EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 22, 2021
Approaching the Moment of Truth
Dec. 21, 2021 (EIRNS)—As we rapidly approach “the moment of truth” in the tense dialogue concerning the future of humanity involving the Presidents of the United States, Russia, and China, consider the chilling remarks to TASS by Deputy Foreign Secretary Sergey Ryabkov, spoken with respect to the Russian proposals regarding the securing of written guarantees against further NATO expansion eastward: “I said that we would find forms to respond, including by military and military-technical means [if NATO ignores Moscow’s concerns again]. I reaffirm this.” Consider, also, the briefing given by Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu to Vladimir Putin documenting the intention of American private military companies (PMCs) to carry out a staged provocation in Eastern Ukraine using chemical weapons. Finally, note that Vladimir Putin was President of Russia at the time of the attack of September 11, 2001, and was the first head of state to speak with President George W. Bush, telling Bush that he had directed the Russian nuclear forces to “stand down” in a situation that appeared to potentially involve even a possible illegal takeover of the U.S. Presidency.
Where is the sane leadership response in the United States? Competent interlocutors, speaking on behalf of the once-cogent, but now no longer trustworthy trans-Atlantic world, need to now emerge from the “dark wood” of post-9/11 neo-con/neo-liberal war diplomacy. The British-instigated “American homeland defense strategies” that have resulted in the past two decades of unprovoked conflicts and destabilizations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and many other locations, punctuated by the wanton killing of civilians in pursuit of dubious “geopolitical” ends, must stop.
Take the unlawful, Victoria Nuland-managed “Fuck the EU” Feb. 21-22, 2014 coup in Ukraine. There, 100 casualties in the Maidan were the apparent prescribed “threshold level” for a public, full-throated endorsement of the Ukrainian “independence forces” by the United States and NATO, according to Prof. Ivan Katchanovski, School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa. He investigated the Maidan Massacre for four and a half years, and was interviewed in Oliver Stone’s 2019 documentary, “Revealing Ukraine”:
“There were two interviews published in a recent book by a Ukrainian pro-Maidan journalist. And in this book they produced interviews of two far-right leaders of Ukraine.... And they and Maidan leaders met with some senior Western officials. And this Western official told them, basically, that killings of a few protesters is not enough for Western governments to change support.
“They said specifically, [the] end of recognition of the Yanukovych government basically would change only if the number of the victims would be 100. The Western government policy changed immediately after the Maidan massacre. Not an accident, because you have exactly 100 people who were killed.”
(The total list of those killed is now 130.) Stone’s two documentaries, the other being “Ukraine On Fire,” contain extensive interviews with Putin, and several scenes of Biden in Ukraine, including Biden speaking before the post-coup Ukrainian parliament in 2015. How does this inform the demands of Russia for written guarantees from the United States and NATO today?
Today, death, be it through pandemic, famine, flood, or war, including potential thermonuclear war, seems to be all around us. No efficient solution from institutions of government in the trans-Atlantic sector seems forthcoming. Yet the solution to this lower-order “entropy of doom” has been advanced as a persistent call for a P5 summit (Russia, China, the U.S. States, France and U.K.), in the method called the “Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites,” and in the economic and strategic outlook contained in the World Land-Bridge and “Operation Ibn Sina.”
Lyndon LaRouche famously stated that “the content of policy is the method by which it is made.” While the State Department will obscure and dissemble, it cannot deny that to not act, now, in the Afghanistan crisis, is to condemn, unnecessarily, perhaps hundreds of thousands to death in the next weeks—not only in Afghanistan, but in other areas threatened by famine and disease. Is this being done in the name of “protecting the democratic rights of the people” we have condemned to death?
The content of that policy toward Afghanistan, the present policy, is depraved indifference, the same indifference reported in the killing of more than 1,500 “civilian casualties” through “precision drone warfare,” and the withholding of medical assistance to the continent of Africa for the past 18 months in order to “make sure Americans (and Europeans) are safe first.” Reversing that depraved indifference is the most efficient way to signal to Russia and the world that those who broke their word, in pledging that “NATO would not expand one inch East” in 1990, have now shown a willingness, if not to reverse, to at least amend their behavior, in order to move away, at nearly the last moment, from what must otherwise be deemed a self-doomed debt-driven drive toward total, unwinnable war.
• Editor’s Note: EIR Daily Alert will skip publishing on Christmas Day (for Sunday, Dec. 26, 2021) and New Year’s Day (for Sunday, Jan. 2, 2022). The first two issues in 2022 will appear on Saturday, Jan. 1 and Monday, Jan. 3.
