EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR THURSDAY, APRIL 29, 2021

Time to Get Serious on the War Danger—Speak Out, Mobilize

April 28 , 2021 (EIRNS)—Over recent days, there has been an escalation of provocations towards the point of danger of breakout into thermonuclear war. Take just the example of the April 20 posting by U.S. Strategic Command for global deterrence and strike, which, in effect, rationalized that war is likely, in their tweet, “The spectrum of conflict today is neither linear nor predictable. We must account for the possibility of conflict leading to conditions which could very rapidly drive an adversary to consider nuclear use as their least bad option,” which was accompanied by Stratcom Commander Adm. Charles Richard declaring to Congress that adversaries China and Russia were arming up, so the U.S. must just get ready and figure on war.

This and many other instances were reviewed yesterday by Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche, in a meeting with colleagues, in which she began, “When you are looking at the picture as a totality, it is absolutely horrifying. To start with, what I think could be really a detonator of the situation, you remember that when Putin gave his speech on April 21 to the Federal Assembly, he said there are red lines which cannot be crossed, and then he said there was an assassination attempt against Lukashenko and a coup attempt against Belarus, and that that had really gone too far.

“So now the director of the Russian Federation Security Service (FSB), Alexander Bortnikov, is saying that they are investigating the possible involvement of the U.S. government in the planning of a potential, supposed military coup in Belarus, and that sudden investigation of the plot of a military coup against Lukashenko is going on, and that the opposition politician Grigory Kostusev, and the political analyst Alexander Feduta, the lawyer Yuri Zenkovich, according to Lukashenko were involved in an assassination plan against him, and he accuses U.S. special services and U.S. leading forces to be responsible. And also quoting the head of the Belarus KGB [intelligence agency], the project plot was planned for the summer, June or July; the military coup was planned for May 9 in Minsk, during the parade for Victory Day, and that this would have been sponsored from abroad.

“Then according to a report in the Belarus TV station ONT, the implication is that Michael Carpenter, one of the most important foreign policy advisers of U.S. Vice President Biden and director for Russia at the National Security Council; afterward he was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense with responsibility for Russia, Ukraine, Eurasia, the Balkans, and Conventional Arms Control, was a key figure behind the supposed coup attempt in Belarus, and that next week more interesting new details about this story would be made known....”

She pointed out further, that in 2018, Carpenter

“made some waves when he accompanied the Ukrainian neo-Nazi, then-Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada Andriy Parubiy on a trip to Washington, and when Carpenter was questioned concerning Parubiy’s connection to the Nazi movement, which was involved in the Ukraine coup in 2014, he defended Parubiy as a patriot and fantastic leading personality.”

The same year, Carpenter was co-author with Biden of an article, “How to Stand Up to the Kremlin: Defending Democracy Against Its Enemies” (CFR’s Foreign Affairs, January-February 2018).

As Zepp-LaRouche stated, this is “absolutely incredible, because if this turns out to be the case, we could be closer to World War III, than anybody realizes, because this is exactly the kind of stuff which happens in the forefront of world wars.”

Moreover, the same day as Zepp-LaRouche’s review, Michael Carpenter blatantly participated in a virtual forum, hosted by the Washington-based Center for European Policy, with speakers including the U.S. Ambassador to Belarus Julie Fisher (whose credentials she has yet to present in Minsk), and others, who called for continued concerted action against President Putin, by stirring things up in Belarus, and elsewhere.

There are some Europeans waking up to this crazed behavior. Zepp-LaRouche reported that Germany’s Foreign Minister Heiko Maas has modified his tone, saying that the confrontation with Russia should not continue. Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz is calling for de-escalation.

In the U.S. today, Naval War College analyst Lyle J. Goldstein has an article, “Parsing Putin’s Red Lines,” with the warning to stop the confrontationism against China and Russia. “We should not be touching the red lines of other major, nuclear armed powers on a daily basis.” (Article posted on the American Committee for U.S.-Russia Accord blog).

Zepp-LaRouche called for people to speak out, and mobilize. “The upcoming conference on May 8 is more urgent than ever before, to really get a resistance against the war danger,” she said, because, “we need a moral resistance against this kind of decadence, which could very well be the beginning of the hours and days before World War III.”

Register and attend the May 8 Schiller Institute conference, “The Moral Collapse of the Trans-Atlantic World Cries Out for a New Paradigm.”