This article appears in the January 7, 2022 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
We Need To Correct the
Mistakes of the Last 50 Years!
[Print version of this article]
The following was drafted by Helga Zepp-LaRouche as an introduction to the new TLO mass circulation pamphlet, soon to be released.
Dec. 26—The world is faced right now with an overwhelming multitude of crises: the pandemic, which is very far from being under control, and has resulted so far in around 800,000 deaths in the U.S. and more than 5 million worldwide; an escalating tendency towards hyperinflation; collapsing infrastructure in the U.S. and European nations; world famine of “biblical dimensions”; a mass-migration crisis affecting more than 70 million people; the list could go on. But probably for the first time in U.S. history, the possibility of a new world war is dawning on people, and that this time it would not just be overseas. If it happens, it for sure will come to the United States. The combination of all of these dangers seems almost too much to bear—unless we realize that none of them are natural catastrophes, but are the result of wrong policies. And that means they can be corrected, provided the political will can be mobilized to do so.
The overarching problem is that much of the trans-Atlantic world is dominated by a financial oligarchy that has worked diligently since the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, but especially since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and its coverup, to eradicate, step by step, the principles of economy associated with the tradition of the American System of Alexander Hamilton and replace it with the British System of monetarist policies of profit maximization. When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, these forces—situated primarily in the City of London and Wall Street and more recently also in Silicon Valley—took the demise of Soviet communism as the pretext to create a unipolar world, built upon the much heralded British-American special relationship.
This was not stated openly in the tumultuous period spanning the fall of the Berlin Wall, the subsequent German Unification, and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, but behind the scenes the Neo-cons in the U.S. and their London counterparts were already working on what was to become known as the “Wolfowitz doctrine,” i.e., the idea that no country would ever be allowed to bypass the U.S. in terms of economic, military, or political power. Publicly, promises were given to Gorbachev by Secretary of State James Baker III, that NATO would not move “one inch eastward,” if Russia were to allow the peaceful unification of Germany. But that was a deliberate deception from the very beginning.
With the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent dissolution of the Iron Curtain, there was an historic chance for a great change. Such chances only emerge at best once in a century. With the borders between Eastern and Western Europe now open, Lyndon LaRouche and his movement proposed the economic program of the “Eurasian Land Bridge,” the idea to integrate the industrial and population centers of Europe with those of Asia through infrastructure development corridors. Such a policy would have created the basis for a peace order for the 21st Century. While there was great support for this visionary policy among many industrialists and peace-loving forces in many countries, the Neo-cons in the U.S. and their British partners had no intention of allowing it.
Instead, the CIA published a report in 1991 expressing concern that the nations of the former Soviet Union had a greater number of highly educated scientists and more raw materials than the United States. Therefore, the expansion and upgrading of industrial development could not be encouraged. With the help of the utterly corrupt Boris Yeltsin, Jeffrey Sachs imposed “Shock Therapy” on Russia from 1991 to 1994 and reduced Russia’s industrial capacity to only 30% of its previous level. And the massive population reduction of about one million Russians per year was the result.
Organized in institutions such as the Project for a New American Century, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Atlantic Council, and the London-based Henry Jackson Society, these forces had no intention of sticking to the promises made to Gorbachov. They used the occasion of the disappearance of the communist adversary to instead further the transformation of the United States from the Republic that it was created to be by America’s Founding Fathers, into a trans-Atlantic Empire modelled on that very British Empire against which the American Revolution had been fought.
With that new orientation came a whole set of policies: further deregulation of the financial markets, including the eventual abolition of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999; and the systematic abandonment of the UN Charter and its guarantee of each state’s national sovereignty, replacing that guarantee with a “rules based order,” in which the rules are made by a few. The introduction of “humanitarian interventionist wars” and the Right To Protect (R2P) policy, led to the “endless wars” in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and other nations.
A systematic policy of “Regime Change” and “Color Revolution” against all countries which refused to submit to the concept of the unipolar world was run by this Anglo-American cabal. And, since Russia had been effectively deindustrialized with that “shock therapy,” these Neo-cons thought they could dismiss Russia as a strategic player. They proceeded to insult Russia, to boast that Russia would now be no more than a “regional power,” as Obama proclaimed.
Meanwhile NATO moved step by step eastward, not only an inch, but by adding fourteen members, including the seven nations of the former Warsaw Pact and the three Baltic states, and in this way moved closer to the border of Russia with modern weapon systems that reduce the time to reach Moscow to a few minutes. At the same time, the U.S. pulled out of one arms control treaty and other treaties, one after the other: The ABM Treaty in 2002, the INF Treaty in 2019, the JCPOA in 2018, and the Open Skies Treaty in 2020.
At the same time, the trans-Atlantic oligarchical establishment arrogantly felt so increasingly self-assured that it decided that it had become safe to maintain its power with a turn to more openly Malthusian green policies, given that the “adversary” had disappeared. And that therefore it was no longer so necessary to maintain state-of-the-art industrial and scientific technology. So, the shift to a more openly and unabashed neocolonial “Transformation of the World Economy” out of fossil fuels and related technologies was promoted. The well-greased propaganda machine of the trans-Atlantic media, under the spell of NATO, escalated the scare about anthropogenic climate change, ignoring the views of thousands of scientists who had challenged the arbitrary models based on tailor-made algorithms about CO2 emissions causing the “planet to boil over,” as Obama famously put it to an audience of African students assembled in South Africa.
When these monetarist policies erupted in the systemic crisis of 2008, rather than addressing the root causes of the problem, the money printing machines of QE (quantitative easing) and the zero-to-negative interest rate policy were set into motion, to keep the casino economy of speculation and profit maximation going. Ever more apocalyptic scenarios were put into circulation by the Princes of the British Royal Family and their kindergarten troops of the Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future, increasingly prophesying that the world would end in twelve years unless people stopped eating and driving cars.
The more the untenability of the financial system became clear to insiders, the more the determination of the financial oligarchy grew, to transfer their activities into one last gigantic bubble. “Shifting the Trillions” became the new slogan, which was to signify the “decarbonization” of the world economy, whereby investments would, from now on, be directed only to renewable energy and related industries. Meanwhile Prince Charles upped the ante by declaring from mid-2019 onward, that the world had only 18 months left to reach the royally defined climate goals, or otherwise the world would end.
What Charles had in mind, however, had little to do with the behavior of the climate of the Earth, which has stubbornly followed its cycles for millions of years, oscillating from warming periods to ice ages and back, depending on processes in the Sun and the changing position of the solar system in the Milky Way galaxy. Prince Charles’ proclamation had very much to do instead with the series of major climate conferences—from the April 22-23 U.S. Leaders’ Climate Summit, to the United Nation’s COP15 Biodiversity Conference in October in China, and culminating in the COP 26 Climate Conference in Glasgow. It was stated in various ways that, by the time of this last of the series of conferences, which would take place in the UK and would be pretty much under the control of the British Royal Family, the climate regime had to be imposed on the entire world, to make the “Shifting the Trillions” maneuver work.
So with big fanfare, the two-week extravaganza took place in Glasgow with, according to the BBC head-count, 120 heads of state participating and many top executives arriving in their heavily CO2-emitting yachts and private jets. But COP26 turned into Flop26. First, the leaders of Russia and China did not come, and according to the statements coming from both countries it became very clear, that they were not willing to submit to a global neo-Malthusian scheme, that essentially would condemn the developing sector to giving up any hope of ever overcoming underdevelopment by forcing them to submit to the abandonment of fossil fuels and sign on to something that would effectively be a global eco-dictatorship. The leaders of several developing nations, including Indonesia, India, and Nigeria, made it very clear that they would not give up their right to development by giving up investments in fossil fuel related energy plants and industries, and that furthermore, they completely rejected the arrogant Eurocentric efforts to dominate them in a neocolonial manner.
With the failure of Flop26, the efforts of the U.S. and UK to assert a neo-Malthusian dictate over the world and the attempt to impose this last mega-bubble, the “Great Reset,” to prolong the life-expectancy of the failing financial system, had fallen through. Not much better was the effort by President Biden to rally the designated democratic countries against the so-called “autocratic” regimes, and to get those “allies” to swear allegiance to the “rules-based order.” Several countries abstained from attendance, refusing the demand to essentially choose between the U.S. and China.
In the noninvited “autocratic” states on the other side, the self confidence about their own policy successes, for example in respect to economic growth rates or the success in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, was expressed openly.
The narrative about the “good” democracies and the “bad” autocratic states had, in the meantime, fallen into a gigantic, almost irreconcilable credibility hole. Not only had the most powerful military machine in the world, the U.S. plus NATO, lost the war in Afghanistan after 20 years of war against essentially 65,000 Taliban fighters, but the circumstances of the hurried withdrawal revealed many other unpleasant realities. Except for maybe a couple of schools and roads, nothing had been built in these 20 years and the whole country was in absolute shambles. In the weeks and month since, it has become obvious that more than 90% of the population had been left food insecure, a euphemism for starvation, and left without medical care.
As the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, stated clearly in his address to the Emergency Meeting of the OIC (Organization of Islamic Cooperation) Council of Foreign Ministers in Islamabad in December, when the NATO and U.S. troops left in August, everybody knew that 75% of the Afghan budget had come from international aid. When the donors cut that aid following the Taliban takeover, and then the $9.5 billion in foreign reserve assets belonging to the Afghan people was withheld by the U.S. Treasury and some billions more by European banks, the economy was shut down practically at once.
As a result, 24 million of the about 40 million people now living in Afghanistan are in acute danger of starvation this winter, dying of disease without medical care, or freezing to death in the very harsh winter weather of Afghanistan. And this is not the fault of the Taliban, but of the continuation of a war, which could not be won militarily, by other means—the means of financial warfare. If these are the “rules” of the rules-based order, “democracy” has become a bad word. And what had been suspected by many observers is now confirmed by the remarks of Secretary of State Blinken: The purpose of the U.S./NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan was not just to end one of the endless wars, it was to free up forces bogged down in an unwinnable war for redeployment in the Indo-Pacific, and around the crisis with Russia over Ukraine.
So essentially the “Western democracies” have suffered three distinct and different defeats during the last four months: first, the defeat in Afghanistan, where NATO did not exactly cover itself with glory; second, the disaster of the Flop26; and finally, the “democracy summit,” where everybody but the most ideologically blind proponents of the official narrative is now convinced that the emperor has no clothes.
It is essentially due to the combination of these three defeats on top of a worldwide backlash against the arrogant idea of the U.S. historian Francis Fukuyama about the “end of history,” which he declared with the demise of the Soviet Union. The forces of the unipolar world, announced by Fukuyama, are pushing confrontation with Russia over Ukraine. In a twisted form of a mirror-like inversion, the U.S. and the UK are accusing Russia of preparing a military attack against Ukraine, when it is, in fact, NATO, the U.S., and the UK instigating Ukraine to create security situations that are unacceptable to Russia, and which represent the de facto crossing of red lines.
In a reaction to what was clearly building up to a military conflict between Ukraine and Russia, with the obvious potential of escalating into a larger war, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on December 17, presented two proposed treaties to the U.S. and NATO, one of which, the “Agreement on Measures to Ensure the Security of the Russian Federation and Member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization,” would require that NATO members commit to no further enlargements of the alliance, including especially to Ukraine.
As President Putin and other Russian officials put it, these treaties would retrospectively put in a legally binding form that which was promised to Russia in 1990 in the first place, and which, given the geographical location of Ukraine and its security implications for Russia, is a perfectly legitimate demand. Putin cautioned, however, that even the signing of such treaties would not be a 100% guarantee, given the record of the U.S. pulling out of legally binding treaties. If NATO and the U.S. reject the signing of such treaties, the world will in all likelihood be in for a reverse Cuban missile crisis or something worse. Russia will be forced to respond now as America would, if Russia were to install offensive weapons systems at the Canadian and Mexican borders.
There are remedies, but they require a dramatic change, of course.
The U.S. and NATO should sign these two treaties, since they are consistent with what was promised to Russia in 1990 and with what is the necessary precondition for a stable security architecture in the world.
All nations must cooperate to build modern health systems in every single country on the planet. It should have become obvious to everybody, that the pandemic can not be defeated by only providing health care to the rich countries.
The incredible suffering of the Afghan people, who have lived under conditions of war for 40 years, must be stopped with “Operation Ibn Sina.” A modern health care system must be built, and the economy must be built up by integrating Afghanistan into the regional projects of the BRI.
The U.S. must return to the principles of the American System of economy of Alexander Hamilton and adopt the Four Laws proposed by Lyndon LaRouche.
The combination of these policies can bring the world quickly out of the mortal danger we find ourselves in, but they require that you, the American citizen, become active to save the country and save the world!
