ENDGAME OF PREDATORY CAPITALISM
Sanctions against Russia:
Preparation for World War
by Helga Zepp-LaRouche
Aug. 1—The sanctions against Russia's financial sector and energy companies adopted by the EU—with the agreement of the German government— hit Germany's machine-building and medium-sized productive sector, the Mittelstand, particularly hard. They are part of a strategy of confrontation, which, as former German Secretary of State in the Defense Ministry Willy Wimmer correctly emphasizes, is preparing for nuclear war with Russia.
We have a problem: Our government in Berlin is not looking out for the general welfare and protecting us from dangers.
The sanctions against Russia must be condemned in the strongest possible terms and lifted immediately. There is not even a shred of evidence that President Putin was responsible for shooting down Malaysia Airlines MH17, and furthermore, it is the governments of Great Britain, the United States, and Ukraine which are so far refusing to publish the existing satellite photos, AWACS data recordings, and the findings of the air traffic controllers, not to mention the so-called "black boxes," which were taken into custody by the British government.
An unprecedented phalanx of pro-NATO news magazines is issuing war-mongering propaganda that is a painful reminder of the Nazi paper Der Stürmer, whose propaganda led to 80 million deaths. The propaganda also recalls the media campaigns against Saddam Hussein for alleged weapons of mass destruction, which led to the deaths of more than a million Iraqis, and the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Assad government in Syria, which also turned out to be lies. Or in times past, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which provided the pretext for the Vietnam War, with its more than 3 million victims. Everything today suggests that the downing or crash of MH17 was either a "false flag" operation or possibly a quite different element of war preparations against Russia.
The sanctions adopted on the basis of rash prejudgment of Putin will, according to Philippe Pegorier, head of the French company Alstom and president of the Association of European Business (AEB), cost Germany about 300,000 industrial jobs, especially in the machine-building sector, whose Russian customers will face financing difficulties as a result of the sanctions and will have to cancel their orders.
The campaign against Russia is actually about regime change, as Wolfgang Münchau recently brutally announced in an article on Spiegel Online. "We can crush the Russian economy in weeks," he bragged, by blocking their access to international payment systems. Münchau added: "Payment systems are the nuclear bombs of the financial war," and the EU has not only a common interest in stopping Putin, but also the means to do it.
Where the War Danger Comes From
Recently, quite a few people? although still too few? have warned that this all could lead to a third world war, a thermonuclear war. A group of former defense and foreign ministers and security experts from the European Leadership Network warned that the conflict in the eastern Ukraine threatens the security of Europe as a whole. They said that it was particularly disturbing that such crises could spiral out of control without warning, triggered by third parties, as recently in the case of the downing of flight MH17. National leaders need more time to make decisions, especially since both sides still have thousands of nuclear weapons on alert. A nuclear war as the result of a quasi-mistake is absolutely possible, they said.
That is certainly true, but the truth is much worse, because there are also those who are doing this intentionally.
The real reason for war lies in the complete bankruptcy of the trans-Atlantic casino economy. In the face of the heroic struggle of Argentina to defend its sovereignty and the common good of its 41 million citizens, against the attempted raids of the NML hedge fund, the chorus of those who are now bloviating self-righteously? "But the debt must still be paid" ? is shocking beyond belief. These advocates of the "free" market economy apparently thought nothing of this hedge fund, NML Capital, backed by the American justice system, demanding a profit of 1,608% in six years.
But in the meantime, the same vulture fund, with the backing of the Obama Administration, has quietly positioned itself in Europe over the past year and a half, and has bought up dozens and dozens, if not hundreds of billions of euros of the bad debts of the European banks, on the same principle as it did in Argentina. They bought this worthless paper, which the banks were glad to unload so as to pass the "stress tests," for 3-4 euro cents per 1 euro, so as to turn around later and demand payment of the entire original, nominal value—just as in the case of Argentina.
According to Spanish media reports, such as CincoDias.com, the same vulture fund, Paul Singer's NML Capital, and its parent company Elliott Management, bought up at least €1.3 billion in distressed loans (what an expression!) in 2013 from Banco Santander, the largest bank in Europe, and other Spanish financial institutions, such as Bankia. The total cost to Elliott Management was a measly €50 million—less than 4% of the nominal value. In March 2013, Elliott bought €300 million of bad loans from Santander for a paltry €12 million; in August, Elliott and the hedge funds Lindorff and Cerberus Capital Management bought €1.354 billion in distressed loans from Bankia, for €38 million—3.8% of their nominal value.
The vulture funds are making such deals not only in Spain, but are "helping" stressed banks throughout Europe to dump their bad paper to the tune of about €800 billion, so that they can pass the European Central Bank's stress tests. Shortly afterwards, the hedge funds will demand payment of the original, nominal price of the real estate, bonds, or whatever—just as they did in the case of Argentina. Then it will be the European nations that are the suckers, or the citizens of these nations, whose bank accounts are expropriated by a gigantic "bail-in" : the Cyprus model for all of Europe.
At least then the chorus of the self-righteous bloviators should feel a lump in their throats (and maybe even enjoy it, as the condemned man enjoys his last meal).
Why the British Empire Hates Germany
Why is the German government backing sanctions against Russia, acting as willing assistants to a system that has Germany itself as a primary target on its hit list?
Anyone who wants to answer this question needs to understand the role of the British Empire, the City of London as well as Wall Street, which historically was always a branch of this empire.
Thus former Russian Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin recently accused British Prime Minister David Cameron, in an open letter, not only of supporting Nazis in Ukraine, but also of operating in the tradition of Neville Chamberlain, who, in 1938, wanted to direct the Nazis into a war against the Soviet Union, as today the EU is being drawn into a war against Russia.
Willy Wimmer, in his recent article, also refers to the role of the British, and warns: Anyone in Russia in this situation who counts on the United States "or, what is almost worse, on the British, should keep in mind the fate of the German resistance against the Führer." (Former American Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said openly that Russia should never be allowed control over its rich raw materials.) Wimmer is obviously alluding to the role of British intelligence (and another Western intelligence services), which betrayed to the Gestapo the desperate opponents of Hitler who had made contact with them.
The British Empire has hated Germany at least as long as, and for the same geopolitical reasons, that it hates Russia. Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, in a memorandum written five days after the failed assassination attempt against Hitler of July 20, 1944, when bloody purges of the Nazi apparatus were underway, said:
"It may now be said with some definiteness that we are better off with things as they are today than if the plot of July 20th had succeeded and Hitler had been assassinated.... By the failure of the plot we have been spared the embarrassments, both at home and in the United States, which might have resulted from such a move, and, moreover, the present purge [by the Gestapo] is presumably removing from the scene numerous individuals which might have caused us difficulty, not only had the plot succeeded, but also after the defeat of Nazi Germany.... The Gestapo and the SS have done us an appreciable service in removing a selection of those who would undoubtedly have posed as 'good' Germans after the war.... The killing of Germans by Germans will save us from future embarrassments of many kinds."
The "good" Germans today are the Mittelstand companies and machine builders, who want to export to Russia, China, India, etc., and are therefore supposed to be ruined, so that what remains of German industry could be all the more easily smashed by the obscene demands of the banks and hedge funds in the coming "bail-ins."
A continuous line of geopolitics against Germany has extended from Lord Milner and Halford Mackinder, which led to the First World War and the conditions of the Versailles Treaty, which was supposed to neutralize Germany forever; then the murders of the signatories of the Rapallo Treaty; the financing of Hitler by the head of the Bank of England Montagu Norman, Prescott Bush, and Averell Harriman; and the transport of industrial plants by the British occupation forces after the Second World War; right up to the coup de grâce of getting the Germans to commit suicide today, by means of sanctions against Russia.
It is high time to change course and end the policy of the British Empire. Cooperation with the BRICS countries and Latin America, which are in the process of building a new, more just world economic order through the New Silk Road, is the path we must take. And de Gaulle was right: Perfidious Albion!
Translated from German by Susan Welsh
