport) to protect from drought, floods, and all disasters.
Food is not a “farmer’s issue.” We call on people from all walks of life to join with us, in supporting the farmers everywhere.
Add your signature and/or send a message to the farmer organizers of the Aug. 31 demonstrations in Germany, via email: contact@schillerinstitute.org
Mike Billington interviews Col. Richard H. Black (ret.) on the Ukraine Center for Countering Disinformation board hit list, the Ukraine war and his thoughts about the Schiller Institute’s role in today’s crisis.
Mike Billington: Hello. This is Mike Billington. I’m the co-editor of the Executive Intelligence Review representing the Schiller Institute and the LaRouche Organization. I’m here today, August 23, 2022, with Colonel Richard A. Black—Senator Richard Black—who, after serving for 31 years in the U.S. Marines and in the Army, then served in the Virginia House of Delegates from 1998 to 2006, and in the Virginia Senate from 2012 to 2020, I’ll allow Colonel Black to describe his military service himself.
Colonel Black, my interview with you April 26, which focused on the difference between the U.S. and the Russian military operations in Syria and also in Ukraine, now has had nearly 3 million views, a million in English, over half a million in Russia with Russian subtitles, and many, many other languages. The thousands of comments, have been mostly of the nature of high praise for a military veteran telling the truth about the extreme danger of the failed U.S. leadership, which is driving the world towards global war, perhaps even nuclear war. So, you have a very large following around the world!
For Ministries of ‘Truth,’ Truth Is the Danger’
Perhaps that is one of the reasons that you are one of the 72 people who were placed on the blacklist published July 14 by the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD), which of course means Censorship Board, or Ministry of Truth, you could say. The CCD was set up by the U.S. State Department and the U.S. and British intelligence in Kiev to label any challenge to the approved narrative about military operations in Ukraine as “Russian propaganda,” even calling the people on the list, i.e., you, “information terrorists” and “war criminals. What is your view of this?
Col. Richard Black: Well, let me start, if I could, by just giving our listeners a little bit of my background. I want to make it very clear that I love my country. I’ve risked my life for it hundreds of times. I volunteered to fight in Vietnam. I was a helicopter pilot, flew 269 combat missions. My helicopter was hit by enemy ground fire on four of those flights. In one case, bullets that were aimed directly at me tore through the cowling of the cockpit just behind my head. They very nearly hit me.
I was flying off the carrier Iwo Jima in the South China Sea off the coast of the Philippines, when the flight operations officer who briefed us in the morning, told us our squadron has been tasked with providing a volunteer to fight on the ground with the 1st Marine Division, which was at the time heavily engaged in combat. I immediately volunteered, went to work with the 1st Marine Division, and fought in 70 bloody combat patrols. During my final patrol, I was wounded. Both my radiomen were killed next to me after we had launched a rubber boat assault and crossed a river under enemy fire.
I served a total of 32 years in uniform, first as a marine pilot, then as an Army lawyer, I ran legal offices at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, Fort Ord, California, and at Fort Lewis, Washington. In each of those I supervised 25-40 Army lawyers. Finally, I retired as Chief of the Criminal Law Division at the Pentagon, where I testified before Congress. I advised the Senate Armed Services Committee and prepared executive orders that were signed by the President.
That said, I am adamantly opposed to our current wars and especially the very dangerous war that we’ve engaged in in Ukraine. I believe the U.S., the U.K., and the European Union have embarked on an imprudent course of action that has carried a significant risk of triggering an all-out nuclear war.
Moving on to the issue of the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation. It’s very interesting—this woman, Nina Jankewitz, created quite a media frenzy when it was discovered that the Department of Homeland Security was going to set up a disinformation board, a “Ministry of Truth,” to decide which versions of facts would be permissible and which ones would be censored. This was censorship at the very highest levels of the federal government.
Nina Jankewitz is a rather bizarre, young, narcissistic woman with an extensive background of working within the Ukrainian system and informing those people about how to control so-called “disinformation.” Now, she was President Biden’s pick to be the Director of the Department of Homeland Security’s new Disinformation Governance Board. Literally, the sole purpose of that board was to censor critics of government policies. This is a woman who supposedly is going to make things more truthful by suppressing voices like yours and mine. It’s interesting that she issued some tweets that implied that reports about Hunter Biden’s laptops were somehow Russian disinformation.
Well, I think practically everyone in the country, Democrat and Republican, understands that there is something gravely wrong with Hunter Biden’s laptops and the information revealed on them. Jankewitz has said that she shudders to think of what free speech abolitionists would do if Elon Musk loosens the restrictions on free speech imposed by Twitter. In other words, if there is somehow an explosion of freedom in America, she just doesn’t know how the world would deal with the truth.
You know, the truth is quite a danger. We do know that she has very close connections with the Ukrainian government, and the Ukrainian government has set up a Disinformation Board, which issued essentially a blacklist which contains 72 names, 30 of whom were speakers at a conference of the Schiller Institute, which has done some excellent work in keeping people informed about what’s going on. This blacklist is clearly intended to instill fear and to silence critics, to censor critics.
Here we have a situation where the Department of Homeland Security is giving guidance to the Ukrainian government, to the SBU, which is sort of a terroristic secret police in in Ukraine, telling them how to suppress the voices of American citizens. Not only American. There is an Italian General, a lot of prominent people. We’ve got a very real problem where we have American taxpayer dollars being spent by the Department of Homeland Security for the purpose of silencing free speech. That’s where we stand right now.
The Targetting of the Schiller Institute
Billington: As you mentioned, 30 of the people on that list were either leaders or friends of the Schiller Institute, who spoke at one of the Schiller Institute conferences. You spoke at several Schiller Institute conferences with Helga Zepp-LaRouche. What is your sense of why there’s this extreme targeting of the Schiller Institute by these Ukrainian forces?
Col. Black: I think if you look at the people who have appeared at these various conferences and interviews that have been done by Schiller Institute—the Schiller Institute and the Executive Intelligence Review publish highly accurate, very balanced foreign policy assessments, and also raw intelligence from which people can simply look and see what the media from all different nations is saying. You have this aggregation of open source intelligence, which allows people to sift through and to some extent, to arrive at their own conclusions. And I think that the Schiller Institute is viewed as a genuine threat to the new world order, the globalist, the deep state, whatever you want to call them. For them, truth is the ultimate disinformation.
Billington: You were one of 16 Americans on that hit list who this past week signed a letter to six congressional committees—the Intelligence, Judiciary and Foreign Affairs Committees in both the House and the Senate—a letter which demands an investigation of, as you said, the use of taxpayer money to finance a foreign entity in Ukraine, which is threatening the right to constitutionally guaranteed free speech of Americans, as well as threatening the personal safety of American citizens, given that people are accused of being propagandists for Russia with whom Ukraine is at war, and therefore to call these people war criminals and terrorists, is clearly a threat that something might be done physically. Scott Ritter, a former Marine intelligence officer who’s also on the list, made the point that when you’re dealing with the Ukraine regime, such a list is a “kill list.”
As both a former military officer who headed the Army’s Criminal Law Division and a political leader who served in the Virginia House and Senate, what is the impact of this U.S.-sponsored and -funded threat on you and others? And what must the Congress do?
Col. Black: You know, it’s interesting. At the at the height of the Islamic caliphate that was set up by the terror group ISIS, I was among three Americans who were named as enemies of ISIS. ISIS called me “The American Crusader,” and that was certainly a hit list. And so it’s ironic, but here we are and we now have not the infamous terror group ISIS, but we have the Ukrainian government operating, probably under the specific direction of the Department of Homeland Security, to put me on a target list, which frankly, today I think is far more dangerous. I think ISIS ended up having much more to worry about than whether I liked them or didn’t like them. But I think today the hit list published by the Ukrainian government is probably a more deadly hit list.
Just this week, Daria Dugina, the daughter of an activist, a pro-Russian activist, was murdered in Moscow, apparently by a Ukrainian assassin who killed her using a bomb that exploded under her car, ripping her body to pieces and burning her to death. Since the United States has admitted being involved in targeting 13 Russian Generals for assassination in Ukraine, it is possible that the CIA provided the targeting information to go after this young woman.
Apparently, they were actually targeting her father. He’s an established pro-Russian pro-war journalist. And they wanted to show that they have the ability to go right into Moscow and to carry out a mafia style hit. So, they did it. I would not be surprised if the CIA provided the targeting information to go after her. It was just a last-minute switch of automobiles that caused the daughter to die instead of the father.
I would agree with Scott Ritter to this extent. The CIA and the Department of Homeland Security have a common interest in blocking access to the truth about the Ukrainian war. The SBU, the secret intelligence agency of Ukraine, is being molded through a series of rather violent purges by Zelensky into one of the most ruthless intelligence agencies in history. It is possible that the SBU could view the Ukraine/Department of Homeland Security’s joint list as some sort of a kill signal authorizing them to go after individuals, to attempt to assassinate them.
The Case of Senate Candidate Diane Sare
Billington: Another person on the CCD list is Diane Sare, the independent LaRouche candidate from New York State for U.S. Senate against Chuck Schumer. Chuck Schumer was one of the leading members of the Congress pushing the massive funding of the Ukraine government and war, including their Security and Defense Council, which set up this hit list. She’s on the hit list, and running against Chuck Schumer. So, Chuck Schumer is financing a foreign entity which is threatening a candidate against him. This would appear to be a quite virulent intervention into an American election. Do you have some thoughts on that?
Col. Black: I do know that Diane Sare is on the hit list. I’ve listened to her discuss this issue in an interview with Scott Ritter. She is an amazingly bright, informed, articulate, appealing candidate. I can’t imagine anyone being a better representative of the American people than Diane Sare. She would certainly have my vote if I were in New York. She makes clear what’s going on.
Here we have a senatorial candidate, a prominent woman in New York, and you’ve got Chuck Schumer in a position where he’s funding Homeland Security. I’m sure that he’s quite comfortable with the idea of a Disinformation Board, because there’s a lot of “disinformation” about him that he’d like to suppress! It shows the darkness and the challenge that the American Disinformation Board, and the Ukrainian Disinformation Board—the threat that they pose to freedom. These are not instruments of the people. They’re not instruments of liberty and freedom. They are instruments of tyranny. These are the kinds of things that the Gestapo, that the Bolsheviks, that the great tyrannies of the world imposed—some sort of preclearance on what you can say and what you can’t. I think it’s a very, very bad sign.
The FBI Raid on Donald Trump’s Home
Billington: U.S. taxpayers are also funding our Department of Justice, and the FBI, and that means they are also financing the raid against the former President’s home. In February 2020, Donald Trump, as everybody knows, was impeached for allegedly trying to influence President Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine to investigate alleged criminal behavior by President Trump’s opponent, Joe Biden, and especially his son, Hunter, as you mentioned. And yet here’s Joe Biden raiding the home of his possible opponent in the 2024 presidential election. What are your thoughts on this raid?
Col. Black: The raid is absolutely outrageous. It is amazing. If you look at what happened here, this is an election year stunt. There’s no justification for it. It is clearly designed as a Hail Mary pass by the Democrats to say, “Look, let’s do a raid and play it up with publicity, and hopefully it’ll somehow taint the Trump campaign for President.” As a practical matter, what has happened since the raid occurred, the American people are waking up. They’ve said, “Hey, wait a minute, we just don’t go for this idea of raiding your political opponent.”
Think about this. When Richard Nixon was in the White House, he was overthrown over a third-rate political prank at the Watergate. It was like Republicans vs. Democrats. In the election prior to Watergate, the Democrats had broken in and burglarized the Republican headquarters. Here we were, and the Republicans burglarizing the Democratic headquarters, and yet they managed to overthrow the Presidency over this. Think of how trivial that event was relative to conducting an all-out FBI raid on the residence of the President of the United States or the former President.
Now, if you look at the way that the FBI did it, of course, you know, they’ve got a very dark history of this. They did it in a way that was designed for maximum publicity. The FBI tipped off the news media to when they were going to be there so that the news media would be able to be on the scene. They chose to maximize the visual setting so that they had emergency lights flashing. They had 30 FBI agents swarming all over the place carrying fully automatic submachine guns in full view. Democrats hate the AR-15, except when their agents are descending on their political opponents, and then they don’t care whether they use machine guns or mortars or whatever. This was set up. They may have had Hollywood directors telling them how to do it—I’m not saying that for a fact—but they thought it through. They thought, “How can we play this out in the media?” It was deliberately designed as a media circus.
Let’s look at their justification for this. They say that President Trump had some classified papers in some cartons that he took when he left the White House.
I have old documents that I’m going through for the first time now, that date back to 1963, and they’ve sat in dusty containers ever since. The idea that somehow President Trump, in between his incredible schedule of making appearances, is going through all these old dusty boxes—I don’t find that too convincing.
But here’s something that I think will interest your listeners. Seymour Hersh is probably the finest investigative journalist of our times. He won the Pulitzer Prize over the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. He exposed the abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. He’s a magnificently talented individual. He has spent many, many years, while he’s writing other books and doing other investigative things. He has been, for over 30 years now, preparing a book called The Dark Side of Camelot. It’s a book about President Kennedy and his administration and so forth.
In that book, Hersh interviews a woman named Suzanne K. Forbes, a national security archivist at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. She’s responsible for maintaining the National Security Archives that are held by the Kennedy family, essentially, at the Kennedy Library. She told Hersh, referring to the Eisenhower administration, that the Eisenhower administration left virtually none of its national security files behind when it vacated the White House, and that this typically is the case with outgoing presidential administrations.
Reflect on that. You have national classified holdings today at the Kennedy Library, just as you have in other Presidential libraries. You have the national security archivist at the Kennedy Library saying that this is a typical thing that’s done by different outgoing administrations, specifically the Eisenhower administration, which had some very dark secrets in its time.
If all other Presidents take archives when they leave office, and later on release them at their pleasure from their Presidential archives, why does that suddenly become a crime because Donald Trump does it and the deep state doesn’t like Donald Trump? This whole thing is a total fabrication. We’ve got the Attorney General of the United States, working hand-in-glove with the Biden administration to suddenly create something criminal out of thin air. It’s just a total hoax. It was an attempt to try to influence the midterm elections and nothing else.
No Peace in Ukraine Before Mid-Term Elections
Billington: Let me switch to the global strategic crisis. In our April 26 interview, you warned very stringently that we’re facing the threat of global war and even a nuclear war, and that continues today. The U.S. continues to pour billions of dollars in heavy military hardware into Ukraine. Just last Friday, the Pentagon announced another $775 million in arms shipments, including additional ammunition for the HIMARS system, the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, which the spokesman claimed has “really changed the dynamic on the battlefield.”
What is your professional opinion of that claim and the military situation in general in this ongoing conflict?
Col. Black: HIMARS appears to be a very effective system. The HIMARS fires rockets that are GPS guided, so it’s extraordinarily accurate. However, they talk about the HIMARS as though it is somehow going to turn the tide of battle. There is never a particular single weapon that turns the tide of battle. The HIMARS does make a difference, but it will not be decisive.
What we have seen, if you’ve been watching the war from the beginning, the Ukrainians have fought a very fine defensive war, very tenacious. But at the same time, here we are at the six-month point, and they have never once launched a significant counteroffensive. They’ve had limited counterattacks. You know, you can have a single company that launches a counterattack and goes back and forth. But I’m talking about a counteroffensive where they actually make a drive to seize territory somewhere. Not a single time have they done that. At the same time, NATO, the United States had a flood of weapons pouring in to Ukraine. A great many of those have been destroyed. Many of them are being sold on the black market.
Just recently, a very, very good friend of mine, the former military attaché of the Pakistani embassy, Lieutenant General Sarfraz Ali, one of the corps commanders in Pakistan, died in a tragic helicopter accident. There are very strong rumors that he was shot down. Now, the United States has been so loose with control over its anti-aircraft weapons that those things are literally being sold on the dark web. So it’s quite possible that he was shot down either by one of these weapons that was lost in Afghanistan, or perhaps one that’s being sold by the Ukrainians.
In any event, there’s a tremendous bleed-off of weapons that are being sent to Ukraine, and then sold off by oligarchs, diverted in different ways to terror groups and so forth. The flow of weapons to the Ukrainian army has slowed very dramatically since the beginning of the war, and yet the flow of weapons on the Russian side continues. It’s very steady.
People looking at the Ukraine Russian war are somehow saying, “Well, look, the Russians haven’t staged an enormous blitzkrieg.” But you have to realize that the eastern part of Ukraine is heavily industrialized. What the Russians are really doing is fighting urbanized combat on a very massive regional scale. You don’t do that with some sudden rush. It’s not as though you’re going off across empty planes, rolling your tanks, like might have happened sometimes in the Second World War. It is urban combat. It’s very, very difficult, very brutal. And yet the Russians continuously move forward and they are inflicting enormous, just a terrible number of casualties on the Ukrainians.
I’m confident that nothing will be done to achieve peace before the mid-terms, because there’s no way that the United States is going to allow Zelensky to talk peace with the Russians. But I hope that they will do it, because I hate to see these young Ukrainian men being slaughtered, they’re just being used as cannon fodder for the Russians and also that the West can achieve certain political gains and sell weapons and so forth.
‘The Effort to Destroy Russia Has Failed’
Billington: In particular, Secretary of Defense, Gen. Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Tony Blinken were in Kiev at the same time as our previous interview in April. Austin said at that point, “we want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kind of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.” Now, this is not a military policy. This is a geopolitical mission to destroy Russia and its people through the massive sanction policy, as well as the proxy war in Ukraine. What do you think about this? And is the effort to destroy Russia working?
Col. Black: When we first went in there, there was all sorts of excited talk, from the President on down, about how we were going to turn the ruble into dust. We would destroy it. We would impose sanctions like nobody had ever seen. We would just cut off Russia and they would all starve or whatever. And we have moved to do everything that we claimed we would do. But the fact of the matter is that there was an initial sort of a shock wave in Russia. The ruble initially declined. There was a sudden outflow of capital, a momentary outflow.
But then, the Russian Central Bank moved quite aggressively, very effectively to limit capital outflows, to devise ways to work around the sanctions. The ruble today is at a seven-year high, during the time since the invasion. The ruble has become the world’s strongest single currency in terms of its appreciation against other currencies. Instead of being turned to dust, it has become much stronger than any other currency. Part of this comes from the fact that Russia has heavy gold reserves and very low debt, unlike the United States, which prints money on a whim. Russia has to follow budgets and they don’t spend money that they don’t have. So it’s given them tremendous financial resiliency. As far as the sanctions were concerned, the Russian balance of trade is now triple what it was before the war. The reason for this is that they have found alternative markets for their oil.
Russia’s selling to China. They’re selling to India. They’re selling to Japan. They’re even selling to Turkey, which is one of the NATO countries! They’re selling oil all around the world. They’re selling all of their commodities. They do it at a heavily discounted price, but they produce them at a low price; they’re making lots of profits. It’s interesting how the media talks about, “Well, there’s a recession going to hit them,” and they call Putin a dictator, even though he’s elected, in fairly fair elections relative to our own. I guess he’s an elected dictator! But then they always acknowledge that he is reluctant to declare full mobilization because the people might not like it. So he is far more responsive to the Russian people than our government is to our people. I don’t think he’s a dictator. I think he is a duly elected government representative of the people.
In any event, the effort to destroy Russia has failed. And now, as we approach the Winter, there is a growing sense of panic in Europe. Russia didn’t impose sanctions, the U.S. imposed sanctions, and the U.S. forced the European Union to impose sanctions. Who did the sanctions hurt? They hurt Europe more than anybody else. They hurt the United States somewhat. But we have really just thrown Europe under the bus because they depend on the Russian gas, oil, and other commodities. So, no, it has not worked.
Flaunting the ‘One China’ Policy
Billington: We have a parallel situation now developing in Asia. As you know, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who’s third in line to the presidency, recently visited Taiwan, even though President Biden had a phone call with President Xi Jinping just days before the trip, during which President Xi Jinping called on Biden to stop it, saying “those who play with fire will perish by fire.” Biden even said publicly that the U.S. military was advising Pelosi not to go, although that might have been just him saying it. But it appears that the same military-industrial forces who launched the surrogate war against Russia in Ukraine want to do the same thing with Taiwan, that they’re trying to force China to act militarily to defend their sovereignty, and then blame them and impose massive sanctions and decoupling on China as they have with Russia. What is your view of the Asia ploy?
Col. Black: This whole thing about Taiwan has been a concoction of the U.S. State Department. If the United States were not constantly putting a sharp stick in the eye of the Chinese, things would be quiet around the Taiwan issue. The United States recognized long ago that there was One China and that Beijing was the seat of government for One China. But we did it in a very delicate way that sort of preserved some autonomy for Taiwan. We didn’t officially recognize their government, but unofficially, there was sort of an acknowledgement that we saw some legitimacy to it. There’s a very delicate balance.
Henry Kissinger has recently spoken about it—I know he’s not one of your favorites. He’s not one of mine. But as he grows old, he said a few things that were accurate. And one is, he’s been rather distraught about how cavalier we have been in upsetting this very delicate balance. As he said, and I agree with him, that the One China policy established by Richard Nixon—I think generally acknowledged as one of his great achievements—has preserved peace in that region for 50 years. It’s enhanced trade enormously.
I tended to agree with President Trump that we needed to renegotiate some things on the trade scene, but it didn’t mean that we had to become hostile, and I don’t think President Trump intended any hostility toward China. I think he just intended to try to gain a little bit of advantage for American firms. And I didn’t disagree with that.
President Biden has not been good on China, but at the same time, he at least had the sense to recognize that what Pelosi was doing was her swan song—I don’t know what she gets out of it personally, but she obviously hopes for something because, she’s going to be out of office after November because she will almost certainly step down when the Republicans take over.
So, what is it? What motivated her to make this extremely provocative visit? She was forcing the Chinese to react in some way. Fortunately, they’ve done it in a balanced way that was probably the minimum of what they could have reasonably done. They’ve done a little bit of a show of force, flying aircraft and ships and that kind of thing. But we always run the risk that something like what Pelosi’s done, or one of these very provocative movements of ships, something that we do, triggers an inordinate response. Somehow, we’re relying on the maturity and the good judgment of people in China to prevent some catastrophe from happening. At the same time, we’re allowing ourselves to take the most reckless, provocative steps, totally in reliance on their good judgment over on the other side. It’s not wise.
Contempt of Military and Civilian Officials for Americans
Billington: You may have seen that Susan Glasser and Peter Baker, two leading journalistic promoters of the regime-change wars around the world—they’ve never seen a war they didn’t like—recently published an article in The New Yorker about Gen. Mark Milley, who was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump and still is so today. The article is called “Inside the War Between Trump and His Generals.” They report that Milley opposed Donald Trump, his Commander-in-Chief, on many fronts, but especially on Trump’s orders to end the “endless wars” in Afghanistan and in Syria. Glasser and Baker, of course, support Milley in rejecting those orders, to therefore continue the wars.
Milley is still Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. You’ve strongly criticized him in the past. In your professional view, what do you think about what is going on there with the top military officers of our country?
Col. Black: First of all, the article is a very, very interesting article. You have to read it understanding the enormous bias and prejudice of the two people who wrote the article. They obviously have no concept of self-governance, of the right of the people to govern themselves. They seem to think of the American public as a bunch of buffoons who need to be governed by an unaccountable elite, which, unfortunately, is the case now. When President Trump was elected, he had no governmental experience. His greatest single failing was that he selected a cabinet and he selected general officers who literally despised him and disagreed with every policy that he had campaigned on and promised the American people.
Keep in mind, the American people elected Trump because of those policies, not because they liked his style—well, some of them did probably like his style—but they liked his policies. They liked his foreign policy, among other things. But unfortunately, Trump was sort of enamored by people with Ivy League degrees, with Generals who have lots of stars on their shoulders. He didn’t realize the cultural change that took place under Clinton. Obama, now continues under Biden, where we no longer have the great American patriots in the Pentagon and the State Department. We now have people who are very disdainful of the American people. They have sort of a contempt and a hatred for the people that they govern.
As you read the Glasser and Baker article, you see that within the national security establishment, Department of State, the CIA, the FBI, there was quite a contempt for a government of the people. A comment by one of the authors reflects this: “Yet the Constitution offered no practical guide for a General faced with a rogue President.” Now, if that doesn’t tell you something about the way the elites look at our system of government — how can the President be a “rogue President? He’s the highest elected official in the land. He is the person who is entrusted by the public with carrying out their will. How can he be a “rogue President?”
I think all of the people who were opposing him were rogue Generals, rogue cabinet officials. This Mark Milley’s made some rather bizarre statements. One of them was after Jan. 6, when we had the demonstrations at the at the Capitol. He calls together the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and he makes this bizarre statement. He says: “This is a Reichstag moment, the moment of the Führer!” This man is a histrionic buffoon. He is a dangerous individual who truly is a threat to the Constitution. That kind of bizarre type of reaction—we’ve seen the same thing when he’s testified before the U.S. Senate in June 2021, defending the teaching of Critical Race Theory in our service academies.
Gen. Milley made this angry statement: he said, “I want to read Critical Race Theory,” or something like that. “I want to read this Critical Race Theory so that I’ll understand white rage.” Well, if you hate white soldiers, then get out of the uniform. Get the heck out of there. You have no business there. White rage. This isn’t white rage.
The Jan. 6, 2021 demonstrations had about 900,000 people in the nation’s capital, and they were a cut of Americana. They were black, they were white, they were Asian, they were Hispanic, almost in the same proportions as the entire country. There were plenty of all of these. It wasn’t a token here and there. There were lots of blacks, lots of Asians, lots of Hispanic, lots of whites. It was a mix of America rising up not to overthrow the Constitution, but to ensure that the Constitution was followed and was not overthrown. And it was not a violent revolution. There wasn’t a single person caught in the Capitol with a weapon. The only person who was killed, who was deliberately killed that Jan. 6, was killed by an officer, an agent working for Nancy Pelosi, who gunned down an unarmed woman who had no arms, had nothing. Without warning, he just shot her through the neck and killed her. That was the only killing that took place on that day.
Three times, the President ordered that we remove U.S. troops from Syria. When he ordered it done, he just gave a blank, no nonsense order, “You will withdraw by a date certain,” Gen. James Mattis, who was Secretary of Defense at the time, resigned in order to throw some chaos into the chain of command. John Bolton, who was National Security Adviser, flew over to Tel Aviv and announced over there that we were not withdrawing, simply countermanding the order of the President of the United States. Later on, after the President had totally reshuffled his cabinet to try to get some loyal people in, he again ordered that American troops withdraw from Syria. Again, they simply refused to obey the order.
There is a danger that when you have a military establishment that is not responsive to the President of the United States, we begin to set ourselves up for a military coup and the imposition of a military dictatorship. I think the leadership in the Pentagon today is inclined in that direction, and I think it’s a very dangerous thing. I’m hoping that whether it’s Trump or whether it’s someone else, whoever takes over in January 2025 must conduct an organized, orderly purge of the general officers and replace them with people who are loyal to the Constitution of the United States. That is absolutely imperative.
Today’s Global Crises Require Global Cooperation
Billington: If there is any chance of preventing the danger that you’ve indicated now for months of heading into a global war, a global nuclear war, perhaps, it would require that the U.S. and Russia and China sit down together, not go to war, but sit down to resolve all of the global issues that are now confronting mankind in this perfect storm: the rush to war; the hyperinflationary collapse of the dollar-based global financial system; famine, which is now reaching “biblical proportions,” according to the head of the UN World Food Program; the continuing pandemic; and more. The Schiller Institute has announced a conference for Sept. 10-11 under the title “Inspiring Humanity to Survive the Greatest Crisis in World History.”
What, in your view, is required to move the U.S. off of its suicide course and to join in the necessary deliberations of all nations to find solutions based on the dignity of all nations and all people?
Col. Black: I do think that over the years, there’s always a tendency towards hyperbole, that this and that is the worst thing that we’ve ever faced, and so forth. However, I do believe we have reached a point, particularly during the Biden administration, where the foundations of democracy have been severely weakened and undermined. We have had an election which was highly questionable at best and transparently fraudulent by another viewpoint. We’re in a posture where if we continue in this direction, we can see the emergence of a of a censorship state, a state that no longer recognizes the right to free speech. We see it where government uses private companies like Facebook, Twitter, all of the Internet, social media companies. There is undoubtedly some coordination and a tremendous amount of censorship is emerging. There is beginning to be a certain level of acceptance of censorship.
We are at a turning point, because right now, through the Schiller Institute, through various other outlets, there still is the means of communicating to sort of a policy elite, a group of people who are sufficiently intellectual and sufficiently educated to understand the gravity of where we are. Whether those voices will be silenced if the elections do not go in the right way, I think is certainly a very genuine question.
Now, I don’t say this as some kind of a hardcore Republican. I’ve always voted Republican, always very, very Republican. But at the same time, I have some very grave concerns about elements of the Republican Party that I’m not sure that all of the Republican Party is that devoted to freedom and liberty. But we’ve got to win the next two elections, and we’ve got to do it in the face of what will undoubtedly be widespread voter fraud. Watch the polls.
People must not sit this out and say, “Well, it’s a crooked election. I can’t do it.” There’s always been a certain level of fraud in our elections. We have a long and storied history of voter fraud. Many major elections have been decided by voter fraud and Presidential elections certainly have. We know that the Kennedy-Nixon election was rigged. I think that’s fairly widely acknowledged today. So, we’ve got to watch the polls, but we’ve got to get out. We’ve got to vote.
The new President, whether it’s Trump, whether it’s someone else, has got to nominate and have confirmed a cabinet that is loyal to the American people. Loyal to the things that the president campaigned on. If they don’t believe in what the President campaigned on, they have no business being there. Why does he want voices of dissent? It’s one thing to have people say, “Mr. President, I don’t think it’d be wise to implement your policy this way. I think we should do it in another way.” That’s the kind of dissent that’s positive. But we have people who simply hate what the President stands for and despises the man personally. Those people had no business in government. It’s not supposed to work that way.
The President’s got to confirm people who are representative of the American people and not simply beholden to the globalist elites. We’ve got to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria, which is a tragic war. We’ve got to get out of Ukraine. We’ve got to get out of Somalia. We sent troops into Somalia to start a war in Somalia, intervene in a war in Somalia. They didn’t even bother to explain to people why, it’s just some little one paragraph: “We’re sending troops.” We’re going to war in countries without even bothering to inform the American people, to concoct some kind of a justification. It’s just we’re going to send them off to war. We’re in Somalia.
Why are we occupying Germany 75 years after the war? Why do we still have an occupation force in Germany? Why do we still have an occupation force in Japan? I mean, for goodness sake, these have been our strongest allies. There’s no excuse for that. And it certainly doesn’t benefit the American people in any way.
Now, I do think one of the one of the most hopeful signs I have seen is that if you look at the Supreme Court decisions from the last term, not just singling out this one or that one, but as a whole, there is at least a genuine hope that the Supreme Court, as it’s constituted today, is moving towards a restoration of Constitutional governance with the separation of powers, with the recognition of the rights of states, with a withdrawal of authority from the faceless, unelected bureaucrats.
I think there’s a great deal of hope, and I think that should inspire Americans, because up until now, really, since the 1950s, Americans would have some enormous drive to change the law, and then the Supreme Court would wrap them on the knuckles with a hickory stick and say, “Get back in line. You’re not going to have your will through the ballot box. You’re going to shut up and be in your place.” The new Supreme Court, I think, offers some help.
We’ve got to build and enforce a wall on our southern border and stop tinkering around with it, saying, “Let’s do a little of this and a little of that.” I think we need to be prepared to use military force against the cartels, which are killing 100,000 people a year.
My goodness! In the 10 years of the Vietnam War, we only lost 60,000. And that was the last truly bloody war we fought. 60,000 and the cartels kill 100,000 every year! And then when President Trump suggested, I think it was to his Chief of Staff, “We know where these cartel leaders are. Why don’t we just take them out, you know, use missiles, take them out,” apparently the Chief of Staff was just aghast: “Oh, my goodness, you would hurt the cartel? The cartels are wired in with all these politicians, they’re where all the money comes from!”
Well, the United States needs to be prepared to take action and not to fly some FBI clowns down and arrest these guys. We have a war going on with these cartels across the southern border. We need to take them out. We need to kill them. There is no excuse for these cartels murdering 100,000 people a year in the United States while we sit back and our so-called Department of Defense has all of its troops all over the world, and they’re not defending the southern border. They’re not defending us against the death of 100,000 people a year in the United States. What the heck use are they if they cannot defend the United States border?
Billington: Well. I thank you. We will be circulating this widely. It’s a moment of crisis for mankind as a whole. I’ll repeat that we’re organizing for a conference on September 10-11. I encourage all of our listeners to prepare to register for that. I, again, thank you for working with the Schiller Institute, for making your voice heard.
Col. Black: I very much appreciate what you’re doing personally and what the Schiller Institute is doing. I’m not sure what we would be doing if you were not disseminating the information that you do. So, thank you very much for it.
Cynthia Pooler interviews Diane Sare and Scott Ritter on the Ukraine CCD Hit List and Afghanistan.
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This is EIR’s second collection of responses to the release of a blacklist on July 14 (mistakenly dated July 25 in Part 1) by the Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD) at the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, which listed prominent individuals from around the world as “Russian propaganda” assets, while the Center’s acting director on the same day declared them to be “information terrorists,” and “war criminals.” The mobilization by EIR and others to denounce this Nazi-like attack by a Ukrainian government institution—which is funded by the U.S. and other NATO countries—has forced the Center to take down the list from its website. Nonetheless, the threat to those targeted is not thereby abated, and the call for investigations of the governments that are financing such threats to their own citizens from a foreign nation is expanding.
Part One of this compilation is in the August 12, 2022 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
GREECE
Former Greek Ambassador Leonidas Chrysanthopoulos, a member of the Schiller Institute, in an interview on RT television regarding the Amnesty International report on the Ukraine military using civilians as human shields, added that Ukraine had invented a new term, “information terrorists.”
Referring to the CCD hit list, he said that the list targeted “mainly the Schiller Institute as ‘information terrorists’ and [said] that they should be accused as ‘war criminals.’ This is an invention. If it is taken up in the West, anybody having a different opinion about this war could be considered as a terrorist and be punished according to the laws regarding terrorism. This is very dangerous, because it is leading the West and the European Union toward fascism.” (It was actually the director of the CCD who had said that those on the list should be tried as war criminals.)
Amb. Chrysanthopoulos noted that he and two other former Greek ambassadors had issued a call for negotiations to begin between the West and Russia, adding, “Presumably we will also be considered information terrorists—the next generation of information terrorists.”
DENMARK
Jens Jørgen Nielsen, a former Moscow correspondent for the major Danish daily Politiken, and author of several books about Russia and Ukraine, spoke at the Danish-Swedish Schiller Institute Conference on May 25, 2022, and subsequently appeared on the CCD hit list. He was interviewed Aug. 3 on Radio 24/seven, the leading Danish national private radio channel.
Nielsen said that he is not spreading Russian propaganda, but he is critical of sending weapons to Ukraine, and critical of the narrative that Ukraine is a flowering democracy. “That the leader of the disinformation office called the people on the list ‘information terrorists,’ who should be tried before a military court, is absurd. Zelensky has banned 11 parties, and put people under house arrest without a court decision. It is not, as the narrative goes, a battle between democracy and dictatorship.” Nielson asked: “Will agents come to my house to bring me before a war criminal tribunal? The fact that Ukraine is threatening Western citizens with being brought before a war criminal tribunal is crossing all red lines. Putting us in connection with war criminals from Yugoslavia and Rwanda, mass murderers, is absurd…. I was accused of saying that Ukraine had sent 30 times the previous amount of bombs into the Donbass in the week before Feb. 24. But I have this figure from the OSCE [Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe]. Are they saying that the OSCE is on Putin’s disinformation pay list?”
“What are the consequences of being on the list? I want to go to Ukraine at some point. Will they let me in? Will I be arrested? Will I be attacked by Ukrainians who live here [in Denmark]? Sometimes I translate for Ukrainian refugees. I can’t imagine that they will come to my house and attack me.”
Jyllands-Posten, one of Denmark’s three leading national newspapers, posted an editorial on Aug. 11 denouncing the Ukraine hit list. Although the editorial began with full support for arming and funding Ukraine against “Russia’s brutal attack,” it then switched tone, noting that if Ukraine is to become a member of the EU, “there are conditions to be met. Among them is the fundamental acceptance of free speech….
“The Centre for Countering Disinformation sounds like something out of George Orwell’s ‘1984,’ but it is a center under Ukraine’s National Security Council. The center presumably has a central function during the war, but it has also recently been used to blacklist 72 international politicians, thinkers and researchers, including four Danes…. What the four Danes have in common is that they took part in a seminar at the end of May on alternatives to the current security policy structure in the world in order to reduce tensions and the division of countries into, for example, members and non-members of NATO…. [T]he theme of the seminar and the questioning of Western sanctions policy are of course perfectly legitimate in a free and open society.
“It is therefore worrying when Ukraine blacklists researchers and others who have a different view of the conflict. For it can hardly be seen as anything other than an attempt to silence them and label any angle other than the pro-Ukrainian one as pro-Russian, and thus on the wrong side of history…. [I]n rejecting free speech, free research and free debate, it is precisely Ukraine and its President who are in danger of moving to the wrong side, far from the ideals that they will hopefully pursue on the other side of the war, to emphasize that they are part of us, as we now see their struggle as ours.”
GERMANY
On August 2, Andrej Hunko, a German member of the Bundestag in Die Linke Party, posted the text of an official question to the German government concerning the Ukrainian hit list. Hunko is a long-standing federal parliamentarian; a member of PACE (the Permanent Assembly of the Council of Europe), and an election observer for the OSCE.
His official question reads: “Has the federal government so far reacted to the listing of German citizens, including public figures such as Alice Schwarzer [a journalist] or Dr. Rolf Mützenich [chairman of the SPD parliamentary group in the Bundestag], as disseminators of Russian propaganda… (if yes, how?), and was this listing put on the agenda for the Ukrainian government by Federal Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD) as well as the Federal Minister of Labor Hubertus Heil (SPD) during their Ukraine visit? (if yes, please specify the circumstances such as date and level of contact).”
In another post, Hunko points to the fact that he had been placed on the “infamous Myrotvorets List,” a list issued two years ago by the Ukraine government of “enemies of the State.” Hunko says that “at least two of those on the list were murdered in the meantime. The [German] federal government condemned the list, but never became seriously active to eliminate the list.”
Following the article in the widely read German newspaper NachDenkSeiten by esteemed jurist and author Dr. Wolfgang Bittner (see the first compilation of responses in the Aug. 12 issue of EIR), who spoke at a Schiller Institute conference and was placed on the Ukrainian hit list, the newspaper received many letters of support for Dr. Bittner, mostly from members of the SPD, the government party. The editor, Albrecht Müller, posted this note and several of the letters on Aug. 12:
Wolfgang Bittner refers in this post to a process in which, “if the Foreign Minister is unlikely to be relied on, the Chancellor” should intervene and stop the “discrimination against German nationals” by the Ukrainian government. “The Ukrainian Center for Combatting Disinformation (CCD) has published a blacklist containing 72 ‘public figures’ who take a critical position on the Ukraine conflict. These would be persecuted, ‘threatened with violence’ and would have to fear for their lives. “The persecution of critics and members of the opposition by Ukrainian government organizations” assumes “forms of unbridled fascism,” which one must assume is taking place “with the support of U.S. authorities.” This “state terrorism” and support for the Ukrainian government must be stopped immediately. Thank you for the interesting letters to the editor, which also contain new, enlightening information.
A selection from the letters:
Letter to the editor
Dear Mr. Müller, With the publication of the blacklist of the Ukrainian Center for Combating Disinformation, you and Wolfgang Büttner [sic] have succeeded in stabbing another hornet’s nest. One only wonders what actually still has to happen for the public to finally open their eyes and recognize the kind of fuse that was laid in Ukraine. There wafts an explosive mixture of understandable fears, wounded pride, helplessness and arrogance, driven by political interest. The pressure has to go! This applies to all sides, including the Russian one.De-escalation and negotiations are the order of the day. It is frightening when, of all people, the advocates of such a path of understanding find themselves on blacklists along with their likenesses….
With solidarity greetings from Thuringia, Bernd A. Thomas
Letter to the editor
Dear Mr. Bittner, In case the Chancellor does nothing: I offer you shelter at any time and give NachDenkSeiten permission to give you my contact details. Thank you very much for your effort!
LM
Answer by Wolfgang Bittner: Dear Ms. Mund, Thank you for your generous offer. I hope I don’t have to take advantage of it, and I’m glad that there are still good people like you with perspective. Cordially, Wolfgang Bittner
Letter to the editor
Dear Albrecht, dear enlighteners,
I sent this email to the SPD leadership:
Dear party leadership,
I have learned that in Ukraine there is a “black list” of enemies of Ukraine, including the leader of the ruling SPD party in the German Bundestag, Rolf Mützenich, a party that you lead…. I haven’t heard a word from you about this monstrosity. Are these the Western values that Ukraine is so valiantly defending against the “onrushing subhumans”? I haven’t heard from you yet that Zelensky has banned all opposition parties in Ukraine and that some of their leaders are imprisoned. Which sister party in Ukraine, in the sense of a socialist international, do you feel connected to?… [W]hom do you support when you deliver heavy weapons? I firmly believe that you will support our opponents, even if they act like Banderites [the current followers of Stepan Bandera, Hitler’s Nazi ally in Ukraine] and keep our sworn enemies in power.”
Solidarity, Herbert Krueger, OVV Winkelhaid
Letter to the editor
Dear NachDenkSeiten team, Dear Mr. Bittner,
Thanks for discussing this topic (finally!). The “black lists” do not even seem to be the climax, but perhaps only the beginning of systematic fascist state terror. As can be read today in Die Junge Welt, the public threats continue to escalate, apparently in particular against those people who are in favor of armistice negotiations instead of brutal war…. In a supposedly democratic republic, shouldn’t it be publicly stated that, as a citizen and as a human being, we wish and demand that at least our government seriously advocates peace, instead of constantly pouring fuel on the fire with arms deliveries, etc.—without being personally seriously threatened? Where is the state, where is the care for its citizens? Beautiful democracy … it’s all just unbelievable, we run into all catastrophes faster and faster with our eyes wide open.
Kind regards, Peter Langhammer
Letter to the editor
Dear Nachdenkseiten team, dear Wolfgang Bittner,
That I have to witness state black lists with the names of international, also German, critical intellectuals shamelessly published on government websites, this time from Ukraine, without an immediate sharp reaction from German politicians and/or journalists (there are few exceptions) is a slap in the face to all peaceful and democratically committed people. I see this as nothing less than an invitation to manhunt. I understand it all the less, since as a child I had to experience the horrors of World War II up close. I have therefore written a letter to some public institutions and persons [the letter and the names of officials addressed followed].
Uwe Strohmeyer
UNITED STATES
Glenn Greenwald, the American journalist and lawyer, issued a statement in late July in response to his inclusion on the Ukraine hit list:
“Before Russia’s invasion and since, Zelensky has abolished basic liberties: shuttered opposition media, outlawed parties, imprisoned dissidents. As Ukraine demands money and arms from the West, they now want to export this repression to our countries with McCarthyite blacklists.
“War proponents in the West and other functionaries of Western security state agencies have used the same tactics for decades to demonise anyone questioning the foreign policy of the U.S. and NATO. Chief among them, going back to the start of the Cold War, is accusing every dissident of spreading ‘Russian propaganda’ or otherwise serving the Kremlin. That’s all this is from the Ukrainians: just standard McCarthyite idiocy.
“The Ukrainians have the absolute right to pursue whatever war policies they want. But when they start demanding that my country and my government use its resources to fuel their war effort, then I, along with all other Americans, have the absolute right to question that policy or to point out its dangers and risks….
“Observing the grave danger of a proxy war involving the two nations with the largest nuclear stockpiles, ones with a history of coming very close to annihilating the planet, does not require Kremlin messaging; it only requires the most basic common sense and moral compass.”
Tulsi Gabbard, a former four-term Member of the U.S. House of Representatives and an Army Reserve officer, responded to her appearance on the list on July 26 on the Tucker Carlson show on Fox TV:
“It is the peak of hypocrisy. The Biden-Harris Administration and the Washington elite, both parties, are impoverishing the American people and people around the world, while pushing us closer and closer to nuclear war and holocaust, all to ‘protect democracy and defeat autocracy’ in Ukraine. All this is happening as the Ukraine President is exposing that there is no democracy in Ukraine. He is silencing all dissenting voices, imprisoning political opponents, banning all political activity from the opposition parties, taking control of all national media under his ‘unified information’ policy, and now he is turning his sights on Americans. Not only myself, but a sitting U.S. Senator. The danger of this goes to the cost that our leaders are willing to exact as they continue this façade of a push for so-called democracy and defeat[ing] autocracy. The whole thing is so hypocritical, and we need to hold our leaders to account for it.”
Tony Magliano, an internationally syndicated Catholic columnist who spoke at a conference of the Schiller Institute and was included on the Ukrainian hit list, posted an article on The Southern Cross, The Catholic Magazine for Southern Africa on Aug. 12, asking: “Why is an internationally syndicated Catholic social justice and peace columnist on such a list?” Since he was among thirty people at the top of the list who had spoken at a Schiller Institute conference, the answer was unavoidable: “Just a few days before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I participated in an international Zoom conference hosted by the Schiller Institute—which sought to warn against possible imminent nuclear war, and to inspire a fresh non-violent, just, egalitarian approach to the never-ending wars and economic injustices experienced by the world’s poor and disenfranchised.
“My small contribution was a concise presentation entitled, ‘War is not inevitable! We have a moral obligation to save Afghans from starving! The need to create a new, human-centred paradigm.’
“In my presentation, I highlighted the moral necessity of the U.S.—considering its 20-year history of waging war in Afghanistan—to significantly increase emergency and ongoing developmental aid to Afghanistan ensuring that all Afghans, especially the children, do not starve to death—a tragedy still unfolding. Additionally, I attempted to highlight the obvious catastrophe of the imminent war between Russia and Ukraine, hoping to help avoid that preventable armed conflict.”
This, he concludes, was enough for Ukraine to decide that “I am a promoter of Russian propaganda. But truth be told, I am a promoter of the nonviolent Gospel of Jesus Christ!”
POLAND
Łukasz Marcin Jastrzębski, editor of Mysl Polska (Polish Fatherland) in Poland, published an article in their Aug. 14-21 edition titled “Schiller on the Ukrainian List,” with a picture of Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Jastrzębski reports that a Pole who writes for his journal, Tomasz Jankowski, also appears on the Ukraine hit list, adding: “A significant number of those mentioned on the aforementioned list are associates of the Schiller Institute, headed by Helga Zepp-LaRouche (pictured).” He notes that Lyndon LaRouche, the deceased leader of the movement, had been subjected to similar attacks “by supporters of global liberalism… when he strengthened his actions both in the USA and Europe for peace in Ukraine. The allegations against the Schiller Institute come back like a boomerang every now and then. It doesn’t really matter that there is no logic in them. For many years I have been reading materials published by the Schiller Institute…. We also published interviews with… Lyndon H. LaRouche (1922-2019) and the legendary warrior for Negro rights in the USA, the collaborator of Martin Luther King, Amelia Boynton Robinson (1911-2015), in the Mysl Polska.”
Jastrzębski describes at length the impact of the LaRouches’ meetings with himself and several hundred other Poles in the 1990s, and concludes: “There are no great secrets, huge amounts of money, training centers, conspiracies or other products of Styrofoam minds associated with the Schiller Institute. I recommend everyone to visit the Schiller Institute’s Facebook pages. Today we respect the calls of the Schiller Institute for a peaceful solution to the Russian-Ukrainian issues.”
Schiller Institute Press Release
August 18, 2022
Americans Threatened by the U.S.-Funded Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation as “Russian Propaganda” Agents and “War Criminals” Demand Congressional Investigation
Sixteen prominent Americans whose names appeared on the infamous Black List issued by the U.S.-funded Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation, under President Zelensky’s National Security and Defense Council, have called on six committees of the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives to investigate the use of taxpayers money to finance these overt threats to the right to free speech and the personal security of U.S. citizens. Those on the list are accused of being Russian propaganda assets, “information terrorists” and “war criminals” by the Center and its Acting Director Andriy Shapovalov.
The six committees are:
Senate: Foreign Relations; Judiciary; Select Committee on Intelligence
House: Foreign Affairs; Judiciary; Select Committee on Intelligence
The letter follows:
Call for Congressional Investigations of Threats to American Citizens by U.S. Funded Ukrainian Government Agency —
August 13, 2022
The Honorable Richard J. Durbin, Chairman
Committee on the Judiciary
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20515
Dear Chairman Durbin,
We the undersigned American citizens, all of whom were included on the “Black List” issued on July 14 by the Ukrainian government office, the Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD) under Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, have been accused of promoting “Russian propaganda,” and declared to be “information terrorists” and “war criminals” by this foreign entity. The CCD is being financed by the U.S. Government, including from H.R. 7691, “The Additional Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2022,” which provides funding for the Ukrainian government and its Center for Countering Disinformation. We strongly protest these threats to our constitutional right to free speech, to academic freedom, and to the threat of physical harm coming from a nation at war with the nation we are falsely accused of representing, in our speech and our writings.
We call on your Committee to exercise your oversight of the use of taxpayer funds by investigating the funding of this foreign government agency and their role in directly threatening Americans’ rights and safety. We note that those American citizens targeted on the Black List include a sitting member of the U.S. Senate; a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives; a former member of the Virginia House and Senate; two candidates on the November ballot, one for the U.S. Senate and one for the U.S. House of Representatives; four former leading U.S. intelligence professionals; an internationally syndicated columnist in the Catholic Church; prominent academics and journalists and more. See the list, attached. We are prepared to offer our full assistance in the investigation by your Committee.
Sincerely,
Col. Richard H. Black (ret.): Former Marine, former head of the U.S. Army’s Criminal Law Division at the Pentagon, former member of the Virginia House and Senate
Graham Fuller: Former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, 25-year CIA operations officer, author of numerous books
Ray McGovern: Former Army infantry/intelligence officer, CIA analyst/Presidential briefer
Scott Ritter: Former Marine Intelligence Officer, former UN Chief Weapons Inspector in Iraq
Dr. Clifford Kiracofe: Former Senior Staff Member, U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and President, Washington Institute for Peace and Development
James Jatras: Former diplomat, former advisor to U.S. Senate Republican leadership
Harley Schlanger: Former spokesman for Lyndon H. LaRouche, spokesman for the Schiller Institute, and The LaRouche Organization
Diane Sare: LaRouche independent candidate for U.S. Senator from New York
Geoff Young: Democratic Party nominee for U.S. Congress from Kentucky, CD 6
Jason Ross: Secretary-Treasurer, The LaRouche Organization and Science Advisor to Lyndon H. LaRouche
J. Michael Springmann: Former United States diplomat with the State Department’s Foreign Service, with postings in Germany, India and Saudi Arabia
Bradley Blankenship: Journalist and columnist
Dr. George Koo: Retired business consultant specializing in U.S.-China Trade and Chairman, Burlingame Foundation
Tony Magliano: Internationally Syndicated Catholic social justice and peace columnist
Mike Callicrate: Kansas; Owner Ranch Foods Direct
Caleb Maupin: Journalist, Founder & Director of the Center for Political Innovation
In discussing the tremendous potential to move to a new financial and strategic architecture, Helga Zepp-LaRouche highlighted comments by President Putin at the Moscow Security Conference, in which he said the world is going through a transition. The attempt to criminalize honest debate demonstrates the desperation of the establishment to silence opposition. As reality strikes, she said, it becomes impossible to “gag the entire population.”
She elaborated aspects of the transition: the strength of the Russia-China alliance; the rejection of nations in the Global South of the Unipolar Order; and the growing mobilization of citizens in the developing sector, in Europe and the U.S. seeking fundamental changes, away from the wars which derive from geopolitical division into Blocs. It is a moment of great danger, but also potential for the kind of change which Lyndon LaRouche devoted his life to. She urged people to join her this Saturday, when she addresses the Manhattan Project meeting, celebrating the 75th anniversary of Indian Independence.
Read and sign our call for a New Bretton Woods
As the call for an Ad Hoc Committee for a New Bretton Woods is circulating and picking up endorsers, Helga Zepp-LaRouche presented in her weekly webcast the argument why this is the only avenue that can work, if mankind is to move toward peaceful cooperation and development. There is a growing concern about World War III and, while people are against war, they are not looking at the cause. It is the collapse globally of the neoliberal system which is responsible for the war drive coming from the G7 and NATO. While ridiculing the dog-and-pony show of their summits, she pointed to the serious discussion at the BRICS-Plus summit as an example of the potential to achieve a global bankruptcy reorganization.
As to why connect her call with Bretton Woods, she said it represented a precedent. The hijacking of FDR’s original proposal prevented the full decolonization he intended, but that is now on the agenda. The G7 and NATO are launching a global operation which does not address any of the immediate threats facing mankind. Our proposal does.
She urged people to join this fight after presenting a summary of how it was Bismarck’s rejection of neoliberal free trade policies and embrace of the American System which led to the industrial development of Germany. This story is kept out of the history books. It is up to us to carry out a mobilization which reintroduces people to this approach to overcoming poverty and underdevelopment on a global scale.
