EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR THURSDAY JANUARY 26, 2023
Join the International Chorus of People Saying No to World War III: Negotiations and Economic Development Now!
Jan. 25, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)—Schiller Institute leader Helga Zepp-LaRouche called today’s twin announcements from Germany and the United States on NATO tank battalions being provided to Ukraine, a “catastrophic move” which brings the world a gigantic step closer to the possibility of general thermonuclear war between NATO and the world’s most advanced nuclear power, Russia. People must wake up, join us in demanding that unconditional peace negotiations be undertaken immediately, and alert their fellow-citizens to this incredible danger to their lives which the media is deliberately blacking out so that people do not resist.
Here is what happened:
President Joe Biden made it official today that the United States will provide M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine and will begin training Ukrainian troops to run them ASAP. Biden shamelessly argued these top-of-the-line U.S. tanks are not offensive, but defensive armament!
His announcement followed German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s formal address to the Bundestag, where he explained how Germany and other European nations will be getting right to work to put together a battalion of Leopard 2 tanks. Add in the U.K.’s earlier commitment to send 14 of its Challenger tanks, and NATO has committed 89 of its top flight tanks—for starters.
Scholz assured a German Bundestag member today that fighter jets and ground troops would never be sent to Ukraine—just as he had earlier assured Germans that no offensive weapons, and specifically no tanks, would ever be sent. Just the day before, on Tuesday, a Ukrainian Air Force spokesman told Ukrainian national TV that NATO had already made the decisions about what types of jets Ukraine will receive, along with the training packages to accompany them.
London’s The Economist was not worried about the (relatively) small number of tanks approved for the moment. It celebrated that “America and its allies have shifted from providing weapons in piecemeal fashion to training and equipping entire armored units for maneuver warfare. The aim is to help Ukraine not just repel the next Russian push, but to take back lost lands,” The Economist asserted, naming the retaking of Crimea, in particular.
This British imperial outlet again taunted Russia, in effect saying: “We’re going to do as we please, because you don’t dare use nuclear weapons, do you?” For the second time in a week, in the pages of the Jan. 24 Daily Mail, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson practically begged Russia to drop a nuclear bomb in Ukraine, because that, he drooled, would at last split the Global South—Asia, Ibero-America, Africa—away from Russia.
Yet as the danger becomes so clear, people around the world are beginning to mobilize. Over 210 VIPs have now signed the Schiller Institute’s letter of support for Pope Francis’s offer of the Vatican as a possible neutral ground for peace talks—without any preconditions—between Russia and Ukraine. As of today, over 500 citizens, from 57 nations, have signed that letter because they, too, “believe it is urgent to unify all such efforts into a globe-spanning movement to bring resolution to this conflict, taking into consideration the valid security interests of all parties.”
From Italy today, former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi called attention to the urgency of a peaceful solution which the Pope is promoting, by lamenting to Corriere della Sera that “nobody but the Pope and the Holy See seems to have solutions that go towards a peaceful solution of a conflict, for which we are paying with an intolerable [number of] lives, suffering, as well as economic damage to the entire world.”
From Germany today, MP Sahra Wagenknecht (Die Linke), viewed as the most popular opposition figure in that country, responded to Scholz’s announcement with a call for unity: “Against this madness, which can end in a disaster, we need a big coalition of all forces of reason!”
From Mexico today, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador decried the German decision to send more armaments into Ukraine, during his early morning press conference. He held the media responsible for this decision, which he said was taken against the will of the majority of the German people: “The power of the media is used by the oligarchy of the whole world to subjugate governments,” such as Germany’s “which did not want to become much involved in the Ukraine war. And this is replicated everywhere.”
Zepp-LaRouche issued a call to action in her weekly webcast today, urging everyone to become involved, to sign the Schiller Institute’s letter in support of the Pope’s offer of the Vatican as a venue for negotiations, because “the more countries, and the more institutions and the more people who support the Pope, and give him backing in this idea, that ... the dying must end, the unnecessary suffering must stop, the better.”
The solution lies in creating a new international security and development architecture, she insisted, and creating an international mass movement to ensure that gets done will be the hot topic at the Schiller Institute’s Feb. 4 international conference. We will have “live actors” speaking at that conference, she said. “Former Presidents, former ministers, diplomats, other people who represent real life, like representatives of the clergy, the industry, the trade unions,” discussing what the world actually needs. She invited everyone to participate, and get others to do so, too, in building a movement of world citizens who take responsibility for the cause of humanity.
