Dr. Chandra Muzaffar Letter to UN Leaders Insists, UNGA Must Act To Stop Gaza Genocide
July 29, 2024 (EIRNS)—Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Schiller Institute founder and initiator of the International Peace Coalition, declares her endorsement of Dr. Chandra Muzaffar’s initiative and calls for international support for it.
Dr. Muzaffar, the President of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST), has posted his letter to the heads of all member states of the United Nations calling for taking emergency action to stop the continuing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied territories. It is worth reporting at length:
“I am writing on behalf of an international NGO committed to human dignity and social justice based in Malaysia. Like many other citizens groups, the International Movement for a Just World (JUST) is deeply concerned about the continuing catastrophe in Gaza and Palestine. In spite of numerous calls made by people everywhere to Israel to implement an immediate ceasefire and to facilitate the unhindered flow of essentials—water, electricity, food, fuel and medicines—to Gaza, the Israeli government is impervious to any suggestion that it should end immediately the wanton massacre of civilians, especially children and women who constitute the majority of those killed, and ensure that famine does not claim any more lives in that narrow, congested strip of land.
“Since it does not seem to be possible to restrain the Israeli government, we are now hoping that the UN General Assembly and Resolution 377 can be harnessed to curb Israel. The UNGA as you know can be asked to act if the UN Security Council has failed to overcome a prolonged conflict. A special session of the GA can be convened and it can take a vote on the catastrophe in Gaza and Palestine in general.
“It is our hope and the hope of many other citizens groups all over the world, especially the NGO World Beyond War, the initiator of this global campaign, that your government will give wholehearted support to the proposal to adopt [Resolution] 377, or the ‘Uniting for Peace’ Resolution. It will give a pivotal role to the UNGA in bringing to an end the genocide in Gaza. Uniting for Peace can not only impose an embargo upon the flow of arms to both Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian resistance group. It can also disarm both parties to the conflict and send a huge number of unarmed peacekeepers to Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. They will ensure that there is no armed clash in all parts of Palestine and even in Israel until a conference of all parties involved directly or indirectly in the conflict reach an agreement on restoring the full rights of the Palestinians, establishing a state where there is equality for all its citizens regardless of religion or ethnicity and the right of return of all Palestinian refugees is recognised and implemented.
“JUST is confident given your commitment to peace that you will bring [Resolution] 377 to fruition in the coming session of the GA and help the land of the three faiths to enjoy tranquility and harmony once again.”
In solidarity, Dr Chandra Muzaffar, President, International Movement for a Just World”
United Nations General Assembly Resolution 377 (V), adopted November 3, 1950, empowers the General Assembly to override the United Nations Security Council—in this case, specifically the United States—under conditions that the world deems immediate action to be essential, in order to preserve the international peace and security of the world. The United Nations website, regarding Emergency Special Sessions, says that Resolution 377 “resolves that if the Security Council, because of lack of unanimity of the permanent members, fails to exercise its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security in any case where there appears to be a threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or active aggression, the General Assembly shall consider the matter immediately with the view to making appropriate recommendations to members for collective measures, including, in the case of a breach of the peace or active aggression, the use of armed force if necessary, to maintain or restore, international peace and security.”
The following is Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s transcript of her responses to two questions, at the Orvieto Forum of the panel on “The Spirit of Sovereignism Is Once Again Haunting Europe,” sponsored by the Indipendenza! party on July 27, 2024. Here she responds to the first question, which was presented in Italian. The English translation was not available.Zepp-LaRouches presentation can be watched here.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche: Well, I think we have a big crisis in Germany right now, because when the NATO summit took place, Scholz—the Chancellor—afterwards declared that the United States had decided to install long-range missiles in Germany. Now, that was not discussed in the German Parliament, there was no referendum among the German citizens, and these long-range missiles represent a clear escalation towards nuclear war. The Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Ryabkov already answered by saying that Russia will counter that with similar measures, possibly including nuclear-armed missiles. So, the question is, how is it that the United States can make a decision which puts into jeopardy the very existence of Germany? When Scholz says, it was the United States who decided, who in the United States? We just experienced that there was an assassination attempt on Trump, where the cui bono is still a very open question. Then shortly afterwards, President Biden resigned [from running for reelection], because he clearly was not fit for the office anymore, and there was a big discussion that this was not new, but that he had not been fit for quite some time. So, Biden obviously did not make the decision to put these long-range missiles into Germany.
So, this is a big problem. If you think that some unknown entity is making a decision over the very existence of Germany, that just brings on the table, very clearly, the question that Germany at this point has zero sovereignty. This is, however, clear to a small, but significant portion of the German people, who, basically I would say, join most of what has been said here yesterday and today, meaning that they do not regard Russia as a mortal enemy, which the NATO summit just had declared. The NATO summit declared Russia to be a direct threat, the axis of Ukraine to NATO is irreversible, China to be a challenge for the Euro-Atlantic security order, all of which are assumptions which are not shared by the average people, because they have not been consulted, and the mass media is just trying to get people convinced to believe the narrative of NATO.
So, in reality, the present situation is one where NATO is trying to impose its global dictatorship, which would mean, decouple from Russia, from China, and with that, from the Global Majority. Because in a complete blowback to the policies coming from NATO for some time, there is now a new system emerging in the form of the BRICS, the SCO, and other organizations of the Global South, who are trying to create a new economic system, including a new currency, a new development bank. And Europe is very much in a position where we have to decide, do we want to be the vassals of NATO going into a Third World War with the majority of the world—the Global Majority? Or, do we want to line up with the economic bloc, which clearly is on the rise, to create a new system?
So, I think that we are right now in Germany in a very existential decision-making process, where I think we have to ally forces, and that’s why I’m very happy to be here, and I want to thank you for the invitation, because I think the Italians, the Germans, the French, and other people of Europe have to unite at this point to fight this existential danger. [applause]
Here is Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s response to the second question, also presented in Italian:
Zepp-LaRouche: We have a situation where the German economy is in a free-fall. The economic collapse is much, much worse than meets the eye, if you look at the media or so. I think Germany is heading towards an absolutely existential collapse. And I think, in that, unfortunately lies also a chance that people are waking up, because, it’s not just Germany which is collapsing: You have the trans-Atlantic financial system which is bankrupt. It’s sitting on $2.1 quadrillion in unpayable derivatives debt. That is a bubble which can detonate at any moment.
Now, there is a safety boat already, and that is the new economic system which is emerging in the Global Majority—the BRICS, the SCO, the Eurasian Economic Union, ASEAN: All of these countries are building an economic bloc. The danger is that if NATO puts pressure on Europe to decouple or to de-risk, not only are we heading towards a thermonuclear war, because any one of the crises—Ukraine, the situation between Israel and Gaza; Netanyahu was just in the United States lobbying for a war against Iran; the crisis around China and Taiwan. [applause] We have three regional crises which could go into a nuclear war in a very short period of time.
So, what is the way out? The way out is that we have to think completely differently. If we stick to normal party politics, or normal procedures, I don’t think there is a way out. But if we think in terms of a paradigm shift, that we are experiencing right now a historic transformation, where 500 years of colonialism is ending. Because of the strength of China, the countries of the Global South are now forming a new economic system. This is where economic growth is: The growth rates in Asia and the countries that are working with the BRI are extremely high, while Europe and the trans-Atlantic world are collapsing.
So I think the task we have to solve is we have to convince and make clear to the people of Europe that they do ally with the Global South. Germany is collapsing, but Germany is an export nation, and if we would say, “Let’s work with the BRICS, let’s work with ASEAN, let’s work with the Global South,” we could participate in the prosperity which is developing there. We have to create 2-3 billion new productive jobs in the Global South, which we could do. If all the countries of Europe would ally—hopefully with even Japan, and even the United States at some point—we could solve the migration issue in the only possible human way, in creating productive jobs so that the young people of Asia, of Latin America, of Africa want to stay home and build up their own countries. [applause]
So, I think the biggest challenge we have is, how do we get to the mainstream influence people? In Germany for example, the East Germans are not believing the NATO narrative, because they had a different socialization than the West Germans. There are very important people in all of Germany, who are already thinking the way I’m talking about now. But we have to succeed in making clear to the people who are reading Bildzeitung, FAZ, the mainstream media every day, that there is a hope.
So, I’m promoting, since the special military operation in Ukraine broke out, the idea that we have to have a new security and development architecture, which must include every single country on the planet, because if we create any kind of structure, which does not include every country, it is a step to war. That is the lesson of the Peace of Westphalia, which ended 150 years of religious war in Europe and it came to the conclusion that you have to pay attention to the interest of the other if you want to have peace: And that means the interest of every other.
Now, what I’m suggesting is not so far-fetched. On June 14th, President Putin of Russia proposed a new Eurasian economic security architecture. He did not mention the United States, he only said this Eurasian security architecture could be open to NATO countries. He left it undefined if that includes the United States or not. Now, Xi Jinping has made similar proposals by always talking about the need to have a shared community for the one future of mankind. He has proposed several initiatives—the Global Security Initiative, the Global Development Initiative, and the Global Civilizational Initiative—which go very much in the direction of what I’m saying.
So, I think we have to conspire, if you want, to put this idea of a new security and development architecture on the table, which includes every single country on the planet. And because the present constellation of governments is so difficult—to put it diplomatically—I have also called for the creation of a Council of Reason: that is the call to elder statesmen, retired military, people from science, from culture, who have merit in having contributed something important, to step forward and advise governments and suggest solutions. Because I think the present crop of governments is not fit for the job, and obviously, the electoral process is very difficult, and many obstacles are there. But I think if we would find in every single country on the planet, in all continents, the wisest people who would step forward, like there are examples: For example, the Council of Florence in the beautiful Italian Renaissance was such a council, bringing together the wisest people from the Roman Catholic Church and the Greek Orthodox Church. They managed to get unity in Christianity, at least for a certain period of time. The Peace of Westphalia itself was such a council of the wisest, and also the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which helped South Africa to get over apartheid was such a precedent.
So, I think we need to come up with new solutions, because the fate of humanity has never been so much in danger as right now.
Now, why is sovereignty the absolutely important precondition, and why we have to make that clear to people? Now, up until the 15th century, all government forms were oligarchical. You had kings, monarchs, aristocrats, a small elite of privileged people, who would keep the population deliberately backward, and there was no participation of the individual in government. Then, in the 15th century, through several influences, like the Italian Renaissance, which was a big step forward in the history of Europe, the government of Louis XI in France, where the income of the people doubled in 20 years, and through the writings of Nicolaus of Kues, who developed for the first time, the idea that government is only legitimate, if it has the consent of the governed. That only if the people agree with what the government is doing, is the government legitimate. That’s something which is completely lost today—you know, governments do whatever they like.
So, it was this invention by Nicolaus of Kues of the reciprocal relationship between the government and the governed, mediated through the representatives, whereby the individual—for the first time—could participate in government. And this is why we absolutely have to reject supranational institutions like the EU, because the EU is a gigantic bureaucracy, with enormously large numbers of people, no transparency, no accountability, and the participation of the individual citizen in Italy, in Kosovo, in Germany, does not exist.
So, I think this principle of sovereignty needs a broad discussion. Why do we need sovereignty? It’s an existential question.
Now, lastly, I think we need a cultural renaissance. And I heard some of the speakers yesterday and today speaking about the need to have the Greek, Roman, Christian foundation, and I fully agree. I would even go a step beyond, and say, we urgently need a Classical Renaissance of the best traditions of Europe. [applause] The Classical Greek, the Italian contributions of Dante, of Petrarca, of the Council of Florence, of the Golden Renaissance in Italy; likewise the German Classical period of Bach to Beethoven, from Lessing to Schiller: These are so important ideas, and our young people have completely forgotten it!
So we have to revive that and make it real. Furthermore, we have to have a cultural dialogue between the best traditions of Europe and the best traditions of China, of India, of Africa, of Latin America, because only if we understand the other culture, if we start to discover the beauty of the poetry, of the music, that we start to love these other countries, and that is the best medicine against any kind of chauvinism, or wrongly understood nationalism. [applause]
And I have not heard Ursula von der Leyen, Olaf Scholz, Annalena Baerbock, or any of these people ever speaking about any beautiful idea of Europe. And that is why they are completely unfit to save Europe at this point. [applause]
I think we are in a minority, obviously, right now, but I think we have the vision. I have a vision, where the world can be. I think we are, at this point, this close to thermonuclear war which would be the annihilation of civilization. But we are also only this far away, from making the jump, to create the new world economic order in which all countries can live in a win-win position. And it soon will become apparent that Europe has only one choice: Either go with NATO on the road to destruction, or join with the Global Majority towards a beautiful future. And I think this is what we have to make clear to people so that they understand the potential much better.
I would like to invite your party to participate in a conference we are planning, at this point: A European-wide conference where we are trying to put together people from Scandinavia, from France, from the Benelux, from Germany, and hopefully from Italy, as well. So, that is what I wanted to tell you. [applause]
July 23, 2024 (EIRNS)—The following statement was written by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institute and convener of the International Peace Coalition (IPC), on July 23, 2024. It is being made available for widespread distribution by the IPC and its collaborators worldwide.
In judging the outlook from the recent NATO summit in Washington, which defined Russia as the “most significant and direct threat,” China as a “systemic challenge for the Euro-Atlantic security,” and generally a perspective of a Global NATO, there seems to be no place anymore for diplomacy and dialogue as means to resolve conflicts. With the many escalations we see around the world, from Ukraine, to Southwest Asia, or the Indo-Pacific, each of these has the potential to evolve into a global nuclear conflict in the shortest time.
All the values which were once cheered so dearly, “democracy,” “human rights,” “freedom of speech,” and many others, have been eroded by double standards, evident to the whole world. In sum: The world community is experiencing a deep civilizational and cultural crisis, which needs to be addressed.
There are various peace initiatives, from Pope Francis, who offered his mediation in the Ukraine war, to the Chinese peace plan in collaboration with Brazil, to the initiative of several African leaders, to President Erdoğan of Türkiye, as well as others. But as long as the leading institutions in the West stick to the objective that Russia must be inflicted with a “strategic defeat,” as is now official EU policy, diplomacy and dialogue are banned.
There is an acute danger that the world could split into two separate blocs, the collective West on the one side, and the nations of the Global Majority on the other. If this happens, not only could we see a new edition of a cold war, economic decoupling, and tremendous fall-outs and even crashes, but it could lead to a global nuclear war which could end all life on Earth.
It seems that the leadership presently in positions of power have forgotten the horrible experiences of their parents and grandparents, who suffered through two world wars and who learned the painful lesson that nobody wins in a world war. The fact that there seems to be no longer any place for diplomacy and conflict resolution through dialogue, should horrify anyone who thinks through what the effect of a global nuclear war will be.
The UN may need a reform, but it is still the only available venue to bring all nations together. When its institutions are being eroded, the law of the jungle gains the upper hand. Only some countries currently respect the UN Charter, while others claim that they are the chosen ones who should preside over an undefined rules-based order, which however is not the rule of law, but the rule by law, arbitrarily applied wherever it seems to fit.
In all countries there are wise men and women, mostly from older generations, who see the present world crisis with great concern, and who could and must bring their knowledge and expertise to advise and develop options for how to get mankind out of this crisis and onto a better road to a safe future.
We, therefore, call on Elder Statesmen, religious leaders, former diplomats and elected officials, retired military and other civilian leaders—from all nations—to step forward and create a Council of Reason to explore the potential for a new international security and development architecture, which can take into account the interests of every single country on the planet.
There are precedents for such an approach, from different times and different circumstances, but they can give us a hint about what to do in the present crisis. To name only a few examples: The Council of Florence, which unified the Christian Church, at least for some short time; the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War and laid the basis for the establishment of international law; and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which found ways to overcome the wounds of Apartheid.
These examples should serve as an inspiration to come up with new and bold ideas for the creation today of a Council of Reason, bringing together all moral and intellectual reserves humanity has at this point to move the world away from the brink.
Hello. Greetings to all of you from many different countries, from wherever you may be listening now. We are organizing this Oasis Conference to inject a perspective of hope and show a way out of an otherwise desperate, extremely dangerous, and indeed, catastrophic situation in Southwest Asia.
If we don’t replace this present escalation, which could rapidly turn into a full-fledged regional war, turning into a global nuclear war, it could mean the end of the human species on this planet. In order to avoid that short-term danger, what is needed is a cognitive jump, to conceptualize an entirely different approach, namely to define the economic and security self-interest of the Palestinians, the Arabs in general, as well as the Israelis, and then the neighboring countries in the larger region.
Why am I saying this?
What has happened in the last six months is unprecedented in all of history. A genocide, which is happening in real time, is transmitted live from the battlefield in Gaza to the TV sets in the living rooms of the world audience. So while in the first instance after the Hamas attack October 7th on Israeli villages causing 1200 deaths, the sympathy of much of the world was with Israel. That changed day by day, week by week, month by month, as billions of people could watch with their own eyes, unfiltered by commentators and narrative-authors. And what they saw was not a measured counter reaction by a country under attack, but a relentless ethnic cleansing in a sealed tiny territory by one of the most highly technologically equipped military forces in the world, using artificial intelligence for targeting of Hamas fighters and at the same time denying water, food, medical care, electricity, housing, clothing, sanitation, etc., to an entirely unarmed population. So far, the casualties on the Palestinian side are around 33,400, of which 17,000 are children. That is, 44% of all killed are children! And more than 1 million are starving to death acutely. That is why there have been hundreds of thousands in the streets in Islamic countries, in American and European cities, and in the universities!
In the aftermath of the Israeli attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, U.S. CENTCOM commander Gen. Michael Kurilla, is presently visiting Israel where he met with IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi, and Defense Minister Gallant, and visited the Air Force Command Centers, as well as the air bases. Western media are buzzing about a possible Iranian strike on a variety of targets in Israel, as early as today or two days from now. This morning, the Netherlands closed its embassy in Tehran, Lufthansa cancelled flights to Iran until next Thursday [April 18] and the Foreign Office of Germany has called for all German citizens to leave the country. It’s clearly a hair-trigger situation, which in the worst case could turn into regional and even global war.
Despite this escalation, and all the more because of it, it is therefore of the utmost urgency that a completely different approach is being introduced, namely the so-called Oasis Plan, which was proposed in 1975 by my late husband, Lyndon LaRouche. It is based on the idea to create an incentive for both the Palestinians and the Israelis, to replace the present feelings of deep injury, pain and despair for some and hatred for others, with a perspective of a common economic development for the creation of a better future for all generations to come. For the Palestinians it is of vital importance for their very existence, and for the Israelis they should listen to those who are warning them about the change in the perception of the world, such as Ami Ayalon, the former director of the Shin Bet during the time of the Oslo Accords. In an article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, he warns Israel, that following the IDF attack on food trucks on Feb. 29, killing 112 people, and wounding 760—who were desperately trying to obtain the food that could save them from starvation—and the attack on the 7 World Central Kitchen workers, eradicated the legitimacy of the war in the eyes of the world; that it is seen no longer as a war in self-defense, but as an act of expansionist aggression. Furthermore, Ayalon writes that Israel can not win by eliminating the Hamas leadership, since that would not make the Hamas ideology disappear.
That is an understatement of the year. Even if this present crisis would not lead to a global annihilation of the entire human species, in which obviously also Israel would vanish, if the cycle of violence is not interrupted once and for all, the future for all will be a hell, in which one war will follow the next, as we have seen during the last 75 years, always naturally feeding the various arms producers of the growing military industrial complexes.
What we propose therefore is the updated version of the Oasis Plan first introduced by Lyndon LaRouche in 1975, which he proposed after attending a celebration of the Ba’ath Party in Iraq, attended by many leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement. For anyone visiting Southwest Asia, the most striking experience is the overwhelming presence of the desert and the obvious shortage of water, especially fresh water. It is also clear that the requirements for the water consumption for any population, Israeli or Arab, for a modern living standard, cannot be satisfied from the existing “natural” water resources. Furthermore, in all the military conflicts so far, the lack of water and the efforts to control the access to water have played a decisive role.
The existing aquifers in the region do not provide even approximately sufficient water, therefore even a fair sharing agreement would not solve the problem. In order to create large amounts of new fresh water a variety of methods must be deployed. The most obvious to begin with are several canals connecting the Mediterranean with the Dead Sea, and the Dead Sea with the Red Sea. Because of the difference in altitude, the Dead Sea is about 400 meters below the Mediterranean, so this allows for hydropower generation. But if one creates an additional canal from the Gulf of Aqaba to the Dead Sea, and then links the two canals by a cross canal, something else is possible. The basic idea is to increase the size of the canals sufficiently to allow for large-scale desalination projects along the banks of the canals with the aid of a number of nuclear power plants. Because of the breakthroughs in technology in the recent decades, the availability of the fourth generation pebble-bed reactor, the high-temperature reactor, that was originally developed by Professor Schulten in Jülich, Germany, and which is produced now by China, the safety concerns have been solved. There is also the option of using thorium-cycle reactors, which are uniquely usable for civilian consumption of nuclear energy. One could build a significant number of 300-megawatt electricity plants, what used to be called “nuplexes” or “duplexes” along the canals, providing fresh water for large-scale irrigation for reforestation, agriculture, the building of transport infrastructure and new cities.
Even if the cost of producing fresh water from desalination of saltwater with nuclear energy is relatively high, the economic benefit from the enormous economic activity generated this way in areas, where there was absolutely none before, is orders of magnitude larger than the amount originally spent. It is the unique power of human labor, that with the help of science and technology, it adds value to the process, so that the outcome of work is always higher in terms of value than all the elements which went into it. The energy-flux density used in this, determines the ratio of added value. So it really pays for itself.
One should therefore not only look at the projects mentioned here so far, but have the vision of how this region can look in one, two, three, four generations from now. Take as an example China, which has in the last 30 years greened several desert areas successfully. The Chinese economist Dr. Ding Yifan describes in his new book, The New Dynamics of Development: The Crisis of Globalization and China’s Solutions, how nearly one-third of the Hobq Desert in Inner Mongolia has been effectively treated, and has become an economic cluster of desert tourism, food, and photovoltaics, and how in the Sekhangba not far from Beijing, thousands of hectares of forest have been restored, and how on the border between Shaanxi and Inner Mongolia in the Mawusu Desert, 30% of the desert is now covered with vegetation, soil erosion has ceased, and the newly reclaimed farmland has reached 1.6 million acres, generating tremendous economic benefit for local farmers. Dr. Ding Yifan reports that Eric Solheim, UN Undersecretary and UNEP Executive Director, praised the Hobq Desert model which provides excellent experience for other countries and regions that face desertification problems, and that China’s experience in sand control can also spread to Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.
In order to conceptualize a vision of development for the entire region: from India to the Mediterranean, from the Caucasus to the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, and how that area can develop as a future hub between Asia, Africa, and Europe, one should imagine the infrastructure density, for example, of Germany; where you have an integrated system of highways, railways, water systems, which represent the precondition for advanced industrial development and agriculture. There is no objective reason why Southwest Asia cannot achieve a comparable level in the future.
If the looming war can be avoided, the tectonic change which is taking place in the world today where the countries of the Global South are already working to create a new economic system, can create the conditions for the full development of Southwest Asia. Russia, China, India, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt are already members of the BRICS; Saudi Arabia is a candidate, and others like Türkiye have indicated an intent to join. If all these countries would agree to the development perspective of the Oasis Plan and convene a comprehensive Southwest Asia conference on an emergency basis in the tradition of the Peace of Westphalia, the present looming catastrophe can be avoided, and the crisis turned into the beginning of a new era of peace and development.
Henry Kissinger, who pretended to be an expert on the Westphalian Order, actually grossly misunderstood it by insisting, that it required a “balancing power”—namely an unipolar policeman. He claimed that “the Westphalian system never applied fully to the Middle East,” since only Türkiye, Egypt, and Iran had an historical basis, while the borders of the other states would reflect the arbitrariness of the victors of World War I. He obviously was referring to the intent for future manipulation of the Sykes-Picot Treaty.
That is why the world must return to the actual Peace of Westphalia and establish a new international security and development architecture, which takes into account the interest of every single country on the planet. That new architecture must emphatically include Russia, China, the U.S., as well as a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine.
According to the Cost of War Project of the Watson Institute at Brown University in Rhode Island, in the 20 years from 9/11 in 2001 until 2021, the U.S. military expenditures including collateral costs were $8 trillion, which was spent for military and counter-terrorism measures in 85 countries, not including U.S. special operations forces, CIA operations, “military information support operations,” “psychological operations,” etc. In this same period, more than 940,000 people have been killed by direct war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan; and the number of civilians who have died as a result of indirect causes, is significantly higher. If that amount of money—$8 trillion—would have been invested in programs to overcome poverty and underdevelopment, the world would be today a prosperous garden, and the United States would be celebrated as a friend of humanity.
I can already hear the critics who say that this perspective of an Oasis plan as the starting point for a new international security and development architecture in the spirit of the encyclical Populorum Progessio of Pope Paul VI is not realistic, or even worse, completely utopian.
When Friedrich Schiller wrote his trilogy Wallenstein about the powerful warlord of the 30 Years’ War, he portrayed Wallenstein, not in the way the handed down historic interpretation characterized him, but as a man who really wanted to end the war and reach peace. In the play, Schiller puts the vision of the Peace of Westphalia, which was reached 16 years later, in the mouth of Max Piccolomini, the fiancé of Wallenstein’s daughter Thekla. In a conversation with his father and a representative of the Vienna Court, Questenberg, Max says:
“You make him [Wallenstein] an indignant man and, God knows!
To what even more, because he spares the Saxons,
Seeks to inspire confidence in the enemy
Which is the only way to peace;
For if war does not end in war,
Where then shall peace come from?”
That is the whole idea: “For if war does not end in war, where then shall peace come from?” To inspire confidence in the enemy, that is the only way to peace! At the abyss of what could become the end of all life on the planet, are we, mankind, the creative species; and can we define a solution out of this danger? So let us put the Oasis Plan on the table of all governments of the world!
No one will be able to claim, as historians said of World War I, that we sleepwalked into World War III. The war cries today are so deafening that they threaten to awaken from the dead all of the victims of previous wars, including the First and Second World Wars.
Tax money is poured into military spending of all kinds, while civilian economies collapse, infrastructure decays, and schools and hospitals are closed or fall apart. In the United States, the Pentagon’s defense budget for 2024 amounts to nearly one trillion dollars, while the entire EU budget and all national budgets in Europe are slated for militarization. German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius is demanding that society become “war-ready” and has asserted that we only have five to eight years before a major military confrontation with Russia. American think-tanks are working feverishly on “war games” for a major war with China, which should, in their view, take place sooner rather than later. See the article by the Council of Foreign Relations magazine, Foreign Affairs, “The Big One: Preparing for a Long War With China.”
How did we end up on this trajectory, which can only take us to a Third World War, a global nuclear war between the U.S. and NATO on the one side, and Russia and China on the other, and thus nuclear Armageddon?
President Eisenhower, at the end of his mandate, warned in 1961 against the explosion of the power of the military-industrial complex (MIC), saying:
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Since then, history has unfortunately shown that Eisenhower’s advice was not followed, and that this “unwarranted influence” has spread throughout society and reduced governments to institutions doing the bidding of that MIC.
The decisive turning point occurred when the Soviet Union dissolved. Instead of establishing a new global order of peace, as Lyndon LaRouche had envisioned with his proposal for the Eurasian Land Bridge, which would have integrated the Eurasian continent economically and ensured close ties between East and West, the neocons opted for Anglo-American dominance over a unipolar world. The Wolfowitz Doctrine of 1992 stipulated that no country or group of countries would ever be allowed to surpass the U.S. in political, economic or military power.
Contrary to promises made to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at the time of German reunification, that NATO would not expand an “inch” eastward, NATO did just that. There were five NATO expansions extending 1,000 km eastward toward Russia’s borders, including the installation of potentially offensive missile defense systems in that area, which all preceded the Russian special operation of February 24, 2022 in Ukraine. A new Cuban Missile Crisis at a snail’s pace, so to speak.
The U.S. and NATO countries went for political control, for the idea that all countries in the world had to adopt the Western neoliberal model, i.e. regime change, color revolutions; interventionist wars in which many millions have died; military bases built around the world; war training for their foreign allies; imperial expansion of the EU and NATO up to the point of creating a global NATO as a means to contain real and potential rivals; sanctions aimed at affecting regime change; and finally weaponization of the dollar. All this under the banner of the “rules-based order,” liberal democracy, and human rights.
China, on the other hand, went for economic development and overcoming poverty for 850 million of its own citizens, initially, and then increasingly for win-win cooperation with the nations of the Global South through the New Silk Road Initiative. Thanks to this cooperation, those nations were given the chance for the first time to free themselves from the poverty and underdevelopment dating back to the colonial era. Today, 150 countries of the Global South are working together with China on thousands of New Silk Road projects, building roads and high-speed railroads, ports, airports, development corridors, industrial parks and more.
In the past ten years since China put the Belt and Road Initiative on the agenda, unbounded cultural optimism has spread among nations of the Global South, which has long since become the Global Majority, with the idea that they will soon become fully developed nations. They are responding to the weaponization of the dollar with de-dollarization, i.e., by trading in their own currencies and eventually planning their own reserve currency, by deepening the strategic partnership between Russia and China, creating their own organizations, such as the BRICS Plus, which will include ten members as of January 1, 2024, and dozens more very soon.
Conclusion: the attempt to respond to the disintegration of the Soviet Union with the utopia of a unipolar world order, held together by military power, has been a monumental failure. It has led to an unprecedented strategic blowback.
Therefore, the most crucial question is: Can we in the West, the U.S. and European nations, correct our political course in time, and choose cooperation with the Global South instead of confrontation? China and Russia have repeatedly emphasized that the Belt and Road Initiative and the BRICS countries are open to cooperation with the West!
The main difficulty lies in the fact that much of the economic capacities in the United States, and a growing share of those in Europe, have been taken over by the MIC, and are so closely entwined with the big investment firms and asset management companies of Wall Street and the City of London, that a better term is the military-industrial-financial complex (MIFC). (See this package of material on the MIFC.)
Technically speaking, it would be relatively easy to re-tool these capacities for civilian purposes, and rather than producing bombers, fighter jets, and missiles, to produce modern high-speed rail systems, inherently safe nuclear reactors of the 4th generation, and nuclear fusion reactors, as well as space stations for international space travel. In other words, all the industrial capacity currently used for the destruction of actual physical value—what else are weapons systems good for?—could serve the production of useful goods that promote the common good. Instead of tanks and ammunition, they could produce schools and hospitals, and help our nations to have prosperous economies once again!
Russian economist Sergei Glazyev put it in a nutshell in a message on the occasion of what would have been Lyndon LaRouche’s 100th birthday, which he unfortunately did not live to see. LaRouche not only forecast with farsightedness the crisis of the neoliberal system, but also proposed solutions to overcome this crisis. The countries that rejected his solutions are in crisis today, while those that implemented his ideas are prospering, Glazyev stated:
“In practically all the major countries in the world that today are developing successfully—above all India, and China—there are partisans of LaRouche. They have used his thoughts and ideas, for creating their economic miracles. It is the principles of Physical Economy championed by LaRouche, that today underlie the Chinese economic miracle and are there in the foundations of India’s economic development policy. The supporters of LaRouche in those countries exert a fruitful, very positive, and constructive influence on economic policy-shaping in these leading nations of the new world economic paradigm.”
It’s not yet too late. We need to replace the war cries for ever “more weapons” with a return to diplomacy and the idea that we can—and must—resolve all conflicts through negotiation, if we are to avoid ending up in global nuclear war and a nuclear winter, which would wipe out all memory of humanity’s existence.
Instead of the greed of the speculators of the MIFC, Wall Street, and the City of London, whose high rates of profit rely on taxpayer money pouring into new wars, we must defend the existential interest of the population: The interests of farmers, small and medium-sized businesses, train drivers, bakers, etc.
Swords to plowshares!
We are many, they are few!
For cooperation with the nations of the Global South!
A Transformation Bigger than the End of the Cold War
It is most urgent that we make the ordinary citizens of European nations and the USA–who are bombarded on a daily basis with a barrage of news in the mainstream mass media, which all have generally a spin in such a way, as to create an almost entirely fictitious parallel reality–aware of the tectonic change going on in this historic moment. Because only if they recognize the choices clearly lying ahead of us, is there hope for a positive way out of the present existential crisis of humanity.
It is high time to review the success and respectively the failure of the official policies of the recent period in order to assess the validity or flaws of ones own axioms of thinking. If there is one lesson about how it came to two world wars in the 20th century, then it is the number of miscalculations on the part of the participants in those wars. Having that parallel in mind one can only sound the alarm bells in the shrillest way possible.
The geopolitical confrontation of the US-led NATO over Ukraine, which did not start „unprovoked“ on February 23, 2022, but really already with the „Orange Revolution“ financed by the NED in 2004, and escalated with Victoria Nuland’s Maidan Coup in 2014, is clearly not working the way it was intended. The unprecedented series of sanctions did not „ruin Russia“, as Annalena Baerbock had wished, but caused a far reaching reorientation of Russia to the East and the South. But also Russia’s expectation about a short term nature of the military special operation did not materialize since the Russian leadership obviously underestimated the effect of NATO-operations in Ukraine since the Maidan coup and the subsequent attitude of the population, as well as the far reaching willingness for military engagement in Ukraine by the West.
Now a military stalemate has been reached, and the continuation of the military operations can, despite all new weapon deliveries, only lead to the complete attrition of the human resources of Ukraine, who already has suffered horrendous casualty figures, and the danger of an escalation to the nuclear level, if either Russia sees its territorial integrity threatened or somebody thinks that a limited nuclear war is feasible.
If the Europeans believed that their giving in to the demands of ever „more weapons“ to Ukraine, would lead to a victory of Ukraine on the battlefield, that also did not work out. Instead European nations find themselves completely cut off from any ties with their neighbor Russia, the „energy- dependency“ shifted from Russia to the much more expensive American energy, and in the meantime Germany has lost even the appearance of a remnant of sovereignty and with it the respect in the whole world. Germany, the erstwhile economic powerhouse of Europe is rapidly undergoing a process of deindustrialization caused by exorbitant energy prices provided by the wonderful protective power and ally US, who is not hesitating to lure the battered German industries to resettle in the US with the help of the Inflation Reduction Act–not even to mention the North Stream Pipelines about which nobody believes the belatedly made up story about the sailing yacht Andromeda. A popular saying these days is: What do you need enemies for with friends like this?
Germany has been transformed into a doormat, trampled upon by NATO-boots, while the present political leadership with its green Atlanticist ideology, for whom it would be a euphemism to call it „German,“ is gambling away about everything all the generations have built up from the rubble fields after the Second World War. Half of the German Mittelstand, the source of the entire social system in the country, is either going bankrupt or leaving to reinvest either in the US or in China. The overwhelming mood in the country is one of desperation, restaurant owners, farmers, craftsmen, store owners, nurses, all kinds of service industries, all feel that the floor is being pulled away from under them, and those, who don’t want to move to the Alternative for Germany, a right wing party, with some good points, but also unacceptable elements in it, feel that they have no place to turn to. „Everything will crash against the wall“, is one of the most heard sentences in many private discussions. People feel completely betrayed. We should remember, it was that utter feeling of betrayal after the Versailles treaty, which was the death-nail for the Weimar Republic!
But what most citizens of the West have no inkling about, is that a much bigger, much more consequential development is taking place elsewhere, in those parts of the world, which are effected by what is going on between NATO and Russia, where the „collateral damage“, such as high energy and food prices in these countries was considered „negligible“. And now that oversight is turning out to be the biggest misjudgment of all.
The unilateral (and therefore illegal) sanctions against Russia and a whole series of other countries, the confiscation of state assets and weaponization of the dollar on top of the longstanding experience of unfair trade and credit conditions have led to a gigantic blowback in the countries of the Global South which since has emerged as the Global Majority, representing more than 85 % of the world population. The massive attempts by NATO countries to pressure countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa to take the side of the „democracies“ of the „rules based order“ against the supposed „autocracies“ and „dictatorships“ in the Ukraine conflict backfired thoroughly. The identity of these countries as being part of the Nonalignment Movement and the „Spirit of Bandung“, the major alliance between Asian and African countries of the 1955 conference, came back to life and with it the memory that it was the Soviet Union which had helped many of the developing countries in their struggles for independence against the colonial powers.
When Lyndon LaRouche, my late husband, had first proposed an alternative to the IMF and its conditionalities in 1975 with the proposal for the IDB, which was intended to issue 400 Billion dollar credit lines per year for industrial development projects, this proposal was fullheartedly endorsed be the NAM then, who incorporated it in their final resolution in Colombo, Sri Lanka, representing already 75 % of the world population. The reaction of the financial powers to be were brutal: Indira Gandhi and Mrs. Bandaranaike were ousted from power, President Ali Bhutto and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi several years later were assassinated. The NAM played a subdued role for many years to come as a result of these attacks.
Lyndon LaRouche, whose 101st birthday we were celebrating yesterday, and his international movement kept writing development plans relentlessly, a comprehensive infrastructure plan for the entire African continent, presented in 1976 in a conference in Paris, Operation Juarez for Latin America in cooperation with Mexican President Lopez Portillo, a 50 year plan for the Pacific Basin in light of the expected increase on population density in that part of the world, a 40 year plan for India, which Mrs. Gandhi started to implement, the Oasis plan for Southwest Asia, and in 91, when the Soviet Union disintegrated, the Eurasian Landbridge, the New Silk Road–all of these programs were presented at literally hundreds of conferences and seminars on five continents.
After President Xi Jinping presented the concept of the New Silk Road in Kazakhstan, exactly 10 years and 2 days ago, Western governments, think tanks and media amazingly ignored this program which was clearly the largest infrastructure program in history ever, easily an order of magnitude larger then the Marshal Plan for Europe after the second World War.
But for the countries of the Global South the BRI became the game changer, allowing many of them for the first time to seriously launch infrastructure programs, industrial parks, advanced science projects, etc. From the end of 2017 the attitude in the West towards the BRI suddenly shifted from indifference to hostility, in the security papers of the Pentagon first, and then synchronized in all western media and think tanks, China’s rise was characterized as „systemic rival“ and „opponent“ culminating in the recent „decoupling“ and „de-risking“ frenzy. With the recent enlargement of the BRICS into BRICS-11 and the expressed interest of around 40 more countries to join likewise, the idea of a complete decoupling from Russia and China is more than absurd: it is suicidal. The perspective of creating two more or less separate blocs in reality is not feasible and can be only seen as the futile effort to economically weaken an adversary before a planned military attack, which given the existence of several thousands of nuclear missiles would mean the annihilation of the human species and with it all life on earth.
It is time for a fundamental strategic reevaluation. Is it not now more in the interest of the US and European nations to take the initiative to cooperate with all the countries of the Global South and build a prosperous world for all nations, than taking the risk of pursuing a policy which may lead to the „end of history“, albeit in a different way than Francis Fukuyama, the father of all political misjudgments fantasized?
News are coming in this morning, that Prime Minister Modi announced in a long overdue step at the ongoing G20 summit in New Delhi, that the African Union has been admitted to the G20, making the G21. That is positive, but completely insufficient. In order to eliminate the danger of a third, this time thermonuclear war, we need to create a totally new international security and development architecture, which takes into account the security and economic interest of all nations on the planet. And that is only possible, if it is based on the development of all, on the interest of the other, and the creation of a common future, which is promising and uplifting for all of humanity.
The comprehensive study the Schiller Institute published in 2014 in response to President Xi’s announcement from 2013 in Kazakhstan, „The New Silk Road becomes the World Land Bridge“ can be the basis for such a peace order for the 21st Century. It gives a clear orientation for the economic buildup of all parts of the planet, concrete plans for overcoming underdevelopment in the Global South as well as concrete guidelines for the reconstruction of the decaying economies of the Global North. Together with the Ten Principles I suggested for such a new architecture, these proposals could be the basis for any serious attempt to find a solution to the present crisis. Why not conduct a special session of the UNGA to discuss such a new international architecture, when clearly so many people around the world are concerned about the threat to world peace?
The idea of a World Landbridge, connecting all infrastructurally developed continents through tunnels and bridges, so that one can travel soon with a maglev train from the southern tip of Argentina or Chile up north through the Americas via the Bering Strait all way along the transsiberean railway to Gibraltar and on through Africa to the Cape of Good Hope. This will be the realization of the vision of the German economist Friedrich List and his „space and time economy“, where he outlined, how an advanced transport and communication system with a high speed, dense regularity and cost efficiency of infrastructure would allow for new levels of the mental and material productive powers. This development would then lead to a „Republic of the planet“ based on the „economy of humanity“, which would make it possible that all talents would exchange their ideas and work together in all areas in science and art and all areas of knowledge, which in turn would increase the efficiency of all powers of humanity, the exact opposite of „decoupling“ and „derisking“, obviously.
A similar idea about the future development of humanity to become a great community of the entire world, a „datong shijie“, one can also find with Cai Yuanpei, the first education minister of the Republic of China and President of Peking University, who introduced Schiller’s conception of aesthetic education into China. Obviously the same evolutionary innate idea governed Nikolaus of Kues idea about harmony in the macrocosm based on the best mutual development of all microcosms. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’ idea of a preestablished harmony in the universe represents the same idea, Vernadsky’s notion of the increasing dominance of the noosphere over the biosphere, as well. And I remember very well, how Lyndon LaRouche stunned his associates, when he talked about how despite the present importance of the sovereignty of the nation state, that would not be the last stage in the evolution of the the development of humanity.
Look at this latest breakthrough China made in controllable nuclear fusion technology for a new generation of an „artificial sun“, the Huanliu-3, a week ago. They realized high-confinement mode operation with a plasma current of one million ampere for the first time, according to the China National Nuclear Corporation, (CNNC). The high-confinement mode, is also used as the standard mode for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), in Cadarache, France, which is run by seven member parties, China, the EU, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the US. This inherently safe form of nuclear energy, once it is fully realized, is one of the technologies which will remove the basis for geopolitical rivalry, because it will make energy so plentiful and cheap, that it will be cheaper than the continuation of military conflict.
The perspective for a completely new paradigm in international relations is on the horizon, and this could come much faster then most can imagine. A change in the US with the next presidential election could return the US on the path of a republic. As Sergey Glazyev indicated, a new BRICS currency will likely materialize in 2024 during Russia’s chairmanship of the BRICS, which could turn out to be the lifeboat for the global financial system.
So, there is all the reason for a culturally optimistic view for the future of mankind, provided we replace hatred, envy and resentment with love, generosity, and curiosity for the potential of the other cultures. We still have time to reset the axioms of our thinking.
This is Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s prepared text for her presentation to Panel I, “Peace in the World Through a New Security and Development Architecture for Each and Every Country: The Indispensable Strategic Autonomy of European Countries,” of the Schiller Institute’s July 8–9 conference, “On the Verge of a New World War—European Nations Must Cooperate with the Global South!” It was translated from the German and edited for EIR magazine. (Subheads have been added.)
Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche is the founder and leader of the Schiller Institute.
Excellencies, distinguished guests, dear friends of the Schiller Institute!
What a joy to welcome people from so many nations here in Strasbourg in person, after circumstances forced us to hold our Schiller Conferences only virtually for over three years! But we used this time well to bring together so many new forces worldwide, with which we can intervene together at this crucial moment in world history to create a new paradigm for the future of humanity!
Let me say it straight away: Even if our continent is in an existential crisis, we will not allow its demise. Rather, we will revive the best of what European culture has produced, and what is now buried under the speech balloons of a decadent counterculture and the barbarism of the diehards of the past, and we will bring that into the shaping of the New Paradigm!
Unquestionably, we are now in the most dangerous moment the human species has ever faced, as we are extremely close to extinction as a species on this planet, because that would be the consequence of a global nuclear war. And contrary to what the propaganda of the trans-Atlantic mainstream media claims, the danger is not due to “Russia’s unprovoked war of aggression” nor to “China’s increasingly aggressive imperial power grab,” but to the trans-Atlantic forces who are unscrupulously playing with nuclear fire, while attempting by all means to exert unipolar dominance over the world when it has long since been moving in a multipolar direction.
While the mainstream media in unison slander as a “Putin sympathizer” anyone who dares to think that history did not begin on Feb. 24, 2022, and while NATO and the U.S. government fund organizations that put people on lists that put their lives in danger, the nations of the Global South have very much gained an independent view of things.
The sixfold expansion of NATO to the East, coming a thousand kilometers closer to the borders of Russia, despite promises to the contrary, can be as little covered up as the efforts of the Northern “ATLANTIC” defense alliance to expand in the Indo-Pacific region as Global NATO. Above all, with the increasingly blatant and arrogant appeals with which representatives of the “rules-based order” demand that the whole world submit to their intrigues and their “indulgences” in modern garb (such as a carbon tax or CO2 emissions trading), they have crossed the Rubicon. But by such means they hope to prolong the existence of the hopelessly bankrupt neoliberal financial system at least a bit longer.
We are currently experiencing a change of epoch, albeit not of the kind that Chancellor Scholz referred to on Feb. 24, 2022, which amounts to the militarization of Europe as a protectorate of the United States. Rather, we are seeing the end of some 500 years of colonialism, which the countries of the Global South are determined to finally shake off with the help of China and the BRI. For example, at the recent Global Financing Summit in Paris, President Ramaphosa demanded that the international community provide investments for the Grand Inga Dam project:
“Let’s get that done and then we will be convinced that you are serious with the promises that you make…. “
It is estimated that the cost today would be perhaps $120 billion, and that it would generate at least 44 gigawatts of electricity, which would have an absolutely revolutionary impact on the entire continent’s energy supply and economy.
More than 30 nations have applied for membership in the BRICS, which would then include the world’s most populous countries. The attempt, coming mainly from the U.S. and the UK, to “decouple” from China or to “de-risk,” as this foolish phrase has come to be called—when all these countries are closely linked with China—can only lead to economic suicide, or to an equally suicidal formation of geopolitical blocs, which would carry the seeds of a world war.
In the face of this tectonic shift of power, which occurs at most once or twice in a millennium, the European nations—but also America—must decide whether they want to cooperate productively with this emerging world order, or whether they (with NATO, the U.S., and the UK) will opt for total confrontation and the attempt to oppress the absolute majority of the human species. The decision between these two options will test, at the same time, our moral fitness to survive: Are we, as rational beings, able to give ourselves, together with the Global South, an order that guarantees the coexistence of us all and, as Leibniz would put it, allows the happiness of future generations? Or are we soulless human machine guns, hatefully directed only toward the destruction of the supposed enemy?
Nuclear War ‘Options’
This is not an academic question, as will become obvious in four days at the annual NATO summit in Vilnius, at which the Hungarian government—thankfully— announced that Ukraine’s admission to NATO will remain out of the question for as long as the war continues, which should actually be self-evident. Now, however, there are recent statements by Berlin’s two leading think-tanks—Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP) and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik (DGAP), both are close to the government—about possible security guarantees for Ukraine outside of formal NATO membership. Even if these are only ideas from think-tanks, and not necessarily the policies of the Berlin government, these papers deserve the closest attention, because their authors are typical of the so-called “experts” who speak non-stop on the talk shows, and in this way influence the views of the population.
It is not only in France that there has been a great deal of concern recently about Germany’s seemingly complete loss of all sovereignty (which was never very good), as could be seen in the German government’s lack of response to the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines.
Now, it must be taken into consideration that the SWP, which advises the government, the Bundestag, the EU, NATO and the UN among others, was created on the initiative of the BND [Bundesnachrichtendienst, Germany’s foreign intelligence service], which, when it was founded under the aegis of the American occupying power in 1962, incorporated personnel from the military intelligence service Fremde Heere Ost and the Gehlen Organization. The SWP was initially based in Ebenhausen, a small town near Pullach, where the headquarters of the BND was located. The much larger DGAP (the German Council on Foreign Relations), 2800 members, was founded as early as 1955 in cooperation with, and modeled on, the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations and the British Royal Institute for International Affairs, known as “Chatham House.”
In an SWP paper of June 29, 2023, entitled, “From ad hoc support to long-term security guarantees as a NATO member,” it is stated that there are two options, apart from full NATO membership, that would really guarantee Kiev’s security. The first is “demilitarization” of Russia by reducing its armed forces and arms industry to a level that rules out “offensive operations.” This would only be possible through “external shocks,” a clear defeat of the army, a renunciation by the leadership of its “neo-imperial understanding of its role,” which would require a change of regime, and the simultaneous denuclearization of Russia’s military potential. That, however, they say, is “currently unrealistic.” The second option would be for Ukraine to build up its own nuclear arsenal.
Just in case, the DGAP provided yet another option, circulating under the keyword “hedgehog,” as an animal symbolizing such a massive rearmament of Ukraine—into a super armory so to speak—that it would deter all future attacks. This includes the variant proposed by the chairman of the British defense committee, Tobias Ellwood, which envisages support from a coalition of the willing and a powerful task force, a Joint European Defense Initiative (JEDI). Germany’s Rheinmetall Group has already announced plans to build a modern tank factory and other weapons factories in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, U.S. defense contractors Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin sponsored champagne receptions at the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, not least to celebrate the MoU [memorandum of understanding—ed.] that the world’s largest financial services firm, BlackRock, which manages $10 trillion in assets, landed with the Ukrainian government. JEDI is only intended to help bridge the gap; in the long term, NATO membership is indispensable. The goal is to anchor Ukraine irrevocably in the Euro-Atlantic structures. The priority, therefore, is to proactively communicate to their own populations the “meaning, purpose and goals” of NATO membership for Ukraine and to take action against institutions that claim to be part of civil society but are in fact controlled by the Russian state. For the record, we are not controlled!
What a nightmare! The largely destroyed Ukraine is to be transformed into a mega-armed country, a “hedgehog,” or rather into a permanent cash cow for the military-industrial complex on both sides of the Atlantic; it will become a “frozen” conflict that can be activated at any time, as a permanent crossing of the red lines defined by Russia which, in the meantime, is supposed to be “ruined” according to [German Foreign Affairs Minister Annalena] Baerbock, or permanently weakened (according to [U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd] Austin, RUSI [the British Royal United Services Institute], [NATO Secretary General Jens] Stoltenberg, etc.).
There’s not a single thought about ending the war through diplomacy, no peace negotiations, no positive vision for the Ukrainian people, and certainly not a peace order for the world as a whole! What an ugly, destructive spirit rears its head here, no human emotion influences the thinking, it’s cold as a robot which is steered by a worm-eaten algorithm!
A New Economic Order
But the arrogance that leads some to claim that they belong to the camp of the “good people,” and can therefore suggest the most horrendous things with impunity, also blinds them. The reality is by no means that the Russian economy is collapsing, quite the contrary. Economic growth in May was [when annualized] 5.4%, while Germany is officially in recession, and Russia was forced by the sanctions to build up many branches of production for its own benefit and redirect trade patterns from the West to Asia, where the momentum of the world economy is anyway.
The trans-Atlantic financial sector, on the other hand, is sitting on a bubble of 2 quadrillion dollars of outstanding derivative contracts—that’s a 2 with 15 zeros—which ultimately means hopeless systemic debt. Central banks are switching back and forth between QE and QT [quantitative easing and tightening—ed.] in apparent disorientation. But Josep Borrell, EU High Representative for Foreign Policy, takes the cake. He recently stated with utmost arrogance at the European Diplomatic Academy in Bruges, that Europe is a garden, while most of the rest of the world is a jungle that could intrude into it.
Such a point of view will find no sympathy among the 5,000-year-old cultures of the peoples of Asia, who together with the other countries of the Global South have long been putting into place a New World Economic Order—and where Mr. Borrell is now regarded as a comedian but not one to invite for a visit—or among the nearly 50 percent of German companies that are fleeing the country, due to the mismanagement of the German government and the unaffordable energy prices.
Hearing Borrell’s misplaced comparison to a garden, one is reminded of Scene X in Act II of Schiller’s play Don Carlos, when the Marquis of Posa, who sees himself as a citizen of the world and carries the liberation of Flanders from the Spanish yoke in his heart, confronts King Philip II, the absolute ruler of Spain, the empire on which it was said at the time that “the Sun never sets.”
Phillip says something very similar:
“Behold my Spain, see here the burgher’s good blooms in eternal and unclouded peace. A peace like this will I bestow on Flanders.”
And the Marquis answers:
“The churchyard’s peace!… And do you hope to end …
The universal spring, that shall renew
The earth’s fair form? Would you alone, in Europe,
Fling yourself down before the rapid wheel
Of destiny … Vain thought!”
The absolute majority in Germany, for example, has lost confidence in the government, and according to recent surveys, 79% are not satisfied with the government’s policies. Here in France, we have just seen what state the social fabric in this garden is in. No wall can be built high enough to protect the garden, Borrell says? Well, we see at the external borders of the EU, what these walls look like. Pope Francis described the reception camps for refugees in the border countries of Europe as concentration camps, which are surrounded by high walls topped with NATO barbed wire, and are repulsive enough to deter people from venturing in small boats over the Mediterranean Sea, which itself has long since been turned into a horrendous mass grave.
No, Mr. Borrell, this Europe is not a garden, it is a continent that competent politicians, such as Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer, wanted to bring out of the rubble of the Second World War into a better future, and which a thoroughly decadent political caste, having thrown out the window its duty of peace, is now leading into a renewed catastrophe that threatens to far surpass the horrors of the Second World War.
And if large parts of the world outside Europe resemble a jungle, it’s because Europe has not developed Africa in the past centuries, but well-known families in the trans-Atlantic world have built their fortunes on the slave trade, drew profits from the opium trade, or are profiting from the modern successor of colonialism—the casino economy—in which the wealthy determine the rules of our oh-so-fantastically-organized rules-based order.
Or maybe other regions are a jungle because the trans-Atlantic interventionist armies took up residence there, as NATO did for 20 years in Afghanistan, during which time nothing was built, and then left the country in ruins. Or as in Iraq, where a country rising to modernity was bombed back into the Stone Age, and concerning which Madeleine Albright said the death of 500,000 Iraqi children was a fair price to pay for the right to continue ruining the country. And the list of why some countries of this world are not gardens could go on: Syria, Yemen, Libya, Haiti, etc.
But there is a way out. The nations of the Global South, whose existence was just recently discovered by the G7, and which represent the overwhelming majority of humanity, have long been shaking off the shackles of modern colonialism and creating a new international currency, new development banks, a new credit system. Over 30 countries have applied for membership in BRICS-Plus; the SCO, AU, ASEAN, EAEU, Mercosur and other organizations have moved to carry out their trade in national currencies. One hundred and fifty-one countries cooperate with China’s BRI [Belt and Road Initiative], which this year celebrates its tenth anniversary, and managed during that decade to make sure the term “developing countries” really does apply to the countries of the Global South.
Europe and the ‘Global South’
We in Europe, and even in America, have to give up the already doomed attempt to contain the rise of these countries by decoupling or “de-risking.” We have to replace confrontation, which in any case only benefits the military-industrial complex, with cooperation. Germany, France, Italy, and all other European nations must become part of the new paradigm in international relations; our middle class, now bankrupt under the old paradigm, can not only help build the Inga Dam, but realize the Transaqua project that will provide electricity to twelve more nations in Africa. We can cooperate with China to provide the entire Global South with a high-speed rail system, we can build ports and waterways, green deserts through large-scale desalination of seawater, and build new cities.
Yes, and while we’re at it, we can also modernize our own ailing infrastructure. Instead of enriching the defense industry and impoverishing the population, we can repair our schools, make the health care system functional again, intensify international cooperation on the ITER fusion project as a crash program in order to achieve commercial use of fusion energy faster, and we can spare ourselves all the pollution and the destruction of our landscapes with those unspeakable wind turbines. We can also rebuild Ukraine as a bridge between Central Europe and Russia as part of the new Silk Road.
To bring Europe, and America, onto this path, is our commitment. And let us remember what Posa said to King Phillip, and what we, together with Schiller, say to the many Borrells of today:
“Geben Sie die unnatürliche Vergöttrung auf,
die uns vernichtet!…
Sie wollen pflanzen für die Ewigkeit,
Und säen Tod? Ein so erzwungnes Werk
Wird seines Schöpfers Geist nicht überdauern…
“Geben Sie, was Sie uns nahmen wieder!
Lassen Sie, Grossmüthig, wie der Starke,
Menschenglück aus Ihrem Füllhorn strömen—
Geister reifen in Ihrem Weltgebäude,
Geben Sie, was Sie uns nahmen, wieder.
Werden Sie, von Millionen Königen, ein König!”
~ ~ ~
“Give up the unnatural deification that destroys us!…
You would plant for all eternity, and yet the seeds
You sow around you are the seeds of death!
This hopeless task, with nature’s laws at strife,
Will ne’er survive the spirit of its founder….
“Restore us all you have deprived us of,
And, generous as strong, let happiness
Flow from your horn of plenty—let man’s mind
Ripen in your vast empire—give us back
All you have taken from us—and become,
Amidst a thousand kings, a king indeed!”
Today, we no longer need a king, but as a variation on Posa’s words today,
April 3, 2023–The “narrative” of the MSM is that there are countries, where freedom of the press thrives, such as Norway, which appears again at the top of the relevant index; and that there are countries, where it is suppressed. In reality, in the MSM honest journalism has almost entirely disappeared. The very notion of a historical or objective “truth,” which can be unearthed by investigative journalism, has been buried by a barrage of projectiles which pierce through that very concept. What has come in its place is an arbitrary variety of descriptions of that “truth,” which are either named as “fake,” or must be “debunked,” or even crushed before conception by being “pre-bunked.”
In reality there is a brutal fight for control of the “narrative” of the “rules- based-order,” where journalism has been degraded to serve as the executioner on behalf of the ruling elites. If this were an exaggeration, Seymour Hersh would have received a newly created Nobel Prize for excellence in Journalism in Norway, and all the Norwegian media would have excelled in reporting about the role of Norway in the sabotage of the Nord Stream Pipelines.
The heads of state who assemble this weekend for the coronation of King Charles can prove their commitment to freedom and democracy by congratulating the newly crowned King for making his first act the freedom of Julian Assange!
No, not sleepwalking, but rather with eyes wide open, and without reason, backbone or conscience, the trans-Atlantic Establishment is pushing us to the edge of the cliff, beyond which a thermonuclear Hell is lurking, that threatens to annihilate all life on this planet. The 12-point program for a diplomatic solution to the strategic crisis between NATO and Russia, released by China on February 24, represents a possible last-minute lifeline to save us from jumping off. Although it was rejected out-of-hand by President Biden and the EU Commission, it has been increasingly supported for good reason by nations of the Global South, and consequently by most of humanity. It definitely needs to become an integral focus of all those forces worldwide that, in this time of existential threat for humanity, are committed to a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine conflict. It also represents a concrete option around which to orient the offer of Pope Francis to use the Vatican as a venue for peace negotiations.
The reason why China’s peace plan was immediately rejected by the United States and NATO is that their goal is the restoration of a unipolar world in which China would never be allowed to play the role of a broker for peace. As NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg made clear Feb. 28, in his joint press conference with Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin in Helsinki, he sees Ukraine’s future as a part of the EU and as a member of NATO (in the long run). Thus, for NATO, the option of a neutral Ukraine is off the table, although the NATO leadership knows perfectly well that Russia considers that a blatant disregard of its demand for security guarantees. In other words, the U.S., the UK, NATO and the Atlanticists defend the line: “Ukraine has to win on the battlefield,” and “Russia must be ruined.” Conversely, Russia naturally sees this as an existential threat, and will attempt to bring about a decision on the battlefield.
The Russian government would be in a parallel universe if it did not take seriously the proposals discussed at a joint event of the Jamestown Foundation and the Hudson Institute in December 2022, concerning options for a complete breakup of the Russian Federation. Their “minimalist” goal is for Russia to be turned into “a looser, confederation-type administrative political structure”—de facto disempowering the Russian government, while the “maximalist” goal is the complete breakup and partition of Russia “along ethno-religious lines” and the simultaneous creation of separate states such as Chechnya, Dagestan, and Tatarstan. In that case, they say, demilitarization comparable to the Morgenthau Plan proposal, a “de-Sovietization,” would have to be carried out, and broad sections of society would have to be brought before a war crimes tribunal or re-educated.
Since the collaborators of these two think tanks are recruited from the inner core of the U.S. intelligence agencies and the military-industrial complex, i.e., the real U.S. power structure, Moscow must assume that these scenarios reflect the intention of the U.S. government. That, in turn, would fulfill the condition that the Russian military doctrine has set for the use of nuclear weapons, i.e., when the territorial existence of Russia is threatened.
According to experts from several nations, a military victory for Ukraine is far away. Ukrainian troops have suffered huge losses, averaging 1,000 men per day over the past three months and around 500 per day since mid-February. Some 10 million refugees—two million of them in Russia—unanimously say they do not want to return to Ukraine. Overall, the Ukrainian population has dropped from 37.5 million to about 20 million at present. Almost half of the urban infrastructure has been destroyed, while all critical industrial capacity is located in Russian-speaking regions.
In such circumstances, a war of attrition lasting many years, as the amount of weapons ordered by NATO would seem to indicate, will be a meat grinder in which the population will be wiped out “to the last Ukrainian.”
While U.S. military officials such as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley are pushing for negotiations based on a realistic assessment of the situation, and even the Rand Corporation has advised against a “long war” in Ukraine for its own reasons, the hawks around the State Department are apparently following the proposal made by one of Britain’s leading think tanks, the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), which advocates escalating the war to the point where Russia would have to threaten to use nuclear weapons because of a threat to Crimea and thus to Russian territory. According to this perverse logic, the ensuing “Cuban Missile Crisis on steroids” would “promote” the settlement of the war because Russia could thus be forced to surrender. U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Victoria “Dr. Strangelove” Nuland, notorious for her active role in the 2014 Maidan coup in Kiev, recently reiterated her support for Ukrainian military attacks on Crimea. Thus, the danger of an escalation to a global nuclear war in the short term is knowingly accepted. Obviously, the lives of the Ukrainian population do not count in this scenario; the sole goal is to ensure the defeat of Russia in order to re-establish the status of American hegemony.
The European Council for Foreign Relations, the EU’s own think tank, points out in a recent study that although the U.S. and Europe have drawn closer to one another, the rest of the world is moving further and further away from the West. Those who wish to get an idea of this reality for themselves are advised to watch the video of a dialogue between Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and the head of the Indian think tank ORF (Observer Research Foundation), Sunjoy Joshi, at this year’s Raisina Dialogue. A good representation of the Global South’s elite meets regularly at this prestigious event sponsored by the Indian government. As Lavrov, among others, indicated, the Russia-India-China troika, first initiated by Russian Foreign Minister Primakov, continues to be a centerpiece of strategic cooperation, but has since greatly expanded into the BRICS Plus group, to which two dozen other countries of the Global South have applied for membership. Therefore, Russia is hardly isolated, as this includes an overwhelming majority of humanity.
And this majority supports the Chinese peace proposal, which calls for respecting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries, abandoning a Cold War mentality, ending hostilities, ending sanctions against Russia, and proposes concrete steps on how to overcome the crisis diplomatically. President Zelensky has also stated that he wants to discuss this with President Xi. The near-hysterical reactions of the mainstream media and the Atlanticists to the Chinese proposal prove once again that ideological glasses cause blindness.
The majority of the world’s population supports a diplomatic solution to the crisis. Brazilian President Lula, who has called for a peace club composed of the nations of the Global South, will travel to China later this month to discuss peace initiatives with Xi Jinping. Italian General Fabio Mini, former commander of the KFOR mission in Kosovo, has proposed further useful steps for a settlement of the conflict in Ukraine. Pope Francis’ offer to use the Vatican as a venue for diplomatic negotiations is gaining support from key individuals and institutions around the world, as well as religious leaders of various denominations.
Therefore, it is high time for China’s proposal to become the center of the discussion. The situation today is comparable to that in which the negotiations leading to the Peace of Westphalia ended 150 years of religious war in Europe. At that time, the warring parties came to the conclusion that the war had to come to an end, otherwise there would be no one left to enjoy a victory because everyone would be dead. That is precisely our situation today, with the difference that the existence of nuclear weapons today would guarantee such an outcome.
One of the most important results of the Peace of Westphalia, which laid the foundation for international law, was the realization that peace requires taking into account the interest of the other. From that standpoint, not only is NATO’s repeated eastward expansion a catalyst for war, NATO itself is obsolete and urgently needs to be replaced by a new international security and development architecture that takes into account the interests of all states on the planet.
It is urgently necessary that the newly emerging peace movement, that came onto the scene at the “Rage Against the War Machine” demonstration on Feb. 19 in Washington, on Feb. 25 in Berlin, and in many other rallies in Italy, France, Germany and numerous other countries, take a clear position in favor of ending NATO and supporting the Chinese proposal for a peaceful settlement to the conflict which otherwise threatens to lead to the end of civilization.
Feb. 6, 2023 (EIRNS)—The recent double earthquake in southern Turkey and northwestern Syria is a terrible disaster which is generating a wave of emotion and empathy from around the world. The situation will likely worsen due to forecast weather of extremely low temperatures throughout the region, resulting in the collapse of weakened buildings due to the cold and frost, not to mention the immediate consequences to children, women and men who have lost everything.
Time is of the essence. We welcome an international response; in fact there are several countries that have already offered their assistance to the populations affected by the earthquakes. This being said, it is difficult to accept that the same disaster has a very different human impact on either side of the borders of Turkey and Syria. On the Syrian side, this tragedy is affecting a population that has been hard hit by years of war and sanctions imposed by the United States with other nations.
This situation confronts us, as Western nations, with our responsibility to uphold the values we claim to embody. Are we going to continue to apply the measures that we very well know have led to the unimaginable suffering, misfortune and death of innocent people? Or are we going to finally make the decision to lift these criminal sanctions? Don’t we know, after so many years of use, that the weapon of sanctions only hurts the people?
It is time for Western leaders to regain a minimum of moral fiber, by taking this tragedy as the opportunity to definitively lift all sanctions against Syria and, from then on, to organize the reconstruction of the country with those who are determined to contribute to it.
