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Petition: Convoke an International Conference to Establish A New Security and Development Architecture for All Nations

Your daily update for April 25, 2022 from Harley Schlanger.

This is an edited transcript of the interview with Joel Dejean by Mike Billington on April 20, 2022. Mr. Dejean is the LaRouche Independent candidate for U.S. Congress from Texas’s newly-created 38th C.D. Mr. Billington is an Editor for Executive Intelligence Review magazine. 

Mike Billington: Greetings! This is Mike Billington, co-editor of the Executive Intelligence Review. I’m here today with Joel Dejean for an interview for EIR, for the Schiller Institute, and for The LaRouche Organization.

Joel Dejean is a LaRouche Independent candidate for Congress in the 38th District in Texas, running against a Republican favorite, Wesley Hunt. Joel was born in Haiti. He moved with his parents at the age of six to the Bronx, a Borough of New York City, and in 1972 won admission to the prestigious Bronx High School of Science, which is part of the New York City public school system. He earned a degree in Electrical Engineering from the state university at Stony Brook, followed by 8 years working at the Texas Instruments defense electronic group, where he worked on projects, for the U.S., Australian, and South Korean air forces. 

He has been a collaborator of Lyndon LaRouche’s Fusion Energy Foundation, and the LaRouche political movement since 1985.

In 1995, while Joel was campaign for a LaRouche associate in France, he suffered a severe retinal tear in his right eye and returned to Houston. Efforts to save that eye failed as did work on the left eye, leaving him blind. But this has in no way stopped his full-time effort to fight for the future of mankind. He’s able to read anything he wishes on the internet, through various apps, and also has access to audio books and to 500 newspapers and magazines from the National Federation of the Blind. In fact, his campaign slogan is that he’s the only candidate with a positive vision for the future.

Welcome, Joel! Would you like to add anything about your career?

Joel Dejean: Well, the only thing I’ll add, is that in July of 1969 I was 10 years old, and I remember being on a family vacation to the Niagara Falls area. The evening of July 20, I remember watching Neil Armstrong come down the ladder of the Lunar Lander and take that “giant leap for mankind.” That inspired me to study real science and eventually become an engineer, and that’s how I ended up in Texas. 

Billington: You’ve run for office in Texas before. You ran for the Houston Independent School Board in the fall of 1993, and then in 1994, for U.S. Congress from the 25th C.D. in Texas, campaigning for Lyndon LaRouche’s solutions to the unfolding economic and strategic breakdown.

What made you decide to run again, at this critical moment in global history? 

Dejean: Back then, we were running as LaRouche Democrats. LaRouche himself, in January of 1994 was still in prison. He was paroled just a few weeks later. We were trying to revive the tradition of the Democratic Party—the Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy tradition of scientific optimism and a control of the banking system.

Now, in 2022, both parties have completely lost any idea of the tradition of the American System. The idea of running now as an Independent, is, [a reflection of what] LaRouche said on his 90th birthday: Party politics is out, party politics is corrupt. So, we have to provide an alternative to the American people. Because if you look at the policies coming from the Republicans and the Democrats, they are in goose-step, marching toward war, depression, and famine. We have to give the American public in Texas, in the nation, and the people of the world an alternative.

Billington: So, both you and Diane Sare—a LaRouche Independent candidate running from New York State for the U.S. Senate against Chuck Schumer—are actually running as national candidates, to build a movement of citizens to take responsibility for the current global crisis of civilization, the impending dark age of economic and strategic collapse, which at this point no one can avoid.

What inspired you to join the LaRouche movement in the first place?

Dejean: The first time I ran into the LaRouche movement was March 23, 1983. I didn’t even know about him then. I had just completed a round of flight tests with an upgraded infrared detection system at the Eglin Air Force Base in the panhandle of Florida. I had gotten wind that President Ronald Reagan was going to give a national Defense speech on TV that evening. I watched the President saying that we had to get the scientific community that gave us nuclear weapons to now give us the capability to make those same weapons “impotent and obsolete.” 

Although I wasn’t working on strategic weapons, but tactical weapons, that speech spoke to me directly. I was inspired by that speech. The next day, when I went in to work, I found almost no reaction.

I took another two years before I ran into LaRouche organizers. I was on a trip in Los Angeles. I started reading LaRouche’s material. I joined the Fusion Energy Foundation. That’s when I got a clear conception of what Reagan had been talking about. He wasn’t talking about off-the-shelf technology; he was talking about new physical principles, although he didn’t put it in those terms.

Once I met the LaRouche organization, I was inspired to learn more and more, and that’s how I came to know Lyndon LaRouche.

High-Level Texas Gerrymandering

Billington: Your District was recently created, as I understand it, through gerrymandering by a Texas state government which is Republican-led, and includes much of the world-famous Houston Energy Corridor. The gerrymandering was actually designed for your opponent, Capt. Wesley Hunt, a West Point graduate who was a helicopter pilot in the Iraq War, who is supported and funded by Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, James Baker III and others from the military-industrial complex.

What is Hunt’s program, and what is the choice you are presenting to the voting public in contrast to that of Capt. Hunt?

Dejean: Here’s the irony: Hunt claims to be against the Green New Deal, but on his website he says he is for decarbonizing the economy, he’s for a shift away from fossil fuels. His version goes that he wants to wait until Russia, India, and China get rid of fossil fuels first. So, he wants them to commit suicide, and then we can join them. Hunt’s policy is the same as that of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the same as James Baker III—it’s for the Green New Deal, if not in name, but in actuality. His other policy is to confront Russia, crush their economy. His policies are leading us directly toward World War III with Russia and China.

A Fusion Energy Science Driver

Billington: You’re well-known as an expert on the science of nuclear and fusion energy. You’ve given classes and you have written articles on the necessary transformation of the way we live, through the development of fusion power as opposed to the Green New Deal—fusion power which could provide essentially unlimited energy for all of mankind.

What is your message regarding fusion, and why has its development been sabotaged over these past 60 years since President John Kennedy called for a crash program before he was assassinated?

Dejean: I was always for nuclear power—mostly nuclear fission power. As a matter of fact, when I was in the 5th grade I made a model of a nuclear reactor. The only thing I couldn’t get was yellow cake, so it never went critical. But I was always for nuclear power. Matter of fact, my last year at Stony Brook the IEEE [Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers professional association] caucus in the university [of which I was a member] visited the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant. It was scheduled to come online within a few months, but Mario Cuomo, at that time Governor of New York State, shut down that plant and, after $5 billion being spent on building it, not one watt of power was produced.

So, as I ran into the Fusion Energy Foundation, I saw that not only was LaRouche in favor of fission nuclear power, he was in favor of a full-fledged development of fusion power, not just for energy, but for things like space propulsion, a way of getting to Mars and other destinations at a high-enough speed so that the occupants of the spacecraft will have a chance to arrive at their destination ready for exploration.

Billington: You’re already well-known in Houston. You’ve spoken several times in the recent past to the Houston City Council as a strong opponent of the Green New Deal, both because of the faulty science behind the carbon argument, but also because it’s used to justify the banking cartel’s diversion of credit from industry and agriculture and scientific research, in order to bail out the bankrupt trans-Atlantic financial system.

How are people responding to your message?

Dejean: Last year on Feb. 9, I testified to the Houston City Council and the Mayor, Sylvester Turner, one week before the deep freeze hit Texas. We both—Joe Jennings also testified with me—warned the City Council and the Mayor that their adoption of the Green New Deal and the Climate Action Plan would not only threaten Houston as an energy capital; it would lead to brownouts and blackouts. One week later, the whole State froze over, which obviously was blamed on global warming. We had a blackout for 48-96 hours, depending on your neighborhood, and close to 1,000 Texans died, freezing in the dark.

The people I mentioned that to, realized that not only was I right, but that this whole sham of global warming is a fraud. However, people like Sylvester Turner went on national television one week later to say that the freeze proved that global climate change is real. So, they are too dense to get it, but the population has reacted quite positively to what I said.

Billington: You spoke recently to the Houston City Council, right?

Dejean: There’s a little town in 38th C.D. called Bunker Hill. I went up there on the 19th and had 3 minutes to speak. I began by referencing the other Bunker Hill near Boston, and referenced that 247 years ago, on April 19, 1775 the Battle of Lexington and Concord occurred, which led in June 17 that same year to the Battle of Bunker Hill. I said that while we eventually lost that battle to the British, that battle proved that the Continental Army was a formidable force that eventually forced the British out of Boston. 

I referenced that there was a British officer who after the battle said, “Any more victories like this will lose the war,” which they eventually did lose. I referenced that today the British control Capitol Hill, from the President who’s called for regime-change in Russia, to the Senators like Sen. Chris Coons from Delaware, who has called for American boots on the ground in Ukraine, to lunatics like Sen. Roger Wicker from Mississippi, who has called for dropping nuclear bombs on Russia.

You have this whole Capitol Hill operation in the Congress. The Democrats and the Republicans are, like I said, in lockstep in goosestep, marching toward World War III, totally oblivious to the control that the British retain over Capitol Hill, in our government.

Billington: You write in a campaign statement from March 22—which I read—that we are now facing “the front end of the final hyperinflationary collapse of the Western dollar-based, liberal, free-market edifice of Western finance, forecast decades ago by economist Lyndon LaRouche.” You note that the unsustainable bubble of several quadrillion dollars in gambling debts that can never be repaid is driving a policy of fascist austerity and outright starvation globally.

What is the solution?

Dejean: The solution is really quite simple. LaRouche laid it out back in June of 2014 in his “Four Laws to Save the Economy.”

The first step is we have to reintroduce President Franklin Roosevelt’s Glass-Steagall Act, where we separate the commercial banks from the investment banks. We have to control the issuance of currency. We have to nationalize the Federal Reserve, so that we can issue long-term, low interest credit to infrastructure—things like high-speed rail, water management. The Fourth Law is that we have to have a full-scale, crash program to get controlled thermonuclear fusion, hopefully within the next decade.

Combine that with China and Russia, and India and the United States—the Four Powers—all working together, we could overwhelm this London-Wall Street dying financial system, and we can get the world on a firm security, and economic development architecture.

Rebuild and Develop Afghanistan and Haiti

Billington: You have also spoken out against the extreme evil being done to Afghanistan through the sanctions after 20 years of destruction, imposing sanctions even stealing their [financial] reserves that were on deposited in the U.S. and European banks. Afghanistan, as well as your birthplace, Haiti, represent two of the most serious threats of outright genocide now facing the conscience of mankind.

How have you acted on this, and what do you propose?

Dejean: Back in October, I held a rally outside the Houston office of the Federal Reserve, demanding that the $9 billion in Afghan funds being held by the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury be released. It was bad enough that the U.S. stole $9 billion in Afghan national money after spending $2 trillion in destroying that nation over the last 20 years.

I have endorsed the Schiller Institute’s plan for development of Afghanistan, and we released a plan in October for the development of Haiti. The plan for Haiti was originally proposed by two Chinese companies five years ago, that they would fund and develop water, sanitation, and power for the city of Port-au-Prince. Haiti, which is not a sovereign country, was told by the IMF and the U.S. State Department that they have no right to work with China. So, after the earthquake of 2010, and after the earthquake of August 2021, nothing has been rebuilt, except for a few fancy hotels for the non-governmental organizations that come in like vultures to feast off the carcasses of Haitians.

I support the Schiller Institute’s plan to develop Haiti. Today, charcoal provides 75% of the power used in Haiti. I have called for Haiti to be the first nation to go from charcoal power to fusion power in the next 10 years, with the help of the U.S. and China. That’s the way out for Haiti; that’s the way out for Afghanistan.

Now that they’ve gotten away with stealing $9 billion funds, the same Treasury Department and Federal Reserve system has stolen $300 billion from Russia. These guys are the biggest bank robbers in history.

Support China’s Belt & Road Initiative

Billington: Indeed. The world-famous MD Anderson Medical Center in Houston was one of the first targets of FBI Director Christopher Wray, both during the Trump administration and continuing in the Biden administration, carrying out an outright McCarthyite war on Chinese and Chinese-American scientists in the United States called the China Initiative, threatening them with arrest. Many have been arrested, and many have been thrown out of their jobs on the false claim that because of their collaboration with Chinese scientists, were somehow functioning as spies.

This China Initiative has recently been shut down under enormous pressure from Americans, not just Chinese-Americans, but Americans who recognize this was an abomination to be taking place in the United States. But the witch hunt against all things Chinese is continuing.

You, I know, have spoken out against this. What have you done to counter this anti-China hysteria?

Dejean: You may remember that during the last few months of the Trump administration, they actually shut down the Houston Chinese Consulate. Over the last 5 years, we’ve had a series of meetings with representatives from the Houston Chinese Consulate, talking about the Belt & Road Initiative. We had one meeting where the Chinese Consulate representative and a representative of the Pakistani Consulate here met with the Schiller Institute at a university campus to discuss the Belt & Road Initiative.

I have continued to call for the Belt & Road Initiative. I’m also calling for the U.S. to join that in what was called the North America Belt & Road Initiative. We should be part of this massive infrastructure-building. The FBI has shut down all of the Consulate activities in Houston. They have gone after Chinese scientists, and they say that the fact that Chinese scientists are working on a cure for cancer is somehow a national security threat. I continue to denounce that.

My campaign went to the Chinese New Year’s Festival this past February and got out a statement I put out on working with China. We don’t need to be enemies of China and Russia. We need to collaborate on the frontiers of science, in space, fusion, and medicine. 

Organizing in District 38

Billington: Now, of course, the focus has shifted to an all-out demonization and attack on Russia—a total degeneration of international relations with Russia from the West, and the massive and illegal economic warfare against Russia, openly aimed at destroying the Russian economy. Supposedly, this is justified by Russia’s military operations against Ukraine, but as we now all know, the U.S. killed millions of innocents and drove millions more out of their homes in totally illegal wars against Serbia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and more, and never faced justice for these crimes.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche and the Schiller Institute have called for an international conference of all nations to establish a new security and development architecture for all nations based on the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which settled 150 years of warfare in Europe, by establishing sovereign nation-states that recognized their interest to be the interest of the other, and forgave all previous alleged crimes committed on both sides, in order to establish peace through development.

I know you’re working on this. How are you organizing for this event, to have this international conference, and to prevent this extreme danger of a war with Russia, which also, of course, could be nuclear, and will almost certainly include a similar war against China? 

Dejean: There are a significant number of Muslims in the 38th C.D. I don’t know the exact percentage, but my campaign has gone to several of the mosques in the District, or right near the District. We have spoken to the people coming out of the service. We mentioned the obvious hypocrisy of the U.S. being “so concerned about the poor Ukrainians,” and not giving a damn about the millions of people killed in the illegal wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya. The reaction has been quite positive for a large number of Pakistanis. We were speaking to them about how [Pakistan Prime Minister] Imran Khan was being targetted for daring to speak his mind and saying that Pakistan is not a slave to the West. You saw what happened last week, where Khan was overthrown.

I’m continuing to organize with the Muslims in the District, and have scheduled an event for next week, where we will bring together contacts that we have met on the college campuses. There are four community college campuses in the District where we have gotten probably over 100 student contacts of all ages.

There are a lot of veterans going to these community colleges—veterans of the Iraq War, veterans of the Afghan War who are trying to make something out of their lives, who have realized that their efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan were totally wasted, not by their service, but by people like my Republican opponent, Wesley Hunt, a graduate of West Point, and is campaigning, proud of the fact that he had 55 combat missions flying Apache attack helicopters in Iraq. As a reward for his service, he became a diplomatic liaison to Saudi Arabia—the very nation that financed and supplied the hijackers who took down the World Trade Center towers in New York City and attacked the Pentagon.

I issued a call, challenging Wesley Hunt to “fess up” to what he was doing in Saudi Arabia, and whether he is still proud of his disgraceful service in Iraq. So far, I’ve gotten no response.

I continue to organize on the campuses, at the mosques, and all over the District—city councils, wherever we can find people. Like I said, I’m holding this event next week to bring these forces together.

Sanctions and The War in Ukraine

Billington: I should also mention and ask about the situation in Ukraine, where our media, our Congress, the Biden administration, both major political parties are all talking about “saving the heroic Ukrainians,” while denying the self-evident and extensively proven fact that the cutting edge of the Ukrainian battle against the people of the Donbas since the coup in 2014 in which the U.S., Victoria Nuland, and Joe Biden openly supported neo-Nazi forces—with swastikas—supporters of Stepan Bandera, Hitler’s ally in Ukraine. And that we’re now proudly supporting what can only be described as a neo-Nazi force carrying out mass murder in Ukraine, while trying to blame everything that happens on the Russians.

I’m sure you have been speaking out against this, and I wonder if you want to comment on it.

Dejean: Yes. I’ve gone to several conservative Republican meetings, and brought this up, that Wesley Hunt and his backers, like James Baker III, are pushing policies that are leading us directly toward war with Russia—not so much over Ukraine, but I’ve spoken out to say that it was the last 30 years of NATO expansion, where after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall coming down, James Baker III promised the Soviet government, Gorbachev personally, that NATO would not move “one inch” to the East, if Gorbachev allowed the reunification of East and West Germany under NATO. Baker was truthful, in the sense that NATO didn’t move one inch to the East; they moved 1,000 kilometers to the East.

Any time I mentioned that this fight around Ukraine is leading toward a U.S.-Russia war, I’ve had no one say, “Yeah, we should attack Russia; we should go in for the kill”—lunatic policies that are coming out of the U.S. Senate right now.

There is a reaction against the propaganda, but given the real history of the 2014 coup in Ukraine, and the policy of regime-change that worked so successfully in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and our attempted regime-change in Syria, people realize that we’ve been going down the wrong road. And to back either a Republican or Biden Democrat is suicide. 

Billington: The sanctions policies against many nations, but now emphatically against Russia and China, and their theft of foreign nations’ reserves, which you mentioned, is now driving the majority of the world’s nations to move away from dealing with the dollar at all, since that’s used as the justification for stealing their reserves and imposing sanctions. They’re now beginning to trade in local currencies, and Russia and China, and others are even setting up a totally alternative financial structure, independent of the dollar. 

If the world devolves even further into these warring blocs, a war and global chaos will certainly become unavoidable. How can we bring Americans, and Europeans, to understand that their future depends on cooperation with all nations, rather than the dying delusion of a unitary superpower controlling the world from Washington and Wall Street?

Dejean: The spearpoint of changing the United States is Diane Sare’s campaign for the Senate from New York state, where she began petitioning yesterday, and my campaign here in Texas against these Republican lunatics like Wesley Hunt. We have to mobilize people in the oil industry, scientists, people in NASA. Ordinary Americans do realize that their self-interest is in working with Russia, working with China to develop the world, or lacking that, we’re going to march right down to World War III, where no one will come out with that war.

Fusion Energy with Helium-3

Billington: Thanks. Would you like to add anything?

Dejean: Yes. Today, we are recording this interview on April 20, is the 50th anniversary of Apollo 16 landing on the Moon. We went to the Moon, not just to beat the Russians. We landed six landers on the Moon over a three-and-a-half-year period. The astronauts of Apollo 16, Charles Duke and John Young collected 200 pounds of lunar samples which they brought back to Earth. It turns out that in those lunar samples, unknown at the time they were collected, is an isotope of helium, helium-3, which is very rare on Earth, but there is an estimated one million tons of helium-3 on the lunar surface, which we could have access to.

Helium-3 happens to be the perfect fuel for second-generation fusion reactors, using deuterium from seawater and helium-3 from the Moon. Chinese scientists have estimated that if we were to develop the helium-3 on the Moon, we would have enough fusion power to take care of the needs on Earth for tens of thousands of years. And, there’s plenty of helium-3 in the large, gaseous planets like Saturn and Neptune, so we would never run out.

So, the Chinese are aware of this. That’s why they’re pushing for a lunar program. As Lyndon LaRouche said in 1987, for his 1988 campaign for President, we have to develop fusion propulsion so we can get to Mars in a matter of days, instead of months. We can’t keep using chemical rockets like we’ve been using for the last 60 years, if we hope to develop Mars.

That is the future that I’m laying out to my constituents in Texas—is that we could use the tradition of Apollo, use the tradition of American science, which developed nuclear power, not only to develop the Moon and Mars, but give the children of today something to look forward to. Right now, all they have to look forward to is starvation and war. We have to give them a future.

Billington: Thank you, Joel Dejean, candidate in Texas for U.S. Congress. I think this extremely optimistic message, so desperately needed in a nation fearful and demoralized by the degeneration of our economy and the danger of global war, should ring true and inspire both young and old in your District and around the country. We will make sure this interview gets spread far and wide.

Thank you.

Dejean: Thank you, Michael.

Statement by Helga Zepp-LaRouche recorded on February 28, 2022.

Sign our petition, “Convoke an International Conference to Establish A New Security and Development Architecture for All Nations.”

I’m speaking to you because I want to give you an extremely important message.  As you know, since a few days, Russian troops are in Ukraine, in a military operation.  As a reaction, the West has imposed very, very harsh sanctions on Russia, which are going to have incredible effects, not only on Russia, but also on the whole world.  President Putin has put the Russian nuclear weapons on alert.  Any further escalation of this situation has the danger of things going completely out of control, and in the worst case leading to a nuclear exchange, and World War III, and if that happens the chances are that nobody will survive this.  This could be the extinction of the human species.

Now, to understand how we got to this point, one has to look at the recent history of at least the last 30 years, because we have been sleepwalking from a point, which was incredibly hopeful, into a worsening of the situation—step by step, step by step—and most people were completely indifferent to what was happening.

You should remember that in 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, many of the young people were not even born then, and don’t have a very good idea of what this period was: This was a moment of incredible historical potential, because you could have built a peace order, because the enemy was gone, or about to go; the Soviet Union did not represent a threat any more because Gorbachev had agreed to the democratization of the Eastern European countries, and this was what we called the “star hour of humanity,” one of those rare moments when you can shape history for the better.  

Well, the Soviet Union did not represent a threat then, and therefore, it was quite normal that [U.S. Secretary of State] James Baker III, on Feb. 9, 1990, in a discussion with Gorbachev, promised, “NATO will not expand one inch to the East.”  Now [NATO Secretary General] Stoltenberg nowadays says never was such a promise given, but that’s not true.  Jack Matlock, who was U.S. Ambassador in Moscow at that time, has stated many, many times that, indeed, there was such a promise.  There is a video with former German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, where he confirms the same thing, and just a few days ago, the then-French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas made an interview where he absolutely confirmed this, and said, yes, we did promise this, and a new document has appeared which is in the British Archives.   

So there is overwhelming evidence that such a promise was made.  And therefore, when Putin says now, that he feels betrayed, there is actual evidence, because also Putin came to Germany in 2001, and he addressed the German Bundestag, in German, and it was full of offers, full of hopes to build a common European house, to have cooperation.  He talked about the German people, the people of culture, of Lessing, of Goethe. 

And there was the potential to really even undo in the 1990s, with Yeltsin and the shock therapy.  Because at that time, unfortunately, what had happened is that certain circles in great Britain and in the United States decided to build a unipolar world.  Rather than building a peace order, they said, OK, now is the opportunity to build an empire based on the model of the British Empire, based on the special relationship between Great Britain and the United States: It was called PNAC, the Project for a New American Century.  And slowly, step by step, they started to go for regime change of everybody who didn’t agree with that, for color revolution, for eventually humanitarian interventionist wars, which gave us Afghanistan, Iraq, which was based on lies; the incredible lying to the UN Security Council in the case of Libya; the attempt to topple Assad [in Syria]; wars which have caused {millions of people} to die, millions of people to become refugees and have a destroyed life. 

So this was one area where Ukraine, from the very beginning, was big in the calculation.  There were altogether five waves of NATO expansion, and in 2008, at the summit in Bucharest, it was promised that Ukraine and Georgia would become part of NATO, which, from the standpoint of Russia is really not acceptable.  Because if you have rather than having NATO not moving “one inch to the East,” it moved 1000 km to the East!  It’s sitting now in the Baltic countries, at the border of Russia, but Ukraine would mean that offensive weapons systems could reach Moscow in less 5 minutes, and make Russia, de facto, indefensible.  You have to understand that that is the vital security interest of Russia, which, if NATO would include Ukraine, it would violate that interest, and that is why all this discussion that the Ukrainians have the right to choose their own alliance is really not true!  Because it’s also a principle, in all the official documents, that you cannot have the security of one country at the expense of the security of another one, which would be Russia, in this case. 

So what happened was, when the EU tried to include Ukraine in the EU Association Agreement at the end of 2013, Yanukovych, the President at that time, recognized that that was unacceptable, because it would have opened up the Black Sea and NATO practically for the Ukrainian ports, so he pulled out of the agreement.  And then, immediately, you had the demonstrations on the Maidan; and it is always said these were only democratic people—sure, there were democratic people who wanted to be part of Europe and part of the West. But from the very beginning, there were elements which were kept by intelligence services since the Second World War, the networks of Stepan Bandera, that was the person who had cooperated with the Nazis in the Second World War, and Stepan Bandera became actually an agent of the MI6; his networks had offices in Munich, they were part of the anti-Bolshevist bloc of nations, they were kept by the intelligence services, the MI6, the CIA, the BND, for the case of a confrontation with the Soviet Union.  And these networks were mobilized in the Maidan as part of a regime change operation, a color revolution, and then finally the coup, for which the United States, according to Victoria Nuland, had spent $5 billion to build up NGOs and basically trying to manipulate the population to think that if they joined the EU, they would be rich like Germany overnight, which naturally was never in the cards.

So then, naturally, the coup happened, and with the coup in February 2014, networks came to power which were extremely repressive against the Russian language, the Russian population, and that was why the people of Crimea voted to be part of Russia.  It was not Putin who annexed Crimea, it was a measure of self-defense of the Russian-speaking people in Crimea to have a vote in a referendum.  And the people in East Ukraine decided to declare independent republics for the very same reason. 

Now, the Minsk agreement was supposed to find a negotiation to give these independent republics more autonomy within Ukraine, but the Ukraine government {never} pursued that, and Germany and France which were supposed to be part of the Normandy discussions, including Germany, France, Ukraine and Russia, they never put any pressure on the Ukrainian government so it did not go anywhere at all.  In the meantime, you had more and more maneuvers around Russia, and this escalated to the point where, in November, there were maneuvers even flying planes testing and rehearsing a nuclear attack on Russia up to 14 miles within the border of Russia.  

Now, it was that feeling of increasing encirclement, which is the reason why Putin declared on December 17 of last year, that he wanted to have security guarantees, for Russia, from the United States and NATO that they would guarantee legally binding the security of Russia, which would include: NATO not expanding any further to the East, Ukraine never becoming a member of NATO for the reasons I had mentioned earlier; and not to put offensive weapons on the border of Russia. 

Now, he did not get an answer.  He got an answer from the United States and NATO, basically responding to secondary issues, like a certain agreement to go back into arms negotiations, but he did not get an answer to the core demands.  And that is why, for example, I think Russia and China have now moved into a very close strategic alliance, which happened on February 4, and Putin was trying to test out if there would be a willingness of European nations like Germany—whose Chancellor Scholz went to Moscow, French President Macron went to Moscow—but he came to the conclusion that there was no willingness to stand up against the continuous push by NATO and by the United States, to keep with the encirclement of Russia. 

Now, you can say war is very bad, and naturally, it is the most horrible thing which can happen.  But you have to understand that if you put the core security interests of Russia into jeopardy, well, that’s what you get!  You have to understand the history of Russia: Because two times there was an invasion of Russia already.  One was with Napoleon, who if you remember or if you know history, had an enormously big army and was going into the very wide region of Russia. And there was a plan to defeat Napoleon by luring him into the far regions, by having him draw a long operational line, by using the fact that Napoleon was destroying everything on the way in, to basically make it impossible for him to have any more requisition of food and other materials; they even allowed the burning down of Moscow, to make sure there was nothing with which Napoleon could survive the winter, so he had to make the decision to return, in the winter, with the snow.  And when Napoleon’s troops finally came back at the end of the borders of Russia, there were only a few people from a previously gigantic army.  This was a traumatic experience, already, there.

Then, naturally, you had Hitler, who also invaded Russia, and for the Russians this is an experience, which is deeply ingrained in their DNA, one can say, because they lost 27 million people!  And for them, to defend Russia, it’s the most important—it’s a life-and-death question. 

So, what happened now, is when all of this escalated, Russia said, we absolutely put a red line, when these red lines were not respected, then this was an action which was supposed to make very clear, and Putin said he will take a “military-technical reaction,” and I don’t think Russia has the intention to occupy Ukraine; I think they want to have some neutralization, they want to have a de-Nazification, and frankly, with the present combination—sure, Zelenskyy was democratically elected, but the Azov Brigade is still there as part of the defense forces, you have still in the parliament, a lot of right-wing elements, and Zelenskyy has changed from a peace-loving, or promising peace President, into somebody who is completely a tool, not even daring to bring up Minsk 2, because he feels under threat that if he goes for Minsk 2, he will be toppled or worse. 

So, it is a situation where we have to accept the fact that a de-Nazification is not Russian propaganda, but it has a real element to it.  And it’s a complete scandal that the West, with their so-called freedom-loving, Western values, “rules-based order,” democracy, human rights—which has become a little bit shale, after all these interventionist wars, and especially what was done, and is being done in Afghanistan, where people are left to die and it’s all a conscious policy, because people knew what would happen if there would be such a hasty withdrawal, leaving the Afghanistan people with absolutely nothing.  

So we are in a very, very dangerous situation.  On Sunday, an epochal shift has happened:  Germany, which has good reasons to say “Never Again” do we want war, because we had two world wars on our soil, and in the memory of everybody, especially the older people, we have the stories of our parents and grandparents in our ears of what war does when it is on your soil!  So on Sunday, there was an earthquake, which is I think an absolute catastrophe, because Chancellor Scholz made a government declaration in the parliament, which was turning the German government de facto into a war cabinet.  They now want to have a beefing up of the Bundeswehr; they created a special fund of €100 billion for this year alone; they want to increase the military spending; they already are sending weapons to Ukraine, which was really against any principle Germany had, because it had the idea to never send weapons into crisis areas.  

So all of this is happening.  The German population is in a complete state of brainwashing.  In France, it’s not very different, but in Germany it’s much worse.  And people on the scene, who know both situations, were reporting that it can only be compared to the shock the American people had after 9/11.  I was in the United States at that point, and I remember, you couldn’t talk to anybody, because people were completely crazy, hyped up, whipped up, and this is now the situation in Germany.  

When I heard the speech of Chancellor Scholz yesterday, it reminded me of this horrible speech of Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm, Emperor Wilhelm II, on Aug. 6, 1914, when he announced Germany basically preparing for World War I.  And we all know that at the beginning of World War I, nobody expected that it would be four years in the trenches, back and forth, back and forth, meaningless killing, and at the end, a whole generation was destroyed, and the Versailles Treaty was an unjust treaty, which was just creating the precondition for World War II.

So, what do we do now? I think the only chance is that we get an immediate international mobilization for an international security architecture which must take into account the security interest of every single nation on the planet, including Russia, including China, and the United States, Europe nations, and all other nations on the planet.  The model for this is the Peace of Westphalia Treaty.  That treaty came about because you had 150 years of religious war in Europe, the culmination of which was the Thirty Years’ War, and it led to the destruction of everything: One-third of assets, of people, of villages, of animals—so that eventually, people came to the conclusion that if they continue this war, there will be absolutely nobody left to enjoy the victory.  And from four years, from 1644-1648, people were sitting together, working out a treaty which established very important principles.  The most important principle was that peace can only be won if a new arrangement takes into account the interest of the other.  And then it had other principles, such as, for the sake of peace, you have to make foreign policy on the basis of love; you have to forget the crimes on either side, because otherwise you would never get to an agreement; and it established the principle that in the reconstruction of the economy after the war, the state must have an important role, and that led to cameralism in economics. 

This Treaty of Westphalia was the beginning of international law, and it is reflected today in the Charter of the United Nations, and it is that model which must be taken for nations to sit together, to say, what are the principles how we can give ourselves an order which allows the peaceful coexistence of all nations?  And the equivalent of the cameralistic principles of the Peace of Westphalia must be that this new security architecture combination, must address that which is the real cause of war, which is the pending collapse of the Western financial system, which is about to blow long before this situation with Ukraine developed, but it will be aggravated now by the sanctions and all the consequences; and it must apply those measures which Lyndon LaRouche has defined already many years ago, namely, there must be an end to the casino economy, because that is what is driving this confrontation; there must be a global Glass-Steagall banking separation agreement; you must have a national bank in every single country in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton; and there must be a New Bretton Woods system to give a credit system for long-term development to uplift the developing countries through industrial development.  And all of that must focus on the pressing issue of the pandemic: We need a world health system, because without that this pandemic and future pandemics will not go away; we need an increase in world food production, because we have a famine of “biblical dimensions” as David Beasley from the World Food Program is continuously saying; and we need to have an effort to overcome poverty in all countries where it is a threatening fact, such as those in Africa, many Latin American and Asia countries, even pockets in the United States and in Europe.  And the framework is obviously the offer by China for the United States and Europe to cooperate with the Belt and Road Initiative, to maybe join the Build Back Better program of the United States and Global Gateway of the European Union, to not look at it as competition but as the chance for cooperation.  Because only if the nations of this world work together economically, to the benefit of all, do you have the basis of trust to establish a security architecture, which can function.

So I think we have issued a call for such a conference, and such a new international security architecture, and I’m calling on your to promote that idea, to get many people to sign this petition, to get people to write articles, comment about it, create an international debate, that {we do need a new paradigm}:  Because any continuation of geopolitics of the so-called “enemy image” of one or the other can only lead to a catastrophe, and if it comes to that, there will be nobody left to even comment about it, because it will be the end of humanity. 

So I’m calling on you: Join our mobilization, because it is your life and all our own future.