Brussels is blaming Putin for causing gas shortage in the EU. As ridiculous as this can be, the established media and politicians trumpet this lie around. But nobody mentions that the Netherlands, once a major provider of gas to Europe, is curbing its production right now.
The Dutch government had decided to shut down the Groningen gas field, because of fear of earthquakes, and began to wind it down last year. Earlier this month, Dutch Home Affairs Minister Kajsa and Economic Affairs Minister Stef Blok said that the government will not increase natural gas production from the Groningen fields to head off the impact of soaring gas prices. The gas taps will only be turned on again if there are very cold winters, not for price rises, the ministers said.
If reactivated fully in an emergency, Groningen could alleviate the scarcity. It delivered 88 billion cubic meters at its peak in 1976 and above 30 billion cubic meters just five years ago. Natural gas production in the Netherlands has been falling in recent years, and in 2020 totaled 20 billion cubic meters. This was the lowest production of natural gas in the Netherlands since the turn of the century.
Gas consumption in the EU amounted to 521 billion cubic meters in 2019, and it dropped to 380 cubic meters in 2020, due to lockdowns. As demand resumed this year, and Gazprom increased its supply, the Dutch could help fill the gap. But maybe the Dutch government wants to let “creative destruction” get its way…
Civilization Itself Is at Stake: Will We Rise to the Challenge?
Escalating tensions with Russia, driven by Ukrainian’s suicidal push for NATO membership, U.S. encouragement, and the U.S. military itself, threatens — despite President Biden’s reaching out to President Putin for an in-person summit — to explode into war, nuclear war. A provocative visit of former U.S. government officials to Taiwan adds more fuel to the fire of China’s cross-strait relations. Economic lending into the real economy by U.S. banks withers, even as they are showered with money. Inflation accelerates, and a blowout of the trans-Atlantic financial system is inevitable. Death by starvation stalks the impoverished inhabitants of war-zones Syria and Yemen.
Will these crises culminate in what would become nuclear conflict, a devastation of the human race, or will a new paradigm overthrow the oligarchical structures that drive conflict? What flanks can you create to achieve that happier outcome?
In her weekly Schiller Institute webcast discussion, Helga Zepp-LaRouche responded to the urgent call to the world by Cardinal Mario Zenari in Syria for the world to come to the aid of the Syrian people. More than 90% of Syrians are below the level of extreme poverty, and many are in danger of losing their lives due to famine. (Zenari’s Time is Running Out.) The last decade of war, the unjust sanctions, and the Covid pandemic have created an absolutely intolerable condition of suffering for the Syrian people.
Similar horrors confront Yemen, where the agonizing reality of hunger is conveyed in the powerful documentary {Hunger Ward}, referred to by the head of the World Food Program, David Beasley, who saw children dying before his very eyes in the hospital, and he was unable to help.
In both Syria and Yemen, the results of supposedly “humanitarian interventionist” wars — and there is nothing humanitarian about them! — conducted under the guise of defending the people from murderous governments, are genocidal. Was U.S. military intervention in Syria driven by Assad’s chemical weapon murder of the people there? No, that was not the reason, and the claims about the attacks were not true. As Col. (ret.) Richard Black (USA) has explained, the plan for regime change in Syria was developed ten years before the 2011 destabilization, as part of a policy of regime change in the entire region, comprising Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Libya.
The narrative about the causes of the war is completely wrong.
But even leaving that aside, start from the current humanitarian situation: “When you have a people about to die, and the world does absolutely nothing, that means the people watching that are {morally unfit to survive.} And I’m crying out to you to help us make a mobilization to get rid of the “Caesar” sanctions and to have the immediate reconstruction of Syria.”
In contrast, the so-called donors’ conference in Brussels raised a few billion dollars, but it was an absolute charade. The funds will {not} go to the Syrian government, but rather to neighboring countries that have taken in refugees, to NGOs, and to opposition groups. But, as Cardinal Zenari says, without a {reconstruction}, there will be no end to the misery. Peace through development is the only way out of the crisis.
And we know how to do this! The Schiller Institute has worked for half a century on plans for the development of Southwest Asia, dating back to Lyndon LaRouche’s 1975 “Oasis Plan” proposal. Since then, the LaRouche movement has developed a plan for Syria (“Project Phoenix“), a plan for Yemen (“Operation Felix“), all in the context of bringing Southwest Asia into a development paradigm of the New Silk Road / Belt and Road Initiative.
Against this potential stands the Caesar sanctions, based on a lie. Photographs supposedly showing victims of torture carried out by the Assad government were used as evidence to push through these brutal sanctions policy. But these photographs were mainly of Syrian soldiers killed by al-Qaeda-linked groups! This is not the first time such fabrications have been presented. Saddam Hussein’s forces were accused of ripping babies out of incubators in Kuwait. This was used to start the 1989 Iraq War. Then we had the “yellow cake” and other supposed evidence of Saddam Hussein’s program to create weapons of mass destruction — again, all lies. Then we had the lies from the White Helmets about the supposed use by Assad of chemical weapons.
Zepp-LaRouche demanded: “This must stop and the Caesar sanctions must be lifted. And all the members of Congress who do not lift these sanctions make themselves complicit in every death that occurs in the region…
“This has reached the point where either the world wakes up and we start to remedy this, or we will not survive, because of our own moral failure as a human species.
“I call on you: work with the Schiller Institute. Work with its Committee on the Coincidence of Opposites, which is working to get aid programs and reconstruction.
“I appeal to you: get in contact with the Schiller Institute and respond to the call by Cardinal Zenari, which has not been covered much at all by the Western press, which alone should show the one-sidedness of the media, which we must overcome.”
Will you answer the call? Become a member of the Schiller Institute and work to make its vision a reality.
Tulsi Gabbard Warns Ukraine Tensions Could Cause War
Apr. 14 (EIRNS)–Appearing on Tucker Carlson’s show on Monday, former member of congress and presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard warned the American people of the existential threat of conflict with Russia: “[The situation with Russia and Ukraine] is moving in a very dangerous direction. The question for the American people is, ‘are we willing to go to war with Russia on behalf of Ukraine’? And we need to understand that such a war would come at a cost beyond anything that we can really imagine. Because this is not a war that’s happening to someone else, somewhere else on the other side of the world. No, this is something that will directly impact me, and you, Tucker, every single one of your viewers, and all of our loved ones.
“And this is a war that is not a game. It’s a war in which there are no winners, because you’ve got thousands of nuclear weapons that the U.S. has aimed towards Russia; Russia has thousands of nuclear weapons that are aimed towards us, that could hit any town or city in the U.S. in less than thirty minutes, that could exact a cost on every one of us that would result in excruciating death and suffering beyond comprehension — hundreds of millions of people dying and suffering seeing their flesh burned from their bones. This is something that you can’t really even imagine. And it’s a cost that we will {all} pay.”
In response to Carlson’s question, “why in the world would we ever contemplate going to war with Russia, honestly?” Gabbard continued:
“It is one that we should not do, for those very reasons. You look at the impacts of what a nuclear brings. It brings about the end of the world as we know it. And our leaders should understand this consequence and take it seriously. This is why President Biden, instead of continuing to escalate tensions and escalate this new cold war between the United States and Russia, he needs to de-escalate these tensions, to take the heat out of it, and bring an end to this new cold war. Because if he doesn’t, it’s not a question of {if} we go to war with Russia, {if} this war goes to a nuclear holocaust: it really is then just a question of {when}. And if we continue down this path that we are on, it’s something that could happen a lot sooner than any of us think.”
Carlson concluded by referring to how he had opened the segment, by contrasting the importance of Gabbard’s warning to the war over pronouns: “I’m just amazed by the magnitude of the stories that all of us are missing, including those of us who are paid to follow this stuff, and especially this story. So, I appreciate how you so crisply and wisely addressed that. It’s terrifying.” Watch the interview here.
Oct. 20 (EIRNS) — Helga Zepp-LaRouche participated in the high-level International Academic Forum in China 2021, hosted by CASS, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, on the theme of “A New and Uniquely Chinese Path to Modernization,” which was held in Beijing on the 14th and 15th of October.
The conference opened with a speech by Huang Kunming, a member of the Political Bureau of the CPC (Communist Party of China) Central Committee and head of the Publicity Department of the CPC Central Committee. He said: “Over the past 100 years, the CPC has led the people in pioneering a new and uniquely Chinese path to modernization and creating a new model for human advancement…. China will follow its own path, strengthen exchanges and mutual learning with other countries, and make greater contributions to the world with the new achievements of modernization.”
He pointed out that the forum is an important platform for the promotion for exchanges in philosophy and social sciences between China and the world. More than 100 scholars from various universities, thinktanks, and academic institutions from twenty nations participated.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche, speaking as the president of the Schiller Institute,” titled her presentation, “A Chinese Contribution to Universal History Viewed from the Future.” She presented the great achievement of China’s transformation from a poor primarily agricultural nation into one of the world’s leading nations in science, industry, and culture. Her call for a dialogue on the highest level all cultures of the world elicited a very positive reaction from the panel moderator, who emphasized that the juxtaposition of both the greatest poets and thinkers of West with those of China demonstrates that while they represent very different cultures, the dialogue between them represents truly universal values. One could see this idea expressed in the song of the European Union (EU), Schiller’s and Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”
The questions that needed to be answered were also addressed: What steps must be taken to push the world into a community of a shared future and how can the knowledge produced in China more directly become part of world knowledge?
SCO Opens in Tajikistan: Pakistan’s Imran Khan Calls for Replacing Geo-politics With Geo-economics —
Sept. 16, 2021 (EIRNS)—The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is convening at the head-of-state level in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, with the crisis in Afghanistan the major immediate challenge to their 20-year mission. The eight SCO countries—China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan—become nine with full membership granted to Iran. (Afghanistan, Belarus, and Mongolia are “Observer States”; Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Turkey are “Dialogue Partners.”)
Early reports indicate multiple “sideline” meetings of the leaders of various countries. In particular, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan was quite busy on Thursday, meeting on the sidelines with Belarus’s President Alexander Lukashenko, Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi and Uzbekistan’s President Shavkat Mirziyoyev. He had a more extensive bilateral meeting with Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev on “trade, investment and transportation links.”
He had been welcomed at Dushanbe’s airport by Tajikistan’s President Emomali Rahmon. According to the statement released by the Pakistani government, he described an upgrading of the two countries’ engagement—what he termed his “Vision Central Asia” policy—and emphasized connectivity and Pakistan’s “pivotal position in providing the shortest access route to the sea.” His key example of connectivity was the Trans-Afghan railway project connecting Termez/Mazar-e-Sharif/Kabul/Jalalabad/Peshawar. His statement repeated the need to transform from “geo-politics” to “geo-economics.”
He also addressed the new Pakistan-Tajikistan Business Forum on expanding the “minuscule” $80 million of trade. He declared that Pakistan would expedite work on the CASA-1000 power transmission line to benefit from “your clean and cheap energy [such as] hydroelectricity”, too much lacking in Pakistan. Otherwise, he stated that he would work with President Rahmon to stabilize Afghanistan: “We will be doing our best to make sure they get together and there is an inclusive government.”
Friday Questions — Given that there is no “Climate Emergency”, can we collaborate to take power away from the predatory oligarchs, who are using “climate” to destroy civilization?Why aren’t more people speaking out against inflation?Is inflation caused by supply-and-demand distortions, like the “Bullwhip Effect?”Why didn’t President Trump take down the Federal Reserve?
Afghanistan’s Neighbors Move to Secure Borders and Counter Terrorism—
Sept. 16, 2021 (EIRNS)—In tandem with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) began on Thursday two days of head-of-state sessions in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. The six nations involved are Russia, Tajikistan, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Kyrgyzstan. Their immediate central concern is to modernize and upgrade their forces on an unstable border with Afghanistan.
After an initial meeting on Thursday, the Secretary-General of the CSTO, Stanislav Zas, stated: “In connection with the change in the situation in Afghanistan, plans for the deployment and the makeup of both military contingents and special forces were agreed.” Fourteen documents were reconciled and prepared for signing, including the “temporary presence of joint CSTO forces in the Central Asian region” and the equipping of rapid response forces. Earlier, Russia’s Security Council had issued their own statement saying that the CSTO, besides reinforcing the Tajik-Afghan border, would also tackle drug trafficking and illegal migration.
Putin Celebrates 60th Anniversary of Gagarin First Human Space Flight
April 13, 2021 (EIRNS)—On April 12, the 60th anniversary of the first human space flight of Yuri Gagarin and Cosmonauts Day, Russian President Vladimir Putin visited the city of Engels and held discussions on the development of the Russian space industry. Putin was accompanied by State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, who is a Duma lawmaker, and Saratov Region Governor Valery Radayev.
He visited Space Conquerors Park and laid flowers on the monument to Gagarin built at the site where the cosmonaut had landed. He also held a videoconference reviewing plans for the development of the space industry. According to TASS, Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Borisov and head of Roscosmos space agency Dmitry Rogozin delivered reports.
“In the new, 21st century, Russia must uphold its status of a leading nuclear and space power because the space sector is directly linked with defense,” Putin said at the meeting.
“We will always be proud that our country paved the way to the universe and that our compatriot was a pioneer on this great path,” he stressed. “It is our duty to cherish the memory of the generation of space explorers—to honor the courage and bravery of cosmonauts who ventured to explore the unknown, despite risks, those who developed unique space systems and vehicles, who trained crews for work in the orbit and to remember all those who used their labor and talent to lay the basis for and build up the country’s space potential. Moreover, our duty is to keep on striving to be on a par with the high standards set for us by the space pioneers,” the President stated.
Affirming the need to attract young people to space industry, Putin stated that more than 50,000 people younger than 35 are currently employed in Russia’s space sector. “I suggest increasing by 50% the salary of those who have already been in space and have been holding prominent positions in the cosmonaut team. And by 70% for cosmonauts-to-be who currently undergo training,” President Putin said. “It is still difficult for them now to undertake maximum efforts for achievement of the overall deliverable. They even risk their lives and health.”
Happy 93rd Birthday Fred Wills! —
The collaboration between Fred Wills (former foreign minister of Guyana) to realize a New World Economic System, Helga and Lyndon LaRouche is commemorated in the Schiller Institute’s hosting of the webpage: Shakespeare in Exile, inaugurated on Lyn’s 99th birthday earlier this month. The webpage hosts Wills’ series of lectures on Shakespeare’s drama with LaRouche’s ICLC cadre.
The Wills lectures highlight, “[T]he common error among most of those who consider themselves historians of one variety or another, is that lacking a well-developed sense of the distinctive nature of the human species, they turn from the subject of man as a species, to appeal like a pimp to those passions of sense-certainty which inform and excite the temptations of the credulous. These shortcomers never touch directly that sublime subject which is the history of man.*” — Cloret & Bill Ferguson
Some topics you will encounter include: Schiller; Synarchism II; History; and Love of Mankind. Recommended reading is Lyndon LaRouche’s Nov. 30, 2003 piece, The Role of the Sublime In World Politics Today.
Apr. 14 (EIRNS)–On March 16, the Permanent Representative of India at the United Nations, Ambassador T.S. Tirumarti spoke out against the humanitarian disaster related to the U.S. imposition of sanctions against Syria, the so-called Caesar Sanctions. Tirumarti said the sanctions should be “relaxed,” calling on the international community to act “with a sense of urgency” to help the Syrian people. He said there is an “urgent need to increase humanitarian assistance to all Syrians throughout the country without discrimination, politicization, and any preconditions.”
The sanctions, which were a part of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, went into effect on June 17, 2020, and have plunged more than 90% of all Syrians below the poverty level. With the full backing of Secretary of State Pompeo, the U.S, Special Envoy for Syria Engagement, James Jeffrey, exposed the hypocrisy of U.S. policy in his explanation of the actual intent of the Act. While insisting that “We’re not demanding total victory, we’re not saying that Assad has to go,” Jeffrey said that the goal of the Act is to “make it clear to anyone who wants to rebuild Assad’s Syria that that cannot happen without Caesar sanctions,” until there is a government in Damascus that carries out US demands with what Jeffrey described as “real eagerness.” He later clarified that anyone, or any nation which engages in economic activities in Syria is “a potential sanctions target.”
The sanctions were drafted in response to a collection of photos compiled by a defector of Syrians who were allegedly victims of the brutality of the Assad government. It was delivered to the opposition group, the “Syrian National Movement”, which passed it on to Human Rights Watch, (HRW) which released it in an 86-page report, “If the Dead Could Speak: Mass Deaths and Torture in Syria’s Detention Facilities.” Critics of the report point out that, of the 28,000+ photos included, only a “couple dozen” could be confirmed by HRW activists, who claimed to have “meticulously verified dozens of stories” of people who died in Syrian detention centers. Many of the others were Syrian soldiers murdered by terrorists, or victims of assassinations and bomb attacks done by terrorists.
In passing the bill, no significant voice in Congress was raised about victims of U.S. torture in Iraq or Afghanistan, or about the civilian toll of the “War on Terror,” or about the millions whose lives are endangered by the sanctions. Also of note is that the publisher of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, who published classified U.S. documents reporting on torture and other atrocities carried out by U.S. military and security forces occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, was not hailed as a “hero” — as the defector and HRW activists have been — but is left to rot in a jail in London, awaiting extradition to stand trial in the U.S.
The Schiller Institute is demanding that the sanctions be lifted immediately.
