Mike Billington: This is Mike Billington with the Schiller Institute and the Executive Intelligence Review. I’m here today with Ambassador Chas Freeman, an esteemed diplomat and one of the most knowledgeable people regarding Chinese issues in the nation. Do you wish to say anything else about your position?

Amb. Chas Freeman:  I’m a retired diplomat and defense official with views that differ from those of the establishment.

Mike Billington: Indeed. Thanks. Well, the great mystery now, as everybody knows, is will she or will she not? Will Nancy Pelosi, who is now in Asia, stop in Taiwan? The itinerary she put out actually does not list Taiwan, but it’s still expected, nonetheless, that she will stop there. As you know, Xi Jinping told Biden in their phone call on Thursday, “Those who play with fire shall perish by it.” And the former Global Times editor Hu Xijin said that if she goes to Taiwan, it would be considered an invasion and that the PLA had the right to confront them or even shoot them down. And yet the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, said that the military would protect her if she flies in. What do you expect if she does go?

Amb. Chas Freeman: I think she will go, And I think that has now been confirmed by officials in Taiwan as well as in Washington. The expected date is August 4th, probably flying in from Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines. This is an act of extreme irresponsibility on the Speaker’s part. US-China normalization is linked to American respect for One China, a position that Taipei and Beijing traditionally held, from which Taipei has now departed, with enthusiastic support from much of the American political establishment. 

I don’t think Hu Xijin speaks for the Chinese government. I don’t think the Chinese government is eager to provoke the United States, as the United States seems eager to provoke China. But any consequence from this will most likely fall on Taiwan. The speakers visit, in other words, instead of enhancing Taiwan’s security, is likely damaging it, threatening it, and leading to an escalation in tensions in the Taiwan Strait. Exactly what the Chinese will do, no one knows. They have many, many options, political, economic and military. It’s clear that the speaker put herself in a position where she could not not go. She equally put Taiwan in a position where it could not not welcome her. And she put the Chinese government in a position where it could not not do something escalatory. The sad reality is that the White House and the military in Washington both see this trip as damaging rather than helpful. But the White House has not had the courage to block Mrs. Pelosi’s travel. So we will see what happens, probably on Thursday.

Mike Billington: This has been true on other issues with President Biden as well. In several calls between President Biden and President Xi Jinping, Biden has assured the Chinese President that the US honors the One China policy, and it will not encourage Taiwan to declare independence. And yet his administration continues to do the opposite. And Chinese leaders have to repeatedly say that if the US followed what Biden said in the phone calls, things would be okay. Who is running policy in the US?

Amb. Chas Freeman: It’s very clear that the President is not speaking forthrightly on this issue. Just as in Israel, where he visited recently, he extolled the virtues of the two state solution, which is now physically impossible due to Israeli actions backed by the United States. In the case of Taiwan, the United States once had a diplomatic agreement with the Chinese on how to handle the issue, but this has been salami sliced away. Now we are left with no way of dealing with the issue other than the military, which is why the US military is preparing to protect the speaker. After all, she is the third in line for the presidency and a very important figure in the Congress, which is supposed to be the dominant branch of government under the American Constitution. The military obviously have a requirement to protect her, even if she does something terminally foolish as she is now doing.

Mike Billington: The Taiwan division at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, which I would say is probably the leading government linked think tank for the Chinese, had a meeting in which they said, “Don’t say we didn’t tell you,” and noted that this was what was said before the 1962 border war with India and also before the 1979 incursion into Vietnam, and perhaps they said that before their entry into the Korean War. I’m not sure of that. But can the US ignore the warning this time?

Amb. Chas Freeman: They did say that before the entry into the Korean War. It does not imply immediate action on their part, but it does suggest that we have come to a turning point on this issue, in which the probability of military conflict has been boosted. And Speaker Pelosi will have to take the responsibility for that.

Mike Billington: I think you probably agree the US provoked Russia to the point that they moved into eastern Ukraine. You said in your last interview with us that if Russia moved — this was before February — into Ukraine to defend their compatriots in the Donbas, that China might use that as an opportunity to forcefully reunify China. What level of provocation do you think would drive them to move in militarily now?

Amb. Chas Freeman: I think the issue of Ukraine and the issue of Taiwan do have something in common in that the primary lesson we should take from what has happened in Ukraine is that if you defy the forcefully expressed objections of a great power to your actions, you do so at your peril, and the peril of those who you purport to protect. Russia was provoked into what it did in Ukraine, which does not justify what it did in Ukraine. It was unjustified, but provoked. A similar possibility exists in the case of Taiwan. The Chinese, however, will not be as impetuous as Vladimir Putin was. He sent his troops over the border without having first briefed his generals on his intentions, without preparing the logistical support for the invasion that he mounted, and without addressing the morale of the troops by explaining to them what they were being sent in to do. So that was impetuous, probably a last minute decision after the effort by the Russians to negotiate an understanding on NATO’s enlargement and Ukraine, but failed and was rebuffed by the United States. In the case of Taiwan, the Chinese have had decades, since 1995,1996, when they first began to prepare seriously for military conflict with Taiwan, after the United States breached our agreement with them and allowed the then president in Taipei, Lee Teng-hui, to visit the United States. That was also a congressional initiative opposed by the then Clinton administration, the executive branch. This, too, is a congressional initiative, or at least one by the Speaker. So the danger is that the Chinese will redouble their efforts and make a firm decision to use force against Taiwan. Not that they will use force immediately. They will not do so until they are confident they are ready and can win. Whether the United States stands in their way or not, they assume we will. So that is their planning guidance. This is not a story that began yesterday and it will not end tomorrow.

Mike Billington: You’ve pointed to the 2005 Chinese anti-secession law as defining when Beijing would consider using force to reunify China. One of those conditions is that: “all possibilities of peaceful unification are lost.” Have those conditions been met in your mind?

Amb. Chas Freeman: That’s a judgment for the Chinese to make. Many in Beijing, I think, believe that those conditions have now been met, and that is what makes this moment so very dangerous.

Mike Billington: Clearly Taiwan would be absolutely destroyed in any war between the US and China, regardless of who won, if there was such a thing as winning. Is this not enough to prevent such a disaster, from within Taiwan, not wanting to see that kind of destruction as we see now in Ukraine?

Amb. Chas Freeman: One of the problems that Beijing faces is that having cried wolf so often, having warned Taiwan, so often, its warnings are now heavily discounted. Many people in Taiwan simply refuse to imagine that there could be a resumption of the Chinese civil war. It wasn’t so long ago, however, that there were active air battles in the Taiwan Strait and artillery exchanges between the forces of the mainland and Taiwan. It ended only on January 1, 1979, when the United States and China normalized relations. So the Chinese have a problem — if they don’t do something escalatory, the value of their political military pressure on Taiwan will be diminished. They don’t have much choice, in my view.

Mike Billington: The trade between Taiwan and the mainland is huge. I think it’s almost $200 billion, and there are huge Taiwan investments within the mainland. What voice does the business community have? Certainly they would want to prevent any kind of a provoked military confrontation.

Amb. Chas Freeman: There are almost 3 million Taiwanese living and working on the mainland at any given time, so this is a relationship that is in many ways very intimate, a relationship among Chinese on both sides of the strait. There are many people in Taiwan who do business with the mainland and who have no desire to see that disturbed by the outbreak of conflict. But there are also people in Taiwan who are passionately committed to the idea of self-determination for the island, it’s separation from China, and they happen to be in power. The Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP, has an independence plank. Its leader, historically, although she’s very cautious now, was openly committed to independence. The fact that that is the case is what has essentially ended political dialogue across the strait and replaced a gradual process of accommodation with a rise in tensions.

Mike Billington: You recently quoted John Quincy Adams, who said that the American hearts would be any place where the standard of freedom and independence is brought up, but that she “does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” It is certainly the case that the anti-China mob in both parties and in the media here are trying to make China out to be a monster. Is China a monster?

Amb. Chas Freeman: I don’t think China is a monster in any respect. It’s been around for 4000 or 5000 years, is really the only example of a pre-modern society that has successfully perpetuated its existence over millennia. On the other hand, China has   conditions that are radically different from those that we in the United States understand. It has 14 land borders, sea borders with Japan and South Korea, and with Taiwan, defeated in the unfinished civil war. And, of course, the U.S. Seventh Fleet is off the Chinese shores. The United States is now conducting at least 2 to 3 intrusive patrols along China’s borders daily, which accounts for the fact that the Chinese are reacting in dangerous ways more frequently, in my view. But China also faces other challenges. It has about one third of the arable land of the United States, much less water than we do. It has over four times the population, which it must feed on those meager resources. It’s actually the largest producer of food in the world. Notwithstanding that, it’s very efficient. But it’s always on the edge.

Chinese history is full of instances of mass death through starvation, political upheaval or foreign invasion. So the Chinese attitude toward their government is, they want a can-do government. They want a strong government that will take responsibility for maintaining order and ensuring the well-being of their families. In the United States, we have a margin of error that’s so large, we want a government that does nothing, or as little as possible. “That government is best, which governs least,” said Thomas Jefferson. No Chinese would ever say such a thing. So there is a clash of ideology, of political theory, political culture, which is built into this relationship. I think it is understood in China that the United States has been uniquely blessed with resources, space, separation from the rest of the world by oceans, benign neighbors, only two of them with land borders. And the Chinese are well aware that they share none of these blessings. That causes a lot of misunderstanding between the two countries, and it causes some Americans to see China as anathema.

Mike Billington: The US imposed massive sanctions on Russia, even though they have turned out to be far more damaging to the West really than on Russia. But they have also apparently blinked recently. They did agree to a grain deal between Russia and Ukraine on exporting grain, which began today.  They reversed the sanctions on shipments to Kaliningrad. Europe is very divided over the gas policies. And Blinken did place a call to Sergei Lavrov on Friday. Most of the world has not supported the sanctions policy. Do you think the US can be brought to relent and to end the sanctions regime in Russia and elsewhere, and to negotiate with Russia and China?

Amb. Chas Freeman: Judging by other examples, the answer is no. There’s been no give on maximum pressure on North Korea or on Iran, for example. The sanctions have an almost unbroken record of failure to achieve the political results they ostensibly aim at, namely a change in policy. In this case, a change in Russian policy. But they do have a history of enormous collateral damage. At the moment, the sanctions that the West imposed without, I think, adequately considering the collateral damage they might cause, the knock-on effect, is radically restructuring the global energy market in ways that were not intended. It is radically restructuring the global food market in ways that were not intended. 

I would make one correction to your question, Mike. The grain deal was brokered by the UN with the help of Turkey. The United States and others were not involved. Russia agreed to it. In fact, Russia had consistently offered a path through the alleged blockade of Ukrainian ports for food shipments. The problem with the food shipments actually began not with the blockade, but with the Ukrainians prudently mining their own harbors to prevent the Russians from entering them. The minute they did that, insurance companies canceled the insurance on ships that were in the harbor or attempting to enter it or leave it, and the trade shut down. So regardless of whether there is or is not, or has or has not, been the alleged Russian blockade, the first thing that has to happen is some measure of demining. I gather that has taken place sufficiently in at least one port to allow a ship to depart. Whether that ship will ever return or not for more grain is, however, an open question. This is a war zone. The ships that were stuck there have no desire to return and get stuck again. There’s no assurance that they wouldn’t be, and it’s inherently dangerous, no matter how good a pilot is, to traverse a minefield. So this is a very tenuous agreement not reached by the West with Russia, but by the UN on behalf of the Global South, brokered by Turkey and agreed to by Ukraine reluctantly.

Mike Billington: Let me ask you about the move for what is proudly called “decoupling” of the US and Chinese economy. What do you think of this, and what will be the effects? 

 Amb. Chas Freeman:  The United States and China both have benefited enormously from globalization, meaning the proliferation of supply chains across international borders. The net result of the decoupling will probably be to slow the growth of both the Chinese and the American economy. Part of the decoupling is a ban on Chinese researchers in labs or at universities working on subjects which the powers-that-be in Washington consider sensitive. That is definitely going to retard progress on key technologies in the United States. If you go into an artificial intelligence, or A.I., lab anywhere in the United States, you’ll find that something like 60% of the workforce there is foreign, about half of them Chinese, the other half largely Indian. The banning of those Chinese researchers just sends them back to China, where the government is investing approximately three times as much as the United States in developing advanced electronic technologies. The only competitors that the Chinese have are Taiwan, of course, which has over 90% of the world’s chip market, and South Korea, which is investing something like six or seven times what the United States is in boosting its semiconductor industry. So the decoupling is basically injurious to everyone, unlikely to do anything other than produce greater competition internationally for the United States, and will probably retard, rather than secure, our international technological primacy.

Mike Billington: The hyperinflationary crisis in the Western financial system, which has been aggravated by the sanctions regime on Russia but was already beginning before that, has really forced almost everybody to recognize that we’re heading into an extremely serious economic crisis throughout the trans-Atlantic. Helga Zepp-LaRouche has issued a call, as we have for decades actually, but at this moment of crisis, for a new Bretton Woods conference, which would include Russia and China, as well as the U.S., to deal with what should be obvious to everyone as a very, very serious crisis in the Western financial system. Do you have any hope or expectation that such a thing could be brought about?

Amb. Chas Freeman: No, I do not. The political conditions for that do not exist. There’s no indication at all that the current administration in Washington understands or practices diplomacy in its traditional sense. We’ve seen that with the breakdown in Ukraine. We’ve seen it with the breakdown over the so-called JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal. We’ve seen it with the impasse with North Korea. We’ve seen it with the deterioration in relations with China. I don’t think the political conditions exist. 

On the other hand, one of the effects of the sanctions and other fallout from the Ukraine war is the de facto restructuring of the global financial system. Five ASEAN countries have now agreed to direct settlement of purchases through QR codes. Iran and Russia have agreed to, not just swaps, but a similar arrangement for the use of Russian credit cards in Iran, bypassing SWIFT, the Western operated Belgian entity that usually clears global transactions through the dollar. Similarly, the BRICS are in the final stages of devising a transnational currency to replace the dollar for purposes of trade settlement. And of course, they are expanding their membership. So what we’re seeing is an evolution toward bilateral and plurilateral trade settlement mechanisms that avoid the dollar. And it’s very likely that we are on the path to a future in which the dollar will no longer have the near monopoly position it does in trade settlement, but will be merely one of many currencies in which trade is settled.

I want to just add that the issue of what is a reserve currency and  what is not is actually derived from the question of what trade can be settled in and what it cannot be. But the two are quite different. People talk about the dollar as a reserve currency, but that sort of misses the point. The real strength of the dollar is backed by Saudi Arabia, which in 1974 agreed to denominate the world energy trade in dollars, something that OPEC has grudgingly followed despite objections from some of its members like Algeria and Iran. As long as the dollar continues to be the unit of account for the energy trade and other commodities, the United States will retain our so-called exorbitant privilege. But the minute the Saudis and others begin to accept currencies other than the dollar in exchange for their commodity production, the dollar will collapse and we will see a massive devaluation of it, comparable to the one that occurred in 1971, when the U.S. went off the gold standard and dollars were no longer exchangeable for gold. This is a process that is occurring, in which a rational response would indeed be some sort of international effort to negotiate a transition. But I don’t see the political basis for that.

Mike Billington:  Sergei Glazyev, who’s now one of the leaders of the Eurasian Economic Union, and Wang Wen, at the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University, have held a series of seminars on this issue, on the question of putting together some alternative currency to the dollar for international trade. Do you have a sense of how that’s moving forward?

Amb. Chas Freeman: I understand it is moving forward, but primarily in the context of the BRICS discussions that I mentioned. The last BRICS summit launched an active effort to implement those ideas. They have not yet been implemented, and indeed the details remain somewhat obscure. But I think there’s no question that there is an active effort underway to accomplish exactly what Wang and his Russian counterpart suggested.

Mike Billington: The Ukrainian Centre on Confronting Disinformation, which is funded by the NATO countries, recently issued a list of 78 prominent international figures whom they described as Russian propaganda agents, and declared them to be “information terrorists” and “war criminals.” Thirty of those 78 had spoken at Schiller Institute conferences, and you also have spoken at Schiller Institute conferences. What are your thoughts on this hit list?

Amb. Chas Freeman: It’s a sign of the times. If you don’t have a serious argument, resort to smearing those who disagree with you. This is detestable. It is a rebuke to the very ideas of free speech that are essential to Western democracy. And it should be condemned.

Mike Billington: As you know very well as a Chinese scholar, the Chinese character for “crisis” combines the characters for “danger” and for “opportunity.” It is certainly the case that people around the world are recognizing the extreme danger of the strategic crisis heading for war, perhaps nuclear war, and are also feeling the impact of the economic crisis. Do you sense that the citizenry around the world is responding? Are they adequately driven to try to force a change towards sanity?

Amb. Chas Freeman: Just a minor corrective — there are actually two characters to the Chinese word “crisis,” it’s not one. But yes. This is the origin, I presume, of — I think it was Rahm Emanuel’s observation — that one should never fail to make use of a crisis or let it go to waste. I’m sorry to say that I believe the general reaction internationally and certainly in my own country, the United States, is one of despondency and a sense of impotence and frustration as the equivalent of a tragedy in the true Greek sense unfolds. Everyone can see where this is likely to go. The protagonists nonetheless proceed on course. And the chorus is unheeded. So this is a moment in which, indeed, people should be giving voice to their objections to a course of action which unnecessarily risks a war, possibly a nuclear war. And among other things, as you pointed out earlier, the certain destruction of both Taiwan’s democracy and its prosperity. I wish I could say that I see effective, popular response to the dangers we face, but I don’t.

Mike Billington: Thank you. Do you have any last thoughts that you’d like to leave for our listeners?

Amb. Chas Freeman: No, I’ve probably already hung myself enough.

Mike Billington:  Thank you.

The so-called “Ukrainian Center for countering Disinformation,” which is listed as being part of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, has released a list of 78 individuals—the first 30 were all speakers at conferences of the Schiller Institute—whom it accuses of having promoted “Russian propaganda.” While the Center was created in 2021, with the idea of becoming a “vital hub of counter-disinformation strategy and resources not just domestically, but internationally;” it had “been brewing since 2014,” according to a briefing by Andriy Yermak, Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine for President Zelensky.

That interestingly places it in the immediate context of the Western-backed Maidan Coup, the prehistory for which Victoria Nuland claimed the U.S. had spent $5 billion dollars. So the idea of creating such a hub to control the narrative about the circumstances of that coup, seems to be a continuity of the policy of Nuland, of “Fuck the EU” fame.

The effort to control this narrative has become full of holes however, since another such outfit, namely the U.S. blog called PropOrNot, which was among the first to propagate the story of the Ukrainian Center, was the main loudspeaker for the Russiagate-scandal against President Trump in 2016, which has since been completely discredited as a hoax cooked up by a gang of British intelligence and Clinton campaign operatives.

Otherwise, the poor authors of the Center seem to suffer from the syndrome of belief in conspiracy theories, since they assume that such a wide array of speakers representing top institutions from around the globe are all Putin agents and can’t think for themselves.

— Helga Zepp-LaRouche

On July 23, members of the Schiller Institute’s youth movement from a half- dozen Ibero-American nations joined an international mobilization in defense of Dutch farmers under the heading “World Day of Action for Agriculture, Science and the Future.” In Mexico City, Schiller Institute youth leader Carolina Dominguez introduced the day’s activities in a video now available online, appearing with a large banner publicizing the Dutch farmers’ mobilization call, entitled, “The World Is Going Dutch,” showing another sign that asked “Do you like to eat? Let’s defend those who produce your food!” and a picture of the World Land-Bridge. The video included clips of organizers holding other banners, followed by individual videos prepared by eight youth members and supporters in Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Peru, Argentina and Chile.

In her introduction, Dominguez explains: “The videos you’ll see from around Ibero-America as part of this mobilization are from young people who are worried about what we’re going to do about the future. These videos are for you—the farmers, producers, fishermen and others—because despite the fact that the financial system is bankrupt, that you’re being strangled with restrictions, and that the whole system is in a state of collapse, you keep feeding the population, you keep providing us with food to eat.

“You are not alone! The Schiller Institute is the spearhead for all those voices that can’t be with you in person, but our leader Helga Zepp-LaRouche has called for a new, just financial system that will include collaboration on infrastructure projects among farmers, scientists and educators.” See Documentation for the full text of the video.

Kansas State Sen. Mike Thompson spoke to Bob Baker in a July 22 interview for the Schiller Institute and EIR, reporting on how the Central States came to be facing electricity blackouts, from the shift to low-energy density wind and solar. A meteorologist, he is the Chairman of the Kansas Senate Utilities Committee. He reviewed the science, not the green ideology, on how to understand the episodes of high heat and drought now afflicting some of the planet, and how we should be building water and other infrastructure. The interview will be in the next issue of EIR, cover date July 29, and the video posted on the Schiller Institute site soon.

Thompson said, “We’ve got some big energy policy issues. A lot of it has been driven by the fact that there has been a steady disinformation campaign about the climate, for decades, and now we’re making horrible energy policy based on that … part of the reason that the Energy Information Administration is saying that we’re going to see electric rates double, if not triple, across parts of the country, is because of the increased reliance on renewables: wind and solar.”

Thompson went through some of the weather patterns of drought and high heat. The current U.S. heat wave, “is not unusual. It’s not uncommon, and it’s driven by largely the Pacific Ocean patterns that we have in place right now, and the Atlantic Ocean patterns; there are multi-decadal patterns of abnormally warm and cold pools of water; the locations of those pools of water—and they’re vast areas of the Earth—determine the general weather pattern flow across North America. And the one we’re stuck in right now, helps to amplify a big high-pressure dome over the western part of the United States, which is locking this heat wave into place.”

He stressed that, “there’s a general misunderstanding of the difference between environment and climate and what actually drives the climate,” and debunked the CO₂ demonization.

He gave specifics on the Central States, which right now faces a summer version of the 2021 Texas Freeze, when the state had blackouts. “Here in the state of Kansas, we have 4,000 wind turbines right now, and on a day like today, where it’s close to 100°, we have virtually no wind. So we’re all totally reliant on coal and natural gas, today, and the little bit of nuclear we have.

“And there’s no sign that we’re going to go toward reliability. As a matter of fact, the public utilities here are talking about retiring more coal plants. There are nuclear plants being retired across the United States—Palisades up in Michigan is one of the more recent; Diablo Canyon in California, they’re retiring a couple of those. In ERCOT, the Electric Reliability Council in Texas, they retired over six coal plants and went whole-hog into wind with over 30,000 MW of wind down there.”

Today, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, author of the speech “Gandhi’s Vision for a New Paradigm in International Relations, a World Health System, and Direct Non-Violent Action in Times of Social Breakdown,” will offer a strategic evaluation and remarks, addressing a Schiller Institute webcast, on July 23 at 2 p.m. EDT, in response to the breakthrough against the self-destructive and immoral policy of “war by sanctions” that occurred Friday, July 22 in Istanbul, Turkey.

This breakthrough, a signed four-way agreement to finally allow shipments of grain from the Black Sea, was in part in response to the pleas, admonitions and bulletins issued by the United Nations World Food Program head David Beasley and many others. The agreement was signed by the United Nations, Turkey, Ukraine and Russia. Now that a challenge to, though not a reversal of, the murderous sanctions policy has begun in the area of world food security, that flank must be exploited to roll back sanctions against Venezuela, Afghanistan, Iran and other nations, to end the decades of Malthusian war-fighting against the developing sector in the name of “campaigning for human rights.”

Watch Helga Zepp-LaRouche and Diane Sare discuss!

PDF of this statement

Only a fool can’t see it: the sanctions against Russia only harm Russia marginally, but they threaten to permanently destroy entire key areas of industry and agriculture in Germany and all of Europe! Farmers in many countries are therefore taking to the streets with their tractors, supported by taxi and truck drivers, because they know that very soon we will not have enough to eat in Europe, either. Our life savings are being eaten up by inflation, which has also been exacerbated by the sanctions. The collapse into social chaos is imminent! And for developing countries, the sanctions mean starvation for hundreds of millions of people!

And why all this? Serbian President Vucic is right: the Ukraine conflict is not a local or regional war, the entire West is already waging a world war against Russia via Ukraine to “ruin Russia,” as Ms. Baerbock says. Ukraine is just the means by which Russia is to be crushed for geopolitical reasons, as recently, openly demanded by US Congressmen. And next, China, whose economic rise is to be contained at all costs, is to be “decoupled.”

And who benefits from this insane policy that can only end in World War III?

• First: NATO and the military industry, which always need new wars to keep the well-oiled profit machine running.
• Second, the speculators of the City of London, Wall Street and other financial centers, whose speculation drives food and energy prices sky-high and who don’t care if millions die to pay for their mega-profits.
• Third: the green Malthusians, who are of the opinion that fewer people means a smaller carbon footprint, and that would be better for “the climate” anyway. Or people like Davos boss Klaus Schwab, who thinks the main problem for the climate is the impulse of people to want to overcome poverty!
• And fourth, a political establishment composed of a mixture of these first three elements, which has proven utterly incapable of getting anything right, whether it is fighting the pandemic, supporting the rail network, or ensuring the supply of skilled workers that industry requires. Instead of reflecting on the fact that it is their ideology-driven politics that is the reason we are facing total economic collapse today, they are already constructing a new narrative that either Putin is to blame for everything, or that right-wing or populist circles are now taking advantage of the crisis, blahblahblah.

But in their seemingly boundless arrogance, these self-righteous advocates of the “rules-based order” overlook the fact that the rest of the world isn’t so stupid, and that they realize it’s all about maintaining an ultimately still-colonial world order that defends the privileges of billionaires and millionaires at the expense of the majority of the human species. The acting President of Sri Lanka, Ranil Wickremesinghe, has condemned the sanctions against Russia, saying that their ultimate goal is to tumble the Third World into the abyss and force it to its knees. Our industry and agriculture are in danger of being irrevocably destroyed, while Russia, China and most of the countries of the Global South have no choice but to band together and create a new financial, economic, and monetary system that will defend their interests. This new system is emerging, explicitly excluding speculation and promoting the real economy, growth, and poverty alleviation through investment in scientific and technological progress.

China, and not the “rules-based democracies,” is reacting to the fact that, according to the UN, 1.7 billion people do not have enough to eat. China, together with the World Food Program, will set up a global humanitarian emergency stockpile, from which the world’s food reserves and their distribution will be mobilized through seven strategically placed centers to fight and overcome the world hunger catastrophe with all their might.

There is an obvious way the Gordian knot can be untied with one swipe; gas and oil can flow again, fertilizer and pesticides can be delivered again, food can get back to where it is urgently needed!

The sanctions against Russia, but also all the other countries against which they have been imposed for years for geopolitical reasons — Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen — must be ended immediately! Sanctions, under the conditions of world hunger, pandemic, and hyperinflation, mean genocide for the developing countries, and suicide for our industry and agriculture!

Sanctions are not the just retribution by the morally superior “democracies” for the crimes of “autocracies,” they are a brutal form of warfare against the respective populations of the sanctioned states with the aim of making their living conditions so intolerable that they rise up against their respective leaderships, and overthrow them. But the victims are always the people, no matter whether they be in Russia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Ukraine, or Germany!

Therefore, it is necessary to:
• Immediately end all sanctions not supported by the UN Security Council!
• Achieve comprehensive cooperation between all nations of this world for a new, just world economic order!
• Have cooperation, not confrontation!
• Double food production worldwide!

Excerpts from the Schiller Institute conference of June 18-19, 2022

The philosophical ideas of Russian-Ukrainian scientist V.I. Vernadsky are as fresh today as they were when Scientific American published Vernadsky’s vision of post-war scientific collaboration in the January 1945 edition of Scientific American. In many respects, science in the West has still to “catch up” to Vernadsky. His reflections on time, space and living matter can still serve as food for thought for scientists today, with his many creative insights that still have to be followed up. Vernadsky’s thought is especially important today when the necessary collaboration of scientists has been disrupted by intensified rivalries between nations, “cancel culture” movements, and exclusivist “bloc building.” The achievements of the Russian-Ukrainian scientist in promoting both the development of science in Russia and in Ukraine might serve as a model of collaboration to which science can again return.

Sam Pitroda is an Indian-American innovator, entrepreneur and policy maker who has served as a cabinet minister and advisor to seven different Indian heads of state. He is also author of the consequential book “Redesign the World: A Global Call to Action.” In his presentation to the June 18 – 19 Schiller Institute Conference Mr. Pitroda makes the observation that we live in a society where the purpose of government policy is to benefit power and profit, not planet and people. Economic success is judged not by how many people are lifted out of poverty but by how many billionaires are created and technology is used not for development but for surveillance and war. This type of society is untenable and must change. Using the principle of Gandhian non-violence we must learn to collaborate, cooperate and co-create for the purpose of ushering in a new world architecture which benefits all people.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche was a speaker on the July 7, the first day of a three-day Space Renaissance Art & Science Festival in Berlin, addressing “The Actuality of Krafft Ehricke’s Vision.” [See draft transcript in Documentation.] The conference was sponsored by the Space Renaissance International, an organization that was set up by some Krafft Ehricke space enthusiasts in Europe and the United States. They had initially invited Marsha Freeman to speak about Ehricke based on the work she had done about (and in cooperation with) him. Unable to attend in person, she recommended that they invite Helga Zepp-LaRouche, with whom Ehricke had worked and who had written such a moving speech on him at the Krafft Ehricke Memorial in Washington in 1985. The person she was in touch with was very enthusiastic about the opportunity of having Helga speak and was quickly put in touch with her.

She spoke about Ehricke’s legacy, outlining his achievements in space engineering, but laying emphasis on his philosophy of man, quoting extensively from Ehricke’s works, Anthropology of Astronautics and his “Three Laws of Astronautics.” She also described Ehricke’s work in ridiculing the zero-growth insanity that was flourishing in the 1970s with the Club of Rome and Global 2000 report.

She detailed in particular Ehricke’s observations on how a person’s view on life can change when under different circumstances. The goal today was to effect such a change in a population that feels itself downtrodden and pessimistic, she said. Such a change of perspective can occur when man begins to colonize the Moon and goes to Mars, people will begin to view humanity from a higher standpoint, as a spacefaring species.

The role of those involved in space is to bring such a paradigm shift to the population—astronauts going out to the schools and the universities and encouraging people to “look to the stars,” and look a hundred years ahead and beyond. People used to think that traveling 50 km per hour would be very dangerous, she said. Now China is working on maglev trains that will travel 600 km per hour, and people will accustom themselves to the new paradigm.

While she was showing the audience the painting of Ehricke’s Selenopolis, the design for a city on the Moon, she expressed that Ehricke’s vision was not simply to build a city or a village on the Moon, but to prepare the basis for travel into the galaxy and beyond, citing Ehricke’s unfinished work on Interstellar Relativistic Space Travel.

Her presentation also provoked an interesting discussion, and she was warmly received by the organizers and the audience. The moderator of her panel was Bernard Foing, who was also very excited by Mrs. LaRouche’s presentation. Foing was the Chief Project Scientist for ESA’s SMART mission to the Moon, and is the Executive Director of the International Lunar Exploration Working Group (ILEWG) and the president of Space Renaissance International.

The full video of the proceedings is available here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz80F6TczJQ&t

Mike Billington of Executive Intelligence Review interviews Dr. Clifford Kiracofe, former Senior Staff Member, U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations; President, Washington Institute for Peace and Development.

Mike Billington: Greetings! This is Mike Billington. I’m with Executive Intelligence Review, the Schiller Institute, and The LaRouche Organization. I’m here today with Dr. Clifford Kiracofe. Cliff served as a senior staff member on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations during the 1980s. He’s taught in universities in the United States and China, and is a prolific writer on historical, strategic, and economic issues.

Thank you, Cliff, for being with us today.

Dr. Kiracofe: Thanks, Mike, for inviting me. I’m very happy to be here with you today.

U.S. Imperialism and the Rise of the Security State

Billington: In 2005 and 2006, you gave several presentations at Schiller Institute conferences in Germany as well as in the U.S., several on the theme of U.S. imperialism and the rise of the national security state, and generally on the emergence of a fascist tendency within the United States. This was the time after the 9/11 attack—the Patriot Act, the beginning of the endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq under George Bush and Dick Cheney.

What is your view of that era today?

Dr. Kiracofe: That was very significant. 9/11, of course, changed everything. 9/11 provided a pretext for increasing the national security state, if you will, here in the United States and a clampdown on liberty, and an interference with our constitutional rights. 9/11 was really a key. I can certainly remember and visualize the attack on the Twin Towers. That stunned America. Using that horrible event, the powers that be took advantage of public outrage and fear and continued the construction of the national security state left over from the Cold War—the original Cold War from 1945 to, say, 1988, ’89, when President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev kind of ended the Cold War. 9/11 revamped and provided context for this national security state.

That was 15 years ago. In recent years, you have an addition of the surveillance state, which is actually manipulated by so-called “Silicon Valley people.” You have the social media, etc., all falling under the national security state’s cognitive warfare, propaganda, etc. In answer to your question, I think that early period 2001, 2005, 6 has set the stage for the last 20 years of increasing this national security state here at home and globally, actually.

‘Liberal Democracy’ and the Rules-Based Order

Billington: I noticed in looking over your presentations that even then you rejected the idea of the “unipolar world” which had been promoted by [Vice-President Dick] Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and the neoconservatives—the so-called Wolfowitz Doctrine, which claimed that we had reached the end of history, as Francis Fukuyama put it, that liberal democracy was the proven doctrine for all nations for all time to come.

In your view, what did they really mean by this term, “liberal democracy,” which we still hear all the time today as the justification for the Western “rules-based order?”

Dr. Kiracofe: If you look carefully back at that era, you’ll see among the neoconservatives one outspoken intellectual, Mike Ledeen, who talked about universal fascism. The concept was early Mussolini, that is to say, fascism without anti-Semitism, which Mussolini later introduced into Italian fascism. For Mike Ledeen and the neocons, this kind of regime is one they’re comfortable with. Looking at the intellectual roots of the neoconservatives, really what you’re looking at is what was called Revisionist Zionism. These people are all from the Truman Cold War era mentality and the Revisionist Zionism of Vladimir Jabotinsky. Jabotinsky favored a Mussolini style politics, and, at base, a Nietzschean approach to politics.

When they use the term “liberal democracy,” well, that sounds great. It sounds excellent until you realize that what they really mean is quite the opposite, more of a regimented society, etc. It’s this use of language, twisting language around. Of course, liberal democracy would be great, but that’s not what’s in their mind. And of course, here in the United States, we have a constitutional republic. Our democracy is based on a Constitution, and it’s republican in nature.

Billington: There’s no difference these days between the neocons who run the Republican Party and the so-called neolibs who run the Democratic Party when it comes to asserting the right to use military force against any government which does not follow their “rules-based order,” as they define the rules. The endless wars in the Middle East were unprovoked and were supporting the terrorists against sovereign governments, rather than fighting them. You’ve made the point that the U.S. lost all of these wars while causing massive destruction and death and mass migration. The UN Charter following World War II was very clear. It forbid the use of military force unless attacked and also forbid the use of unilateral sanctions for economic or strategic purposes.

How do you think the U.S. government has gotten away with such overt criminal acts against international law?

Dr. Kiracofe: Well, Washington just plows ahead and does what it wants—the so-called “blob,” or the “inside-the-Beltway” people. Both political parties have been “neocon-ized,” if you wish. Actually, the neoconservatives started in the Democratic Party under Truman in the Cold War atmosphere. Nowadays the neoconservative, bellicose, aggressive line is shared to a great degree by both political parties in Washington, and in Congress. In terms of interventionism, again, both parties are involved—the neoconservative policy network, the liberal interventionists that you mentioned, the so-called human rights people, human rights interventionists. It’s a disregard for international law, that is to say, traditional international law based on the concept of sovereign states, and also based on the concept of non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states.

This international legal concept goes back even as early as 1555 to the Peace of Augsburg, and then 1648 to the well-known Peace of Westphalia. These principles of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries is a 500-year-old principle, although it has not, of course, been followed all those years. The United States since World War II is a prime example of what we would call “interventionist politics.” Its foreign interventions are supported by both parties, or a majority of both parties.

When it comes to major wars, as opposed to the covert coups d’état and all sorts of covert actions, we certainly didn’t win Korea, we didn’t win Vietnam, we didn’t win Iraq, and an ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan, etc. And of course, we’re not going to “win” the proxy war the U.S. started with Russia in Ukraine. We have a lot of violence going on and displaced persons deaths, etc., owing to this interventionism, or what we could call imperialism by the United States and its Western allies.

I would point out that the NATO alliance, we need to remember, is the U.S., Canada, plus Western European countries. It’s really the product of a U.S. or a transatlantic oligarchy, rather than an individual United States or an individual Germany or France or England or something. It’s this transatlantic oligarchy that is controlling NATO as a tool of policy, as an enforcement tool of policy, and is controlling the European Union as a political tool. So, when we talk about “U.S. imperialism,” which is one way to look at it, we also should bear in mind the sort of transatlantic oligarchy which is subservient to, we could say, a certain plutocracy.

The Roles of the City of London and Wall Street

Billington: How do you see the role of the City of London and Wall Street in the governance of this transatlantic oligarchy?

Dr. Kiracofe: That’s the core of it. Of course, the City of London is a very ancient setup, going back many centuries, I think maybe to the 13th century or a little later, but at least 500, 600 years, going back that far. The Bank of England was started as a private monopoly in the late 1600s, 1690s. That whole private banking and banking nexus there in what is called The City. That’s the British component of it. And then we have the American side in Wall Street, you could say a parallel universe, or a parallel and cooperating financial mechanism with the British. 

The Anglo-Dutch banking financial networks, and then the New York linkages, New York commercial banks, investment banks are all kind of interlinked. Each has offices in the other countries—the New York banks have offices in London and the London banks have offices in New York, etc. You’re looking at the central banks and the cooperation of central banks to manipulate the money supply, credit and interest rates, and things along those lines—I would say a misuse. The British Bank of England was nationalized after World War II. The American Federal Reserve, so-called, is still held by commercial banks. The American Federal Reserve isn’t really “federal” when you look at it closely. Also, there’s a problem of so-called independence of central banks. The central bank should certainly be under the control of the Treasury, not independent.

The United States Fed is not under the control of the Treasury and is only nominally under control of Congress, which is too supine to reform it.

Finance capitalism, of course, is the root, the foundation of modern Western imperialism. And Professor Hobson in England, way back in the early 1900s, wrote about it, analyzed it. A number of American economists back in the early 1900s, following Hobson and other analysts, economists, noted this problem of what they used to call “national imperialism.”

For example, in World War I, you had the British imperialism, French imperialism, Russian imperialism, German imperialism—it was a clash of these national imperialisms. After World War II, we seem to have more of what we might call globalist imperialism. That is to say that the competing national imperialisms of the World War I era, even World War II, something changed. After World War II, you had kind of a globalist, a group or a global oligarchy or plutocracy running the imperialist game. And, of course, being the most powerful country after World War II, the U.S. became an instrument for projecting military power or other sorts of power where necessary, to enforce, let’s say, global finance capitalism.

So, the U.S. becomes a sheriff for Wall Street and The City. The British of course give the Americans a lot of ideas because the Americans don’t have so much experience as the British do. So a lot of U.S. policies are actually British policies that the British basically “suggest” to the United States, and then the United States goes forward with that—anti-Russian stuff, and all of that.

Billington: Well, also financial policies, in the sense that the historic American system of Hamiltonian economics had the government directing the credit policy, not the Fed or the private banking system. And essentially, after the assassination of President Kennedy, this British model of banking systematically came in and generally took over the financial system. And all you hear since then is “the independence of the Fed—we must protect the independence of the Fed,” which, of course, is the independence of private bankers, not government policy.

The Federal Reserve Bank Is Not Federal

Dr. Kiracofe: Right. When the Federal Reserve was set up in 1913, the ownership of the Fed actually was the shareholders, and shareholders were the participating big banks. They just put the word “federal” on it. It’s a private bank, in essence. As I said earlier, it actually should be under the authority of the Treasury Department and the Secretary of the Treasury, which would be a cabinet official, with the President.

The Fed was set up by Congress. Congress has the power to create the Fed and Congress has the power to dissolve the Fed or put new legislation forward, to audit the Fed, to change how it works, etc. The Fed is a creature of Congress. However, as you well point out, the idea that the Fed should be “independent”—what does that mean? Independent from Congress? What does that mean? Independent from the people of the United States who vote for their Congresspersons and senators? I mean, what is an “independent American central bank?” Who owns it?

If you take a look carefully during the Jacksonian period of the central bank, you do find that there are foreign shareholders of our own central bank. The issue then is, okay, let’s nationalize the Federal Central Bank, and let’s put it under the authority of the Treasury Department, Secretary of the Treasury, who, of course, is subject to his President and his President is subject to election.

Therefore, we certainly don’t need an independent Fed. We need a Fed under political control. You may say, well, the different politicians are going to have different ideas. Well, fine, that’s democracy. Let’s have a vote in the Senate. Let’s have a vote in the House about the management issues when it comes to the central bank. While it this sort of “high priest” who would be the head of the central bank, why let that high priest make all the policies without regulation, without oversight? 

The Banking Committee and appropriate committees in the House and Senate are supposed to exercise oversight, but they just write a blank check. The high priests and priestesses in the central bank—you can think about Delphi and ancient Babylon and all those ancient times when all the money, the gold and silver, was kept by the priesthood in the temples. These high priests of the Federal Reserve are independent and not subject to democratic control. My personal view is that we need to federalize the Fed and bring it under democratic control of Congress who have the authority and the responsibility of oversight. Look at the interest rates today. Look at the Fed policy. It’s a disaster. It’s wrecking the country.

The Roots of Fascist Ideology in Ukraine

Billington: Thank you. You mentioned the Ukraine situation. Let me go back to that. It’s widely recognized now, I don’t think they can hide it any longer, that the U.S. and the U.K. have been openly sponsoring and arming neo-Nazi brigades within Ukraine, within the Ukraine military and within the government. I know you know a great deal about how the fascist institutions from World War II, the Nazi and fascist institutions, that these were sustained by Western interests in Europe since the time of World War II. What can you say about how that was done?

Dr. Kiracofe: First of all, let’s go back a little bit into the 1920s and 1930s when we have various forms of fascism developing, and we have that particularly virulent anti-Semitic strain of fascism developing, of course, in Germany. But then Mussolini shifts over and becomes also anti-Semitic in his later period, after 1937 or so.

The racial roots of this go back into what used to be called “eugenics” and “racial anthropology” as scientific, so-called, subjects of study. So, eugenics, racial anthropology, which even goes back into the late 1880s, [Gen. Gustav] Ratzenhofer in Austria and the others. That sets the stage for that era of fascism that we supposedly defeated in World War II.

But we have a persistence of the ideology, racist ideologies or racialist ideologies of the racial anthropologists and the eugenics people and the anti-Semites and all of that. We have that persisting in various quarters in Europe. Europe was not de-Nazified. I mean, in theory Germany was de-Nazified, but really the ideology, that pernicious ideology, racialist ideologies, were never fully extinguished. They persisted under the table, you could say, and even protected under democratic institutions, which allow a variety of thought. Although the Nazi thought is pernicious, but still it survived, and particularly in Eastern Europe and parts of Germany.

When we look at the Ukraine situation, we need to take a look at the historical background. First of all, the word “Ukraine” translates to “borderland.” The present geographic space of Ukraine, the present borders are like a Frankenstein monster. Bits and pieces of territory were added to create Ukraine. During World War I, 1918, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, where the German general staff made a deal with Lenin, and Russia dropped out of the war. In return, Ukraine was “created.” Various parts of the former Russian empire were broken off, and Lenin gives the whole southern and eastern portion of Novorossiya, historic Novorussiya, to so-called Ukraine in 1922. After World War II, Stalin gives little portions of what’s now in western Ukraine to Ukraine, former Polish Galicia—there are two million Poles that live in Ukraine. These are all involved in what is the present-day boundaries of Ukraine.

So, Ukraine is a mishmash, an agglomeration of various pieces of real estate and ethnic and religious groups. The western part is Roman Catholic. The Novorossiya area is generally Russian Orthodox. So, you have within Ukraine ethnic as well as religious divisions.

Stepan Bandera’s Nazi Network, Then and Now

In the 1920s, ’30s, ’40s, etc., particularly in the western portion of Ukraine near Lvov, the western portion of what is today called Ukraine, you have the rise of Nazi organizations, various Ukrainian organizations that worked with the German state, the Nazi German state, with the Abwehr [military-intelligence] in particular, the military and others. This is where the Stepan Bandera faction comes from. The Stepan Bandera political faction today is the dominant political faction in Ukraine.

Now, what about this guy? Bandera was a Nazi agent. He worked with the Germans in World War II. His organization was responsible for murdering Jews and Poles and Ukrainians, etc., liquidating them, over 100,000 or so. The Bandera operations in World War II were directed by Nazi Germany as he was their tool.

At the conclusion of World War II, the Nazi German intelligence network under General Reinhard Gehlen was recruited by the West, by the United States, etc., to fold into post-World War II Western intelligence services to fight communism, that is to say Russian communism or Soviet communism, Soviet bloc communism. Folded into NATO, for example, are the Western intelligence services, for example, former Nazi military and intelligence officials. With the idea of fighting communism—use the Nazis to fight the communists—that kind of an idea. In that, you had different operations created in Europe, like the so-called Gladio operation, which left a “stay behind” network of basically Nazi, ideological types in place, undercover in Europe, to fight against the so-called Soviet threat, and so on.

How does this persist? It starts in the 1920s and 1930s. World War II does not de-Nazify Europe, really. And then after World War II, these extremist networks are used by the West, by the U.S. and Germany and Britain and France, etc. against the Soviet Union. In 1991 the Soviet Union broke up and the Warsaw Pact ended. You now have the Russian Federation, of which Russia is the major part, and then all these bits and pieces of what was the Soviet Empire, which was inherited from part of the Tsarist empire. The Baltic states were freed up and Ukraine became independent. The Central Asian countries, the five “Stans,” became independent.

With reference to Ukraine, these old Bandera networks still existed. Some of the elderly people in it and then their children and grandchildren adhered to that form of Ukrainian nationalism that existed particularly in the Lvov area, in the western Roman Catholic zone of Ukraine. There, the ethnic concept, like that of Adolf Hitler, was ethnically anti-Russian. They are Slavs, that’s true. But the Ukrainian racial anthropology made a distinction between themselves as superior to the Russian ethnic people who were, in German terms, the untermenschen, or the lower-down people. That distinction in Ukraine was maintained in the ’50s and ’60s, and by these extremist groups.

In recent years, since 1991, Western intelligence services, the United States, Britain, Germany in particular, were using earlier—1950s era anti-communist networks. They were used to impose the coup d’état in 2014, the so-called Maidan coup, that put in power these really extremist people. Before the Maidan coup we could say that the governments were pro-Western, more liberal, Yushchenko and all, more liberal, pro-Western. But after the 2014 coup, [President Petro] Poroshenko and then [President Volodymyr] Zelensky came to power. Very right-wing nationalists and neo-Nazi networks have real power in the parliament and in the government, the nomenklatura, the apparatus of government, the bureaucracy, and also in the military.

That’s what we’re facing right now in Ukraine. The Ukrainian situation, the tragic war that we see now, could have been avoided by the West pressuring Ukraine to adopt the Minsk-II formula, which was from 2015. The Minsk-II formula simply called for more autonomy for the ethnic Russian speakers, ethnic Russians in the south and east, former Novorossiya. But neither France nor Germany, nor the United States, nor any other of the Western countries would help facilitate Minsk-II. That being the case, the Western countries, and also NATO, built up the Ukrainian military, and backed the new right-wing regimes in Ukraine. I mean, Zelensky is a fascist, and Poroshenko was too. It’s very simple. Ukraine was built up as a proxy, NATO’s proxy, U.S. proxy, against Russia.

Now, of course, this was part of the Zbigniew Brzezinski formula, as discussed in his book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives. Brzezinski was the guy who invented these “color revolutions,” for the country of Georgia, for the country of Ukraine, etc. This is really Brzezinski’s legacy in a direct way, this Ukraine war, because Brzezinski specifically wanted to target Ukraine as a proxy against Russia. Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State under President Clinton, was a former student and protégé of Brzezinski.

Without going into even further length about the situation, right now, the Russians are advancing and Ukraine will be partitioned if the Russian advance sticks, and Russia will get back what Lenin gave to Ukraine—that is traditional Novorossiya in the south and east. There’ll be a Ukrainian rump state. And then the question is going to be, is Poland going to want to grab a little bit of Galicia back, or what about Hungary, etc.? The ultimate shape, the geographic space of Ukraine is yet to be determined. Certainly the U.S. and any military professional knows that the Russians are winning. But the propaganda has to be the other way around, that “the Ukrainians are winning,” “the brave Zelensky,” etc. In fact, on the ground it certainly appears to be that the Russians are winning and ultimately will partition Ukraine.

The Ideologists of Fascism

Billington: Let me let me ask you about the ideology behind fascism. As I’m sure you know, as a university professor for years, the likes of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, of the jurist Carl Schmitt, these people are taught as among the great philosophers and jurists of our age in American universities. And yet they were the ideologues who really gave rise to German Nazism. How do you see this?

Dr. Kiracofe: It’s a tragedy, of course. Instead of teaching Nietzsche and Heidegger and Schmidt and all those guys, we should be teaching James Madison and George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and [Alexander] Hamilton. You know, our own intellectual tradition. What we’ve done is adopted the European intellectual tradition, which has nothing to do with the United States in these characters, and that has proliferated in American education. I will say that in particular, what’s been devastating has been, I think, the Frankfurt School of German intellectuals who came to the United States in the 1930s and set up shop at Columbia University.

The Frankfurt School is “critical theory,” a mixture of neo-Marxism and neo-Freudianism. But what people don’t quite catch is that the Frankfurt School, really, is fundamentally based on Sergey Nechayev, the Russian anarchist. Nechayev’s doctrine was one of pure destruction, and that goes well with Nietzsche, of course. But Nechayev’s doctrine was destruction. The Frankfurt School’s entire program was the destruction of Western culture, and thus politics. So, in destroying culture, you destroy politics. That’s the Frankfurt School approach. I remember very well a university campus in the 1960s when I was a student undergrad. You had these Frankfurt school professors becoming so famous—Herbert Marcuse, for one, and a whole host of others. Marcuse and the Frankfurt School people were dominating campuses from California all the way to New England.

If you take a look at their ideology, it’s a brilliant strategy to destroy. They make no proposals as to what to build. Their role is to destroy. It’s so funny, that the Frankfurt School itself was a creation of the Soviet intelligence services, the NKVD. Felix Dzerzhinsky himself worked with [Theodor] Adorno, directly, to fund and put together the Frankfurt School. And there was a close linkage then between the Frankfurt School and Moscow Center, and the Frankfurt School and the Comintern, the Communist International. In Russia, you had [Karl] Radek and some of the others who were linked in to helping support the Frankfurt School in Frankfurt, Germany, this group of neo-Marxist intellectuals.

Now, what about Nietzsche? What we find about Nietzsche, the trend in the late 19th century, particularly in Germany, there was, I would say, a revival, you could call it, or a wave of Nietzschean thought. Nietzsche became very, very influential in the 1880s, 1890s. At the same time, this strong Nietzschean impulse was linked, you could say, to the Charles Darwin people, the Herbert Spencer people. So, you had kind of a convergence of Nietzsche, and this social Darwinism or however you want to phrase it—survival of the fittest, that philosophy. That was a driving force in Germany as well as in England, etc.

There was a transformation into the military ideology, particularly by Gen. Gustav Ratzenhofer of Austria, who blended this Nietzschean stuff with this racial stuff, “survival of the fittest” stuff of Darwin and Spencer. Ratzenhofer I think in certain circles was influential. And let’s remember, Hitler wasn’t a German at all. Hitler was an Austrian. I think Gen. Ratzenhofer’s ideas provided a real basis for Hitler and that type of militarized Nietzschean thought and action. So, yes, you’ve identified Nietzsche. It’s very important. And when we look at what used to be called militarism, the rise of militarism in Europe in the 19th century, towards the end of the 19th century, that militarism was very much colored by Nietzschean, the “Superman,” and Nietzschean thought.

Now, we fought World War I and tried after that with the League of Nations, and then World War II and tried after that with the United Nations, to try to stem or stop or block or eliminate this virulent militarism that was tearing the world up. It includes, of course, Japanese militarism—I’m not letting them off the hook either, Mr. Abe. But this militarism was kept going in the United States after World War II, as President Ike Eisenhower said, by the military-industrial complex.

Behind ‘Neoconservatism’ Is Nietzschean Thought

What is the leading intellectual policy network for that? The neoconservatives. The point you made on philosophy driving thought in the United States—yes: Nietzsche, and also Heidegger, but in particular the Frankfurt School. Then we see the neocons pushing it. In the academic world, which has been completely wrecked by the Frankfurt School, higher education—not to mention K through 12—in higher education, in international relations theory, international relations scholars, we see the so-called “realists.” Well, what is this “realist” stuff? The “realists,” in academics and in policy in Washington, believe in the philosophies of Nietzsche, and Thomas Hobbes. You didn’t mention Leo Strauss, but Leo Strauss is in there as a purveyor of Nietzschean thought. Hans Morgenthau, another purveyor of Nietzschean thought. So, in the National Security Network in the United States, we have Nietzschean thought, Hobbesian thought, German realpolitik thought, Machtpolitik thought.

By the way, Friedrich Meinecke’s critique of realpolitik is really good, his book on Machiavellianism, Die Idee der Staatsräson, is a very important book on all this.

Permeating Washington, D.C. today, sitting in various offices in the Pentagon and State Department and Congress, etc., there’s this national security thinking based on Hobbes. Well, the United States is not based on Hobbes—more Locke than Hobbes. What you point out about Nietzschean thought, is that it’s not just confined to the world of ivory tower intellectuals. No. Variations of Nietzschean thought are present in the policy making circles in Washington, D.C. Our imperialism, our interventionism, is a Nietzschean idea, that the United States should be the hegemon of the world, should dominate the world: so-called “Full-Spectrum Dominance.” 

All this stuff that you see coming out of the Pentagon in their national security reports every couple of years, or national strategy reports out of the White House. It has this Nietzschean flavor to it. The National Security Council’s NSC 68, 1951—which is a very famous document—set the stage for the militarization of American foreign policy. You could say, the “Nietzscheanization” of American foreign policy. 

Hobbesianization. Certainly, American foreign policy that the Founding Fathers intended, as in George Washington’s farewell address, has nothing to do with Nietzsche, or Heidegger, or Leo Strauss or Carl Smith who was Strauss’ teacher. What’s happened is, this European fascism, this strain of European fascism and philosophy, has come into the United States and spread to the higher education, and then spreads into decision makers in Washington. They have what we can call roughly a Cold War mindset, a Nietzschean mindset, a zero-sum mindset.

U.S. Foreign Policy as ‘Great Power Confrontations’

Billington: We had another shift in strategy during the Barack Obama and Donald Trump administrations, when our national security doctrines declared that terrorism was not our key problem, but rather we now have “great power confrontation” and that Russia and China were identified as our competitors, actually saying that they were our enemies, that they were aggressive, they were trying to take the world away from America’s unipolar leadership and so forth.

And yet, just last week, we had a conference in Beijing of the BRICS countries—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—along with 13 other leading developing sector countries. They absolutely united, totally, in denouncing the idea of these “blocs,” of the East versus the West—what the Biden administration likes to call the “democracies versus the autocracies.” Instead, they called for international unity to deal with the actual global crisis that we’re facing—a perfect storm, as Helga Zepp-LaRouche calls it—the danger of a global nuclear war, the hyperinflationary collapse of the entire dollar-based Western system, mass famine spreading in an unprecedented scope globally. And yet the Biden administration and the media continue to say that Russia is isolated internationally, and that even China is isolated internationally, despite this reality.

So, what is the actual situation now in terms of the emergence of this new phenomenon in China, Russia, India?

Dr. Kiracofe: You’ve identified that really well, the BRICS grouping. What we’re seeing is these different groupings—we have ASEAN [The Association of Southeast Asian Nations] in the Pacific, etc.—around common interests, which boil down to economic and social development and cooperation. So here we have this concept of “peace and development,” or development meaning economic and social, scientific, technological development of humanity.

I’m an American and I’m really outraged at, not just the Biden administration; it’s the entire U.S. establishment, the foreign policy establishment. They’ve completely divorced themselves from, let’s say, George Washington’s farewell address, or you could take Jefferson or Hamilton or Madison or Monroe or Abraham Lincoln, any of the Founding Fathers, astute statesmen of our past. They have taken American idealism, and have created the absolute opposite: the American imperial hegemon, a kind of Frankenstein monster roaming around the world.

As an American, I reject that. I think it’s an alien idea to us, to our culture, our country, our people. This alien idea is imposed by the establishment, the so-called “transatlantic oligarchy,” submissive to a certain plutocracy of finance. What we’re seeing now in the world is a natural reaction.

International Relations 101

Even if you took International Relations 101—which I used to teach in political science classes—you would see the concept of countries getting together to balance against the hegemon. In Europe, Louis Quatorze, Louis the 14th, wanted to be the ruler of Europe. Well, a coalition was put together to block that. Then you had Napoleon. He wanted to dominate Europe and be the hegemon of Europe. Well, you have a coalition that comes together and then blocks Napoleon. And you’ve got Hitler doing the same thing, wanting to be the dictator of Europe, etc. And again, a coalition comes together and defeats Hitler.

So, the pattern, at least in Western history, which is what we’re talking about here, is coalitions coming together to block a hegemon. Now, let’s apply that to the world today, because the United States has entered into this completely un-American hegemonic role, which is—let’s face it, it’s Wall Street, it’s The City, we were talking about that earlier. Who’s really behind American imperialism? Well, Wall Street, of course, and The City. Who’s behind the military-industrial complex? Well, of course, it’s Wall Street. They make the loans to the companies. This is what we call finance capitalism combining with militarism.

At any rate, the BRICS countries are now trying their best to coordinate their policies toward economic and social development of their people. And this includes health and all sorts of categories of social and economic development. China and Russia—and Putin in particular—have emphasized the role of BRICS, the emerging role of BRICS in the international system. The international system is changing, from what?

Well, let’s take a look backward. After World War II, the international system was two blocs, the Western bloc vs. the communist bloc. The Communist bloc was the Soviet Union and China basically, and their satellites. Two blocs, the West vs. the East. Then in 1991, the Soviet Union dissolves and the Warsaw Pact, its military alliance dissolves. That left the U.S. with choices to make. Back then, some of us argued: “Hey, now it’s time to take a breather. Now it’s time to prepare for the eventual emergence of a multipolar world. And if we take a breather, retrench our economy, get our own economic and social development going because we’re at peace. We can adjust to the inevitable ineluctable arrival process of multipolarity.” Some call it polycentrism, some call it pluralism. Along with that, you would have re-emphasized the United Nations as a central point for peace and development and international law.

Of course, the United States has done just the opposite. We’ve done everything we can to destroy the United Nations, to wreck its mission, to destroy international law.

Now that the world economy, more and more countries, have reached an economic level sufficient to sustain their independence and sovereignty, particularly when protected or led by China and Russia, you’re starting to see a Global South emerging, with BRICS part of that. And you’re starting to see this Western bloc of, let’s be frank, white people in the U.S. and Canada and Europe. So, you’ve got this this radical militarized Atlantic community of white people vs. the rest of the world. That’s what’s going on.

Democracies vs. Autocracies: The New ‘Cold War’

It’s a tragedy. It’s a disgrace that the U.S. establishment has supported and promotes this kind of a bloc system or bifurcation system of the world.

In 2005, the U.S. establishment elite, the foreign policy elite, met in a series of meetings. Princeton University hosted. It was to figure out an update to the Cold War. “How do we update our Cold War policy? China is rising, Russia is coming back, we’re mired down in the Middle East with the Iraq war. How do we update the Cold War?” That was the question. A new international situation, a new international balance of power.

The bottom line of that 2005 elite’s decision, was the idea of “democracies vs. autocracies.” Well, that just updates the language of the old Cold War, which was the West vs. the East, the Free world West vs. the Communist East. So, this bloc idea, just updated with a little different rhetoric, different language. Democracies vs. autocracies. That’s 2005. That was carried forward. Remember, in 2008 we had the election of Barack Obama, so that was reached just before the election in 2008, that elite consensus, was carried forward by Obama.

Who was the Secretary of State? Hillary Clinton. Who is Hillary’s chief adviser? A gal who had been involved in this whole update of U.S. foreign policy, Anne-Marie Slaughter, who was Director of Policy Planning over at the State Department. Basically the U.S. elite, so-called elite, such as it is, decided to update the Cold War to take into consideration the rise of China and the return of Russia.

Still, the concept of containment from the old Cold War was applied to the new Cold War. That is to say: beef up NATO in Europe to block Russia, and strengthen the alliance with Japan and other alliances in Asia to block China. Therefore, we have this idea of encirclement of the Eurasian landmass from the European side, and from Japan on the Pacific side. That was already 2005 and carried into the Obama administration. We can remember Mrs. Clinton talked about—she didn’t call it the Quad, but she discussed in 2011 and 2010, as they were two years into the Obama administration—having India, Japan, the United States, and Australia, joining together against China. So, that “Quad,” as it was later called, Four Countries. Hillary was already talking about that in 2010 and 2011.

Here we are in 2022. Let’s think about this. You and I are both old enough to remember the 1970s. We were in college then, grad school. Back in 1972, Nixon did two things: the opening to China and a detente with Russia, easing relations. Fifty years ago, half a century ago, a Republican, no less, a conservative Republican administration, no less, was seeking ways to ameliorate relations with Russia and China. This was bipartisan because later in the late 1970s, President Jimmy Carter, we can well remember, sort of finalized the Nixon opening to China and achieved a normalization, you could say, of relations with China. Late 1978,’79. Here we are, 50 years ago, attempting to have better relations with Russia and China. And bipartisan, Nixon and Jimmy Carter, both Democrats and Republicans.

Let’s fast forward. Here we are today, or since 2005, with the rebirth of the Cold War stuff, back in the 1950s, with Sen. Joe McCarthy! If you say something nice about Putin or President Xi, you’re automatically a commie lover or a panda bear lover or a Russia bear lover or whatever you want to call it. You have this McCarthyism going on right now against anyone who favors a responsible and reasonable policy toward other major powers.

There are only two paths symbolized on the back of a dollar bill, on which we have the great seal of America, where the bald eagle is clutching an olive branch in its right talon and 13 arrows in its left. Now, in foreign policy, that’s your choice. You’re either going to have peace with the olive branch or you can have war with the arrows. And right now, instead of the peace-seeking that Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter and others had, now we’ve got a neocon-ized Congress and a neocon-ized administration. Antony Blinken. Victoria Nuland. I mean, come on. A neocon-ized administration, fully backed by the military-industrial complex and the Pentagon. People may not know it or understand it, but it’s working overtime on war planning against China, using Taiwan as the pretext.

We’re a little diverted right now with Ukraine. That’s true. But what’s really going on in the Pentagon behind the scenes is war planning against China over Taiwan.

In 50 years, we have gone from attempting to ameliorate, reduce tensions with potential adversaries, Russia and China, to the exact opposite. We are now in a confrontational mode with Russia and with China, and both of those countries are much stronger by far than they were in 1972, or ’78 or ’79. Russia and China are formidable powers. And the world is changing. The international system is changing to multipolarity.

The BRICS Alternative to the Hegemon

That’s what gives space for the BRICS that you mentioned, a group of countries who don’t want to live under an American hegemony—it’s not really U.S., it’s a NATO hegemony, the hegemony of the transatlantic oligarchy, or London and Washington, however you want to phrase it. Countries that are in the Global South, as it’s called, who don’t want to be under this system, and who want to be independent, in the sense that they’d like to choose their own political system, their own economic development growth system.

It may not be a pure Western model, but they’d like to be able to choose their own path to development, to political development, economic development, social development, and not be bothered by the hegemonic policies of the NATO countries. NATO is expanding globally, so let’s also remember that. NATO’s not just for Europe anymore. NATO has been for 30 years reaching into Central Asia, the Afghan war, Libya in Africa, and also incorporating Japan and New Zealand as partners. NATO has been globalized and NATO is the control mechanism of the transatlantic oligarchy and plutocracy that I was mentioning before.

So, it’s certainly no surprise that BRICS is being featured now as an alternative grouping, and other countries can join it. Saudi Arabia might like to join. Argentina has inquired about joining. Brazil is a member, so why not Argentina? I think Mexico would be a great addition. Indonesia, fantastic addition. BRICS, which is particularly emphasized by the Russians, by Putin, but also by China. BRICS has great possibilities in terms of forming a community oriented toward economic and social development.

I think it’s going to expand. That’s why they’re starting now, in the last year or so, to talk about BRICS-Plus, plus other members. Who? as we just said, there are a range of members in the Global South that would be great additions to BRICS. And BRICS can certainly learn from the experience of China and its development model, which has been so successful, and from Russia, which has been successful in staving off Western sanctions. BRICS has a lot of potential as a cooperative grouping with a shared future. The key there is cooperation, solidarity, human development, peace. Those are the BRICS watchwords. That’s what BRICS is aiming at.

A New Bretton Woods System

Billington: As you know, Cliff, the Schiller Institute has held a series of international conferences under Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s direction and leadership, focused on the idea that we have to find a way to get the U.S. and the European countries not to go to war with Russia and China, but to sit down with Russia and China and deal with the actual extreme crisis facing mankind, with the collapse of the dollar based system, the threat of nuclear war, the pandemics, famine, and so forth.

We’re now circulating a petition calling for an ad hoc committee for a new Bretton Woods system, basically insisting that what’s driving the war is the economic breakdown of the West, and that the decision by some in the West that rather than putting their own system through reorganization, they’d rather go out and destroy Russia and China, so there would be no opposition to their continued hegemony.

The danger that Helga Zepp-LaRouche has identified is that this new system, which we’ve just discussed around the BRICS and the BRICS-Plus, if it remains only the non-Western countries, and there are still the two blocs, two financial systems, it’s going to aggravate the danger of war rather than alleviate that danger. The question that we are addressing with the petition and with our organizing is, how do we bring the United States to see its actual self interest in being part of the Belt and Road, the New Silk Road, the new BRICS-Plus—to join in a policy for peace through development.

What do you think? You’ve been involved in American politics most of your life. What must be done to bring the U.S. to its senses and to join with this positive effort?

Dr. Kiracofe: Well, I think Helga and the Schiller Institute really are leading the charge here intellectually on the issue. What we’re seeing currently is this bifurcation process, the two blocs, a Western bloc and a, let’s say, Global South bloc. It’s fine that the Global South develops and creates itself into a bloc, or builds solidarity among its members. But, Helga was quite right that, eventually, who knows when, but eventually, we must have an understanding on a global level, which is what the United Nations is all about. We should have an understanding at the global level on an international economy, a global economy that works for everyone—a global international system that works for everyone.

We’re all humans. This is the human race which is at stake here. It’s true that for the moment, maybe for the next few years, we’re going to see this bifurcation into blocs. That’s true. We see it now. It’s a natural reaction against the hegemon—the United States and Western Europe, the transatlantic oligarchy and plutocracy. This is normal, but we have to look ahead. How do we look ahead? We do exactly what Franklin Roosevelt did during World War II. We look ahead to the aftermath of the conflict. We plan ahead. That’s why President Roosevelt, who was very astute in international economic matters, called for the Bretton Woods conference in 1944. That’s a year or so prior to victory in Europe and victory in Japan. So, a year before, while we were still fighting.

International Cooperation to Resolve the Coming ‘Economic Hurricane’

We knew by 1944 that we were going to win, that the Allies were going to win. But President Roosevelt wanted to start planning ahead because obviously, after a world war, there’s going to be global economic chaos. Similar today, just as you as you just pointed out, we’re headed into a situation—we’re already in it—but we’re headed into a more serious situation of global economic chaos. Hyperinflation. We can have a depression. We could have a depression that lasts 5–10 years. I mean, a serious global depression, a real one, like in the 1930s or worse—famine, as you just pointed out.

What we need to do is, we need to do exactly the model that our American leadership under Roosevelt—which was bipartisan, by the way, he had some Republicans in his cabinet—in a bipartisan manner, we should accept the fact that a new Bretton Woods arrangement is needed. There’s going to be this kind of non-Western Global South bloc with its own currency in some shape or form, and there’ll be the U.S. dollar, and there’ll be others, the euro, etc. So, in answer to your question: adopt the Roosevelt model during World War II. Plan ahead. Plan to get us out of this chaos because we’re headed into chaos. Even Jamie Dimon, the head of JP Morgan-Chase Bank,  said “an economic hurricane” is coming.

Now here’s a famous Wall Street fellow saying an economic hurricane is coming. The Bank of England has been saying the same thing in its reports over the last several weeks: a hurricane is coming. So, now is the time, exactly as Schiller Institute has proposed, to be thinking about, or pre-thinking, about the post-storm, after this storm, after the hurricane. We need to get a global new Bretton Woods, that would relate to essentially—there’s a lot of different things there, but it would relate essentially to the issue of the currencies, which are all going to be bouncing all over the place. 

The original Bretton Woods – and this is an important point here — the original Bretton Woods had the exchange rates of the currencies fixed. How were they fixed? They were fixed by the agreement between sovereign states. Aha! Here you have what we would call economic diplomacy. And you have the representatives of sovereign states agree on fixed exchange rates, and how to fix the level. That was destroyed in the 1970s when you had so-called “floating” rates. Floating rates are determined by who? By currency traders in the big banks. I myself had some friends who were currency traders in New York and London. At one time I took a visit to New York and they said, “Hey, come on into our shop here, spend an hour or two with us while we’re trading currencies.

So, here I am sitting in a major international bank in New York City in their currency trading room. These guys are moving currencies. You know, $50 million here, $100 million there. Buy, sell, buy, sell.

Well, no, floating rates have nothing to do with sovereign countries. They turn over the valuation of the currencies to the private banking industry. My suggestion would be that in the New Bretton Woods, we return to the idea that sovereign states determine the rates of exchange, through economic diplomacy around the negotiating table.

If you take a look at the money clause in our own Constitution [Art. I, Sec. 8, Clause 5], Congress coins the money and regulates the values thereof, and of foreign money. Congress has the power to say, “Gee, you know, I think the pound sterling isn’t worth a $1.20. I think the euro isn’t worth $1.02 nowadays. I think the euro is worth $0.98.” It’s the power of the sovereign to determine and regulate the value of money, and of foreign money that the sovereign is exchanging. Not the moneylenders in the temple—we know the biblical story. That’s the issue: is it going to be the moneylenders in the temple, or is it going to be sovereign states? That’s something that needs to be addressed when we’re thinking about structuring a new Bretton Woods.

I understand that the thinking of Sergey Glazyev, whom I’ve met, a fascinating person in Russia, and his colleagues at the Russian Academy of Sciences, have been working on concepts involving a basket of currencies for , o however one would create a monetary instrument, and value it. I think they are working on a concept, for BRICS or BRICS-Plus, of some kind of a monetary unit that would be based on commodities or based on something tangible.

We should remember, and this is not often thought about, money is the creation of the sovereign. Let’s go back, way back. The Byzantine Empire. Who creates the Byzantine money? The king, the emperor. It’s his money. And the value is what he says it is. Why? Because he’s a sovereign. Take a look at the different kingdoms in Europe, in the old medieval period and renaissance. Who coins the money? The king, or the city if it’s an independent city state. What’s the value? What they say it is. What’s the exchange value? What they say it is. What the sovereign says it is. Sovereign money is a legal creation by the sovereign. Lead can be money, copper can be money, gold can be money, leather can be money, paper can be money. The value of that object is what the sovereign says it is.

That’s why I think Glazyev and his team at the Russian Academy of Sciences are trying to figure out how to create something that has value that they can identify, a number or quantity, or how to indicate that value—One euro, or one “BRICS-o.”

I think we need to look ahead. The model for me is Roosevelt’s Bretton Woods, and economic diplomacy by sovereign states. I think that’s the key principle. The numbers and all that stuff, that’s just a matter of negotiation. The key is getting the countries, the sovereign states, together at a conference like Bretton Woods, and have economic diplomacy—negotiate and have economic diplomacy. Let your technical people figure out the exchange rates and all of that.

But the key principle here is international cooperation to stabilize the international economic situation, the world economy. We’re going to go through the hurricane, so we’re going to learn again, like we did in the 1930s. We’re going to go right through that again, it appears. So, we should prepare now. It was a great idea for the Schiller Institute to call for preparing for a new Bretton Woods. Will the U.S. join?

Well,  eventually you’re going to have to. The U.S. cannot be out of it forever. The two blocs cannot exist forever. 100 years? No. 50 years? No. 25 years? Maybe. 20 years? Maybe. Five years? Yeah. But at some point, there’s going to have to be international cooperation on all this, on the dollar system. The use of the American dollar or the Treasury bills as your reserve, that’s going to go out the window. There is a de-dollarization going on right now.

You’re going to enter into a new monetary system, and whether you have two separate monetary systems for a while, at some point, you’re going to need to have agreement among all the trading countries, all the countries engaged in international commerce. You’ll have different types of additional reserve currencies. That, again, gets you into the whole issue, a separate issue, of the organization or reorganization of central banks. And that’s a that’s a whole other issue.

Aside from a monetary conference, there’s the issue of central banks. I think the proper concept there broadly for international finance—finance, banking—should serve industry, like a servant. What we have today is the inverse of that. Industry is serving finance, it’s the slave of finance. Finance is at the top of the pyramid. That’s based on debt, usury and other typical methods of the financial community. Central banks are going to have to be rethought as well. And the relationship between central banks is going to have to be rethought.

Billington: Thank you, Cliff. Of course, the Hamiltonian idea is for national banking as opposed to central banking. National banking being run by elected representatives rather than private banks, is one of the ideas that we’re fighting to introduce through what we call LaRouche’s Four Laws. Well, let us hope that your idea of bringing about this Bretton Woods conference, together with what the Schiller Institute is doing with the petition. I encourage everybody who’s watching this to sign. Go to www.schillerinstitute.com and sign that petition.

But let us make sure that this happens before certain Mad Men walk ourselves into a nuclear war. The urgency of making this happen is something that is now before the human race. I think people recognize that this is a turning point in history one way or the other, and that these same approaches as you’ve laid out, and as we’ve been fighting for, are successful. Thank you very much. We will definitely be circulating these ideas and your work here along with the rest of our mobilization. I want to thank you for participating in this.

Dr. Kiracofe: Thank you, Mike, for inviting me. And best wishes to all of our viewers.