EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 22, 2023
Fight for Syria, and Stop Nuclear War
Feb. 21, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)—If the American people understood the horror that is happening in Syria today, a horror brought about not by the Syrian government but created by the United States government with malice aforethought, “this government would fall,” retired Col. Richard Black stated passionately today.
He said so addressing the online seminar, “The Syrian Sanctions Must Be Lifted,” organized by the Schiller Institute, and led by its founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche.
If sufficient American people watch that seminar, the government would fall.
There, Colonel Black and four other speakers, all with direct experience of the destruction by NATO powers of Syrian sovereignty, prosperity and territorial integrity since 2007, described in detail the unconscionable actions taken against Syria by those powers, and which the complicit Western media refuse to allow to be told.
Even after the devastating Feb. 6 earthquakes, the United States, Great Britain and the European Union continue to deploy their unilateral economic and financial sanctions to block not only reconstruction aid, but even humanitarian aid to that nation. All speakers insisted that the criminal sanctions must immediately be lifted, and the U.S. illegal occupation of Syria ended.
Zepp-LaRouche emphasized during the seminar that this story must be brought before the world community. Syria, she said, is the face of the system which has brought humanity to the brink of extinction by nuclear war—a stark reality brought home to the entire world by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s annual Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly on Feb. 21.
Zepp-LaRouche recommended people not panic over all the individual problems piling up, one-by-one, but instead understand them as her husband Lyndon LaRouche did, when he forecast 52 years ago, in 1971, that we would come to this point after Richard Nixon adopted “this monetarist profit-maximization-only policy by abandoning the old Bretton Woods system.” He warned at that time, she said, “that if we continued on this road, we would inevitably come to a new fascism, a new depression, a new danger of a world war; or, we go in the direction of a completely different system.
“We are exactly at that point now.... You have an incredible conjuncture. It’s extremely dangerous, there is no question about it. We could be blown up and all of humanity could disappear within hours and weeks, and then nuclear winter following that would eradicate all life on Earth. So, the danger is as it never was before. But on the other side, it is the enormity of what the situation is under the present system, which is also bringing people together.”
She pointed to nations working together to create a new economic system around the BRICS, the Eurasian Economic Union, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a system which is already becoming stronger than the decaying, Western liberal model.
She pointed also to the incipient unity seen within the United States at the Feb. 19th anti-war rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. as “also a very important new factor.” People from across the political spectrum came together against the danger of nuclear war, to demand an end to the U.S. fomenting of the Ukraine-Russia conflict, an end to the policy of permanent wars, to the military-industrial complex profiting from those wars, while the needs of the American people are abandoned.
The experience of unity was a happy one—and it did not stop with one rally. Today, 35-40 people actively involved in the rally took the battle against the system to the halls of Congress. Different teams met with top aides to Senators and Representatives, demanding Congress act to cut off the funds for the Ukraine war, insist on talks to end that conflict, investigate Sy Hersh’s documentation that the U.S. government blew up the Nord Stream pipelines.
The Schiller Institute contingent, led by U.S. Senate candidate from New York Diane Sare, included many young people who insisted that it is only under a new system in which the U.S. works with Russia and China to rebuild the world—including the United States—can they have a future.
Veteran organizers found a new openness in some Congressional offices to taking action, and to reach out to offices on the “other side of the aisle” as those in the rally had overcome differences to join forces to stop nuclear war.
The same day, two prominent Americans, also of differing backgrounds and views, economist and university professor Jeffrey Sachs and former senior CIA analyst, now political peace activist Ray McGovern, testified before a UN Security Council meeting on “Threats to International Peace and Security,” urging the UN Secretary General accept the Russian request that an independent international commission be created to investigate what state actor blew up the Nord Stream pipelines, in light of the revelations of Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh.
At the brink of nuclear war, it is time for all citizens of the world to join this fight, and come together to help create a new system fit for human beings.
“There is reason for optimism, despite all of the pain and problems. And that is that we are human, and that means we are all gifted with creative reason. That’s what distinguishes us from all other living species, at least those known on planet Earth,” Zepp-LaRouche said in concluding today’s Syria sanctions seminar.
