NYHEDSORIENTERING NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2023:
Dialog i Danmark mellem Pakistans viceudenrigsminister H.E. Hina Rabbani Khar og
Schiller Instituttets stifter og international formand Helga Zepp-LaRouche
Den 10. juni 2023 (EIRNS)-En 15-minutters dialog til offentlig omtale fandt sted i går mellem H.E. Hina Rabbani Khar, Pakistans viceudenrigsminister (Minister of State for Foreign Affairs) (siden april 2020), og Helga Zepp-LaRouche, grundlægger og international formand af Schiller Instituttet, i anledning af minister Khars besøg i Danmark. Pakistans ambassade i Danmark havde inviteret Schiller Instituttet til en drøftelse med hende, hvori Helga Zepp-LaRouche deltog via Zoom. Til stede var også Tom Gillesberg, formand, og Michelle Rasmussen, viceformand for Schiller Instituttet i Danmark.
YouTube-videoen er tilgængelig her: https://youtu.be/4GtJMFd-T0c
Følgende blev inkluderet i pressemeddelelsen udsendt af Pakistans udenrigsministerium:
“Viceudenrigsministeren talte med den danske afdeling af Schiller Instituttet om Pakistans tilgang til vigtige regionale og internationale forhold. Den internationale præsident for Schiller Instituttet, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, deltog i samtalen via Zoom.”
Pressedækning: Pressemeddelelsen fra Pakistans udenrigsministerium vedrørende minister Khars rejse til Danmark og Finland, herunder hendes møde med Helga Zepp-LaRouche og Schiller Instituttet i Danmark, blev offentliggjort af pakistanske medier, herunder The International News og The Nation, Dispatch News Desk, samt dækning i Radio Pakistan, The Business Reporter og Urdu Point, som udelukkende nævnte Schiller Instituttet i Danmark. Den blev også inkluderet i ministeriets RSS-feed og vist på Pakistans ambassades hjemmeside i Danmark og sandsynligvis på de andre ambassader rundt om i verden.
H.E. Hina Rabbani Khar er en ledende politiker i Pakistan, som har været udenrigsminister (2011-2013), finansminister (2008-2011) og økonomiminister (2003-2007) samt medlem af parlamentet. Hun repræsenterer Pakistan People’s Party. Minister Khar fungerer som viceminister i udenrigsministeriet næst efter udenrigsministeren.
På udenrigsministeriets hjemmeside står der: “Hendes periode som udenrigsminister huskes bedst for det “regionale omdrejningspunkt” i Pakistans udenrigspolitik, hvor hun koncentrerede sig om at opbygge bånd til Pakistans nærmeste nabolande. Dette omfattede normaliseringen af handelsforbindelserne med Indien, og en politik der rakte ud til alle politiske partier og etniciteter i Afghanistan. Hendes tid inden for finans og økonomiske anliggender omfattede Pakistans bilaterale og multilaterale økonomiske diplomati.
“Hina Rabbani Khar dimitterede fra det prestigefyldte Lahore University of Management and Sciences med en kandidatgrad i økonomi og tog senere en mastergrad i ledelse fra University of Massachusetts i Amherst.” (https://mofa.gov.pk/minister-of-state/ )
Referat af mødet:
Dialogen i går begyndte med en kort introduktion af Helga Zepp-LaRouche, fremført af Michelle Rasmussen fra Schiller Instituttet i Danmark.
Minister Khar beskrev derefter nogle af de udfordringer, Pakistan står overfor midt i den nuværende verdenskrise. Her følger en sammenfatning af nogle vigtige punkter.
Ministeren fortalte, at hun gerne ville beskrive, hvordan “resten”, som ikke er en del af “Vesten”, anskuer situationen. “Hvordan er vi endt i en verden, hvor suveræne lande bliver adspurgt: “Hvilken side er du på?”” Vi er på vores egen pakistanske banehalvdel, hvor vi allierer os med det ene eller det andet land eller den ene eller den anden gruppe af lande i overensstemmelse med vores interesser og værdier. Det, der truer os nu, er, at vi siden 1945 har fået at vide, at vi skal have frihandel, fri bevægelighed for varer, investeringer, mennesker og information, og nu får vi besked på, at vi skal opføre barrierer.
Hvert land har lært sin egen lektie af, hvordan verdens beslutninger er blevet truffet. De to interventioner, som inkluderer den der har været i Afghanistan i 40 år, har været meget bekostelige. Kameraerne bevæger sig væk, men kaos er stadig til stede. Nogle lande udtalte på FN’s Doha Afghanistan Forum, at de ikke havde fejlet – de havde haft succes med at indføre sanktioner og sikre, at de ikke havde adgang til deres reserver. Det betyder kvælning af en økonomi. Skal piger, der ikke kan gå i skole, heller ikke have mad? Er det vores reaktion på et regime, vi ikke kan lide?
Pakistan er udfordret med hensyn til at brødføde og uddanne egne børn, øge BNP og håndtere de katastrofale hændelser, som klimaforandringerne fører med sig. COVID og klimaforandringerne afslørede, at vi ikke kan sikre os selv inden for vores grænser. Det er trist og en smule umodent, at vi på et tidspunkt, hvor vi burde forberede regler for kunstig intelligens og klimaforandringer, har meget travlt med at opdele verden i stadig flere stykker.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche (omskrevet): Helga takkede indledningsvist ministeren for muligheden for at tale med hende. Jeg er dybt bekymret over faren for verdenskrig, som er meget overhængende med kombinationen af Ukraine-krisen og forsøget på at etablere et Globalt NATO. Men jeg ønsker ikke udelukkende at fokusere på det.
Samtidig har vi et utroligt potentiale, fordi Den alliancefrie Bevægelse, som var mere eller mindre ude af drift – jeg kan nævne, at min mand, Lyndon LaRouche, udviklede Den Internationale Udviklingsbank i 1976, og vi førte samtaler med disse lande, som praktisk talt vedtog forslaget på deres konference i Colombo, Sri Lanka. Det fungerede ikke på det tidspunkt, på trods af at størstedelen af verden ønskede en ny økonomisk orden. Lande blev destabiliseret – Indira Gandhi (Indien), fru Bandaranaike (Sri Lanka), Ali Bhuttos tragiske historie i Pakistan.
I de senere år, primært på grund af Bælte- og Vej-Initiativet (fra Kina) og potentialet for ægte økonomisk udvikling, som China-Pakistan Economic Corredor (CPEC) i Pakistan, er der sket en genoplivning af Den alliancefrie Bevægelse og Bandung-ånden (byen i Indonesien, hvor bevægelsen blev stiftet) – at det er muligt at gøre en ende på kolonialismen én gang for alle.
Det er et enormt potentiale, for hvis man udelukkende ser på verden fra det Globale Nord og konflikten med Rusland og Kina, ser det næsten håbløst ud. Hvis verden falder i to helt adskilte blokke, er jeg enig med Dr. Mahathir fra Malaysia i, at det udgør faren for Tredje Verdenskrig.
Det Globale Syd, som repræsenterer størstedelen af menneskeheden, og hvor stemningen er optimistisk, hvilket ses af, at 30 lande har ansøgt om at blive medlemmer af BRICS, må fremstå med en meget tydeligere stemme. Som præsident Sukarno (Indonesien) og Nehru (Indien) sagde i Bandung, hvis der kommer en verdenskrig, vil den påvirke det Globale Syd lige så meget som Nord. Det giver det Globale Syd ret til at lade deres stemme høre.
Det er derfor, jeg har foreslået en global sikkerheds- og udviklingsarkitektur med ti principper, som jeg gerne vil gøre jer opmærksomme på, fordi det skal diskuteres.
På randen af tredje verdenskrig og sammenbruddet af den atlantiske verdens finansielle system er spørgsmålet, om vi, som den eneste kreative art vi kender, er i stand til at skabe en verdensorden for alle nationers overlevelse og udvikling?
Minister Khar: Jeg er fuldstændig enig med dig. Jeg har lige talt ved European Council on Foreign Relations, og jeg fik at vide, at min tale var meget forfriskende, selv om den bare skulle have været ganske almindelig. Mens du talte, skrev jeg ned, hvad jeg vil skrive en artikel om: Syd er det nye Nord. Vi minder resten af verden om de ting, vi har lært, og som vi ikke kommer til at glemme.
Jeg betragter det som konkurrence, der ændrer sig til konfrontation og derefter måske til konflikt. Og vi mangler samarbejde, som er fuldstændig udeladt. Det er næsten, som om man ikke kan samarbejde i verden, at den splittes i to.
Jeg vil læse de ti principper, og det vil virkelig være umagen værd for os at tilegne det, og sætte det ind i vores tænkning, og introducere det til Udenrigsministeriet. Og så er der “Den Nye Silkevej bliver til Verdenslandbroen (Schiller Instituttets og EIR’s specielrapporter)”. Lad os holde kontakten. Det, vi potentielt kan se på, er måske en lektion til vores udenrigstjenestes akademi, så vi er i stand til at formidle dette til en bredere kreds.
Afslutningsvis takkede Michelle Rasmussen minister Khar for at give os mulighed for at præsentere vores synspunkter og overrakte hende tre specialrapporter, The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge bind 1 og 2 og Extending the New Silk Road to the West Asia and Africa, som hun satte stor pris på. Minister Khar takkede derefter Helga Zepp-LaRouche og de to medlemmer af Schiller Instituttet fra Danmark.
Bevar fokus på formålet
Den 14. februar 2023 (EIRNS) – I dag, den 14. februar, indledte NATO’s forsvarsministre et todages møde. De har en mission om at samle alle de våben, kampvogne osv., der kan skrabes sammen, til en bebudet forårs-modoffensiv i Ukraine, i et desperat forsøg på at bytte blod for en forbedret aftale ved forhandlingsbordet. De står også med et nyt strategipapir, der udfordrer dem til at finde ud af en måde at udkæmpe en krig i Europa, samtidig med en krig “uden for området” i Asien. Senere i denne uge, den 17.-19. februar, afholdes Sikkerhedskonferencen i München i tre dage, hvor man åbenbart skal diskutere, hvordan man kan skabe sikkerhed uden at tage hensyn til verdens største atommagts anliggender. For første gang i det post-sovjetiske Rusland er Moskvas embedsmænd blevet nægtet en invitation.
Sideløbende med at disse forsamlinger af blodige krigsmagere foregår, er der ved at opstå et kor af stemmer for at standse deres meningsløse kampagne i retning af en atomar konfrontation, med en stor demonstration i Washington, D.C. den 19. februar. Frankrigs leder af LaRouche-bevægelsen, Jacques Cheminade, holdt en inspirerende tale ved et fredsarrangement i Paris den 12. februar. Forskellige grupper på tværs af de politiske skel organiserer sig til Washington-arrangementet og må kæmpe sig igennem de typiske “del og hersk”-teknikker, hvor man sætter utilpassede “venstreorienterede” og “højreorienterede” op mod hinanden.
Hovedtaleren, Chris Hedges, udtrykte det ganske rammende i sit indlæg den 12. februar: “Vi kan ikke gøre op med virksomheders magt og krigsmaskinen alene. Der må være en venstre-højre koalition, som vil omfatte folk, hvis holdninger ikke blot er usmagelige, men endog modbydelige, ellers vil vi forblive marginaliserede og ineffektive…. Alliancer er bygget op omkring bestemte emner, i dette tilfælde permanent krig, som ofte falder fra hinanden, når de konfronteres med udestående problemstillinger.” Hedges citerede også Nick Brana, formand for The People’s Party, som organiserede demonstrationen i samarbejde med ideologisk set uenige modsætninger blandt libertarianerne, for at sige, at “venstrefløjen er blevet stort set irrelevant i USA, fordi den er ude af stand til at arbejde sammen med højre…. Den klamrer sig til identitetspolitik i forhold til job, sundhedspleje, lønninger og krig, og fordømmer halvdelen af landet som forkastelige.”
Der må være noget, der virker efter hensigten, for de nyliberale på New Republic har, som man siger, lugtet branden og smadret glasset. De gik amok i dag med et rablende, usammenhængende angreb på LaRouches senatskandidat Diane Sare – fornuftens og statsmandskabets stemme i fredsmobiliseringen. Artiklens påståede forfatter – en fortaler for “identitetspolitik frem for job, sundhedspleje, lønninger og krig” – påviste, at LaRouches vægt på produktion frem for spekulation betød, at han var fascist!
Så lad dig ikke drage ind i smålige skænderier. Bevar fokus på formålet.
“At fremme samarbejdet i en splittet verden”
Den 18. januar 2023 (EIRNS) – Det er overskriften, som CGTN har placeret på en 14 minutter lang video-kommentar af Schiller Instituttets grundlægger, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, der blev lagt ud den 18. januar både på news.cgtn.com og på CGTN’s YouTube-kanal, som har næsten 3 millioner abonnenter verden over.
I sine bemærkninger udtalte Zepp-LaRouche følgende:
“Selv om det er meget vanskeligt at forudsige det nøjagtige tidspunkt, hvor den systemiske krise i det neoliberale system vil nå til vejs ende, kan det ikke udelukkes, at beslutningen om at foretage en fuldstændig reorganisering af det internationale finanssystem kunne trænge sig på dagsordenen i dette år 2023.” Hun fortsatte: “Jeg tror derfor, at det er meget muligt, at finanskrisen i løbet af 2023 kommer til at blusse endnu mere dramatisk op, og at det vil være det rette tidspunkt til at sætte kombinationen af det Globale Sikkerhedsinitiativ og det Globale Udviklingsinitiativ [foreslået af Kinas præsident Xi Jinping] på den internationale dagsorden.”
Ugens begivenheder bidrager til at fremhæve, hvor presserende det øjeblik er, som Zepp-LaRouche beskriver. World Economic Forum har været samlet hele ugen i Davos i Schweiz for at udstede bankernes marchordrer om udplyndring og krig til Vestens finansielle og politiske etablissement. Et af deres centrale budskaber er behovet for at forsyne Ukraine med samtlige tunge våben og anden støtte, der er nødvendig for at sikre en evig NATO-ledet kødhakker-krig mod Rusland – uanset omkostningerne for Ukraine og hele Europa og uanset den voldsomt stigende fare for at udløse en atomkrig.
Ukraines præsident Zelenskij talte til mødet via video, og hans kone samt amerikanske kongresmedlemmer og repræsentanter for Biden-administrationen var personligt til stede for at slå et slag for alle de våben, man kunne skaffe. Tillige sendte den 99-årige Henry Kissinger en video med en opfordring om at sende flere våben til Ukraine, og at Ukraine på sigt formelt bliver optaget i NATO.
Fredag den 20. januar, den dag WEF afsluttes, har det nyligt udvidede Global NATO til hensigt at fastsætte de fornødne betingelser for den næste fase af deres aggression mod Rusland og Kina på det tredje møde i Ukraines forsvars kontaktgruppe på luftbasen Ramstein i Tyskland. Her vil forsvarsledere fra næsten 50 lande samles for at modtage deres retningslinjer fra London og Washington. Et kritisk spørgsmål er, om den tyske regering endelig vil give helt efter for Londons og Washingtons krav om at sende sofistikerede tunge våben til Ukraine. Kievs borgmester, Vitali Klitschko – en sværvægtsbokser af profession – er håbefuld. Han sagde til AFP, at “jeg håber, at det [Ramstein-mødet] vil blive meget godt for Ukraine. Uofficielt oplever jeg meget gode og positive signaler.”
Rusland forbereder sig militært og arbejder samtidig på at organisere alternativer til det kollapsende vestlige finanssystem. Forsvarsminister Shoigu bekendtgjorde i går planer om at øge størrelsen af Ruslands stående hær fra 1,15 millioner til 1,5 millioner. Udenrigsminister Sergey Lavrov meddelte på en pressekonference i dag, at Rusland er ved at opbygge økonomiske alliancer med “lande [der] er ved at blive udviklet økonomisk…. Se på Kina og Indien (vores strategiske partnere), Tyrkiet, Brasilien, Argentina, Egypten, mange lande på det afrikanske kontinent. Der er potentialet for udvikling … enormt. Nye centre for økonomisk vækst er ved at blive dannet.” Lavrov tilføjede: “Inden for rammerne af vores kontakter gennem SCO, BRICS, CIS, EAEU, i samarbejde med sammenslutningerne i Asien, Afrika og Latinamerika, forsøger vi på alle mulige måder at opbygge nye former for gensidig forståelse….”.
Zepp-LaRouches CGTN-kommentar, som i sin helhed er tilgængelig i Dokumentationen, indeholdt en detaljeret programmatisk køreplan for, hvordan man kan opbygge sådanne “nye former for samspil”, en ny international udviklings- og sikkerhedsarkitektur. Schiller Instituttets grundlægger konkluderede ved at understrege behovet for et afgørende paradigmeskift:
“Der er behov for en stor vision om, hvordan der kan fremlægges en løsning, som imødegår samtlige store problemer samtidigt…. Jeg mener, at vi er nået til et punkt i menneskehedens historie, hvor vi virkelig må tage den internationale orden af relationer mellem nationerne alvorligt, og overveje hvordan vi kan organisere dem på en sådan måde, at vi kan leve som en selvstyrende art, der er begavet med kreativ fornuft.”
Link til video: https://news.cgtn.com/news/2023-01-18/WEF-2023-Fostering-cooperation-in-a-fragmented-world-1gHl9T2Q2Q0/index.html
NYTÅRSBUDSKAB FRA HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE
Det nye år, 2023, bør blive det år, hvor menneskeheden når voksenalderen. Det betyder, at vi skal lægge de barnlige geopolitiske skænderier bag os, hvor nationer bekæmper hinanden, som om vi var forkælede unger, der kæmper mod hinanden med krigslegetøj i en sandkasse. Denne sandkasse kan blive atomar radioaktiv på et øjeblik.
Vi må huske på, at vi er den skabende art, som bærer den ophøjede opgave at fortsætte skabelsesprocessen til gavn for hele menneskeheden. Størstedelen af menneskeheden, landene i det Globale Syd og mange i de tidligere såkaldt avancerede lande ønsker at lægge krigen bag sig, hvad enten det drejer sig om faren for en ny global krig eller de mange intervenerende krige, som har kostet millioner af mennesker livet eller har fordrevet dem som flygtninge.
Lad os skabe et nyt paradigme for internationale relationer, hvor de enkelte suveræne nationers interesser respekteres, og hvor vi alle går sammen om at udrydde fattigdom og underudvikling. Lad os skabe et moderne sundhedsvæsen i alle lande, så den forventede levetid øges for alle mennesker, der lever på denne planet, og lad os skabe betingelser, hvor alle børn og voksne har adgang til universel uddannelse, så alle mennesker har mulighed for at realisere deres medfødte kreative potentiale fuldt ud.
Lad os også skabe et nyt kreditsystem til finansiering af disse mål og til at øge levestandarden for befolkningen i det Globale Syd og for de fattige i de såkaldte industrialiserede lande. Lad os endelig sikre infrastruktur, landbrug og industri på alle verdens kontinenter. Lad os skabe en ny international sikkerhedsarkitektur, som overvinder opdelingen af verden i blokke og forbyder alle masseødelæggelsesvåben og arbejder for at gøre atomvåben teknologisk forældede.
Lad os tænke på hele menneskearten som denne højere Ene, som er af en højere orden end de mange nationer, og lad os aldrig forfølge en national interesse, som afviger fra hele menneskehedens samlede interesse. Lad os bringe den politiske, økonomiske og sociale orden i samhørighed med naturloven, lovene i det fysiske univers, og lad os øge denne viden gennem fremskridt inden for videnskab og klassisk kunst. Og lad os tage udgangspunkt i den antagelse, at menneskets natur grundlæggende er god, og at alt ondt kommer af manglende udvikling og derfor kan overvindes!
En ny økonomisk verdensorden er ved at opstå, som omfatter langt størstedelen af landene i det Globale Syd. De europæiske nationer og USA bør ikke bekæmpe denne indsats, men i fællesskab med udviklingslandene samarbejde om at forme den næste epoke i menneskehedens udvikling til en renæssance med de højeste og mest ædle udtryk for kreativitet!
Lad os derfor skabe en international bevægelse af verdensborgere, som i fællesskab arbejder for at forme den næste fase i menneskehedens udvikling, den nye epoke! Verdensborgere fra alle lande, foren jer!
Zepp-LaRouche udtaler sig om “Den alliancefrie Bevægelses rolle i et nyt paradigme
for de internationale relationer” I har magten til at forhindre atomkrig; brug den
Den 11. november 2022 (EIRNS) – Schiller Instituttets grundlægger, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, udsendte i dag en klar opfordring til de førende nationer i Den alliancefrie Bevægelse om at træde frem for at afværge faren for atomkrig, som i øjeblikket truer med at udslette menneskeheden. Den alliancefri Bevægelse er sandsynligvis den vigtigste kraft på planeten til at overvinde geopolitik på nuværende tidspunkt, og det er ved at gøre op med geopolitik, at vi kan undgå Tredje Verdenskrig, erklærede hun på en international konference i Indonesien om Den alliancefri Bevægelses rolle i den fortidige og fremtidige historie.
Følgende artikel af Helga Zepp-LaRouche blev offentliggjort i bogen, der blev udgivet på Bandung Spirit-konferencen med titlen “Bandung-Belgrade-Havana in Global History and Perspective: Drømmene, udfordringerne og projekterne for en global fremtid?”, der fandt sted den 7.-14. november i Indonesien. (Konferencen afsluttes kun en dag før G20-topmødet på Bali i Indonesien den 15.-16. november, hvor præsident Biden og Xi også vil mødes).
Hendes artikel havde titlen “Den alliancefrie Bevægelses betydning for et nyt paradigme i de internationale relationer”.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche talte også på konferencen online den 11. november, hvor hun gav et resumé af sin artikel under plenarmøde 6: Asiens fremmarch og omstruktureringen af den globale politiske økonomi.
Resumé:
Menneskeheden står over for den alvorligste krise i sin historie, nemlig risikoen for en global atomkrig. Den afgørende drivkraft bag krigsfaren er den forestående opløsning af det neoliberale finanssystem, som nu er gået ind i en hyperinflationær fase. Det er denne historiske fare, som gør det så meget desto mere presserende at genoplive “Bandung-ånden”. På Bandung-konferencen og de efterfølgende konferencer blev der fastlagt de principper, som skal danne grundlag for en ny international sikkerheds- og udviklingsarkitektur for verden i dag.
Er det en overdrivelse at påstå, at menneskeheden står over for den alvorligste krise i historien, når potentialet for en global atomkrig og dermed den sandsynlige udslettelse af menneskearten accelererer fra dag til dag, og når førende eksperter advarer om, at situationen er farligere end på højdepunktet af Cuba-krisen, og dette alligevel ikke får lederne i visse vestlige lande til at opgive deres politik for konfrontation mellem de såkaldte “demokratier og autokratier”?
Drivkraften bag denne krigsfare er den forestående opløsning af det neoliberale finanssystem, som nu er gået ind i en hyperinflationær fase som følge af flere års likviditetsindsprøjtninger i det monetære system og af “Great Reset”-politikken, som den tidligere tjekkiske præsident Vaclav Klaus kalder “det grønne delirium”. Fødevarer og energi bliver i stigende grad utilgængelige, hvilket ifølge Verdensfødevareprogrammet truer 1,7 milliarder mennesker med hungersnød i den nærmeste fremtid. Desuden har pandemien yderligere udvidet kløften mellem de få, som tæller deres formuer i milliarder af dollars, og de milliarder, som konfronteres med sygdom og sult uden et sundhedssystem, uden energi, rent vand eller tilstrækkeligt med mad.
Så, 67 lange år efter Bandung-konferencen, må vi igen, som præsident Sukarno gjorde i sin åbningstale den 18. april 1955, konkludere, at kolonialismen ikke er død, selv om den formelt set og angiveligt ikke længere eksisterer. Formelt set blev der tildelt uafhængighed, men mange nationers suverænitet er forhindret af pengepolitiske strukturer, handelsbetingelser og manglende adgang til ressourcer, som ville muliggøre selvbestemmelse i forbindelse med den økonomiske udvikling. Sanktioner, der af geopolitiske årsager indføres over for tredjelande, fremmer “humanitære kriser”, som er udformet med henblik på at øge den smerte, der pålægges befolkningerne, i en sådan grad, at de vil gøre oprør mod deres regering og skabe betingelserne for et regimeskifte.
Den virkelige konfrontation er derfor ikke mellem “demokratier” og “autokratier”, men mellem de kræfter, der ønsker at opretholde det koloniale system i nutidig forklædning, og de lande, der stadig kæmper for deres ret til økonomisk udvikling.
I lyset af de konsekvenser, som en yderligere optrapning mellem atomvåbenmagterne ville medføre, og som ville føre til historiens egentlige “afslutning”, nemlig en tredje, denne gang en atomar verdenskrig, efterfulgt af en atomvinter, udgør Den alliancefrie Bevægelses nuværende renæssance den væsentligste og afgørende faktor, som kan anvise vejen til et nyt paradigme. For at overvinde den geopolitiske blokdannelse og den fejlagtige tænkning i form af et nulsumsspil, er det nødvendigt at begrebsliggøre det højere Ene, som må være af en helt anden kvalitet og højere magt end de Mange.
Det er et gennemprøvet princip i historien, at fredstraktater udelukkende fungerer, hvis de tager hensyn til hver enkelt parts interesser, som det var tilfældet med den Westfalske Fred. Hvis man ikke gør det, som med Versailles-traktaten, medfører det nye krige. I betragtning af de mange sammenvævede regionale konflikter og den globale dimension af den nuværende konfrontation mellem atommagter, er den lære, der kan drages af dette historiske princip, at der er et presserende behov for en ny global sikkerheds- og udviklingsarkitektur, som tager hensyn til alle landenes interesser på planeten.
Muligheden for et velfungerende europæisk sikkerhedssystem eller et “fælles europæisk hus”, som Gorbatjov fremmanede ved Sovjetunionens afslutning, eksisterer tydeligvis ikke længere i betragtning af NATO’s sjette udvidelse mod øst. Hensigten om at skabe et “globalt NATO”, som proklameret på alliancens seneste topmøde i Madrid, herunder oprettelsen af et hovedkvarter i Indo-Stillehavsområdet et sted i Asien, truer med at forstærke konfrontationen mellem de lande, der tilhører en sådan militær alliance, og de lande, som ønsker at opretholde politiske, økonomiske eller militære forbindelser med Rusland og Kina.
Den kinesiske præsident Xi Jinping har allerede fremsat et forslag til at overvinde den geopolitiske konfrontation med sit Globale Sikkerhedsinitiativ, som sammen med det Globale Udviklingsinitiativ udgør konceptet for den fornødne tilgang. Men da nogle lande i Vesten fremstiller Kina som den største trussel mod deres interesser, forekommer det usandsynligt, at de vil reagere positivt på denne idé.
Det er denne geopolitiske og historiske katastrofe, der gør det så meget desto mere presserende at genoplive “Bandung-ånden”. Mange af de lande, der kommer fra Den alliancefrie Bevægelses tradition, har for nylig givet udtryk for deres afvisning af at lade sig trække ind i en geometri af blok-tænkning. Det faktum, at det næste G20-topmøde finder sted i Indonesien, kan være en historisk mulighed for at tilføje en indholdsmæssig ingrediens til den politiske dagsorden, som kan være afgørende for forskellen mellem faren for civilisationens udslettelse og en lys og smuk fremtid for menneskeheden.
Det er traditionen fra Bandung-konferencen og de efterfølgende konferencer i Den alliancefri Bevægelse (DAB), hvor de fem principper for fredelig sameksistens og DAB’s ti principper fastlagde rammerne for at etablere en ny international sikkerheds- og udviklingsarkitektur for verden i dag. De 120 medlemslande i DAB plus 17 observatørlande repræsenterer langt størstedelen af menneskeheden, nemlig 4,511 milliarder mennesker i NAM og 2,061 milliarder som observatører, dvs. 6,571 ud af 8 milliarder mennesker. Som præsident Sukarno påpegede i sin åbningstale på Bandung-konferencen i 1955, vil havene og oceanerne, som adskiller udviklingslandene fra dem, der kan føre en ny verdenskrig, ikke beskytte de lande, der ikke er part på en af siderne, og som ikke har nogen interesse i konflikten. Han blev bekræftet af premierminister Nehru, som var bekymret for, at nogle af de store nationers militære styrke kunne få dem til at tænke i militær magt og få dem til at afvige fra det rette spor: “Hvis hele verden blev delt mellem disse to store blokke, hvad ville resultatet så blive? Det uundgåelige resultat ville blive krig.”
Det er derfor helt legitimt og hensigtsmæssigt, at DAB-landene taler med én stemme ved næste lejlighed, på G20-konferencen i Indonesien i november (eller på en ekstraordinær samling i FN’s Generalforsamling, hvis den sammenkaldes i en hastesituation), og at de kræver en ny sikkerhedsmæssig og økonomisk arkitektur, som tager hensyn til alle landes interesser.
DAB’s bemyndigelse til at påtage sig en mere aktiv rolle i udformningen af verdensordenen stammer fra erfaringerne fra dets historie. På Bandung-konferencen blev Pancheel-principperne, de fem principper for fredelig sameksistens, fastlagt, og på de efterfølgende konferencer blev der gjort forsøg på at opretholde denne ophøjede ånd. Men det var på konferencen i Colombo, Sri Lanka, i 1976, at DAB kom tættest på at formulere, hvordan denne nye orden økonomisk set skulle udformes. Fru Indira Gandhi fremlagde de krav, som derefter blev indarbejdet i den endelige resolution, nemlig:
- Ophør af gældsbetalinger for de fattigste lande,
- et nyt universelt valutasystem, der skal erstatte Verdensbanken og Den Internationale Valutafond,
- oprettelse af et nyt kreditsystem, som skulle være knyttet til den globale udvikling,
- Trepartsaftaler mellem udviklingslandene, de socialistiske stater og OECD-landene.
Denne resolution var næsten identisk med det forslag om en international udviklingsbank, IDB, som den amerikanske statsmand og økonom Lyndon LaRouche havde fremsat et år tidligere, dvs. at erstatte IMF med et nyt kreditsystem for at fremme den globale udvikling.
Mange i udviklingssektoren vil huske den voldsomhed, hvormed dette krav, der repræsenterede ønsket fra dengang 75 lande og størstedelen af verdens befolkning, blev mødt med. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto blev dræbt kort efter, fru Gandhi blev fjernet fra magten, fru Bandaranaike fra Sri Lanka blev destabiliseret, Den alliancefrie Bevægelses (NAM’s) sammenhængskraft blev svækket, og naturligvis blev kravet om en ny retfærdig økonomisk verdensorden aldrig indfriet. Man kunne tilføje en lang liste over andre tab blandt ledere i det, der kaldes det Globale Syd. Og nu er vi nået frem til den ovennævnte krise, hidtil uden fortilfælde i verdenshistorien.
Det er meget klart, at hvis man ærligt og objektivt præsenterede verdens befolkninger for de farer, der ville være resultatet af en atomkrig, nemlig en udslettelse i en sådan grad, at der ikke ville være noget minde tilbage om alle menneskehedens enorme kampe for fremskridt og frihed, om alle de smukke skabelser inden for videnskab og kunst overalt på jorden, så ville mere end 99 % af dem være imod denne krig.
Jeg er ligeledes overbevist om, at hvis almindelige mennesker havde mulighed for virkelig at forstå årsagerne til uretfærdighederne i verden, og betragte situationen i hvert enkelt land både ud fra den pågældende nations bedste tradition og ud fra det potentiale, som den og menneskeheden som helhed repræsenterer, ville mere end 99 % af dem være helhjertet enige i perspektivet om en retfærdig ny økonomisk verdensorden. Begge disse indsigter er i øjeblikket nægtet “almindelige mennesker”, fordi de fleste af dem mangler historisk viden om andre kulturer eller en personlig erfaring fra rejser, og fordi massemedierne i mange lande har en tendens til at nære fordomme om andre kulturer, der passer til de respektive etablissementers geopolitiske intentioner.
Det er derfor presserende og nødvendigt, at NAM’s ledelse snarest muligt finder en anledning til at træde ind på verdenshistoriens scene ved på det skarpeste at påpege de farer, der følger af geopolitisk blokdannelse, som premierminister Nehru gjorde det i sin tale i Bandung, idet han viste, at “det uundgåelige resultat ville medføre krig”. Disse ledere bør også vække verdensbefolkningens bevidsthed ved at gøre den bevidst om den svære situation, som befolkningerne i udviklingslandene befinder sig i, og ved at illustrere de lidelser, der følger af sultedøden, som Jean Ziegler, FN’s tidligere særlige rapportør for Retten til Fødevarer, beskriver som den mest grusomme og smertefulde form for død. I sin bog fra 2012 “We Let Them Starve: The Mass Destruction in the Third World”, taler Ziegler om en kannibalistisk verdensorden, hvor 10 globale karteller, der kontrollerer 85 % af fødevareproduktionen på verdensplan, bestemmer hvem der spiser, lever, sulter og dør.
Som følge af fødevarespekulation, beslaglæggelse af jord, overdreven gældsætning og biobrændstoffer, dør et barn under 10 år hvert femte sekund, 57 000 mennesker dør hver dag af sult, og det i en verden hvor det globale landbrug ifølge FN’s Verdensfødevareprogram (WFP) sagtens kunne producere mad til 12 milliarder mennesker. I dag, 10 år senere, er 1,7 milliarder mennesker i fare for at sulte, men EU og andre vestlige regeringer insisterer stadig på at braklægge op til 30 % af landbrugsjorden og begrænse brugen af gødning og pesticider, hvilket vil føre til en 50 % nedgang i høstudbyttet. Bag dette ligger politikernes malthusianske synspunkt, som gør Malthus til en selvopfyldende profeti ved at indføre en sådan menneskefjendsk politik – endnu en gang på grund af “grønt delirium” og profitmaksimering.
I lyset af disse uhyrlige uretfærdigheder har lederne af NAM al legitimitet og endda pligt til at vække verdensbefolkningens bevidsthed om, at denne tilstand af sult, fattigdom og underudvikling i verden ikke er et resultat af uundgåelige naturbetingelser, men af gennemførelsen af et finansielt og økonomisk system, der begunstiger de rige og øger kløften til de fattige, indtil det punkt hvor der begås folkedrab.
Dette system er imidlertid ved at have nået sin afslutning, hvilket blev gjort klart af formanden for den amerikanske centralbank, Jerome Powell, på det årlige Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium den 26. august i år. Her bekendtgjorde han en politik med brutale stramninger, der forårsager “en vis smerte” for at bekæmpe inflationen. “At reducere inflationen vil sandsynligvis kræve en vedvarende periode med vækst under gennemsnittet”, fastholdt han, og proklamerede en politik med høje renter i en længere periode fremover ved at henvise til “den vellykkede Volcker-disinflation i begyndelsen af 1980’erne”, år hvor renterne steg til over 20 %. Disse bemærkninger udløste straks en livsfarlig kapitalflugt fra markederne i udviklingssektoren og retur til dollaren. Generaldirektøren for Bank for International Settlements (BIS), Agustín Carstens, advarede om, at for meget “smerte” for hurtigt kan få hele systemet til at bryde sammen i processen, og sammenlignede det med det sted, der kaldes ” the coffin corner”, hvor et fly bremser ned til under sin stilstandshastighed og ikke er i stand til at generere tilstrækkelig opdrift til at holde sin højde.
I samme retning henviste den franske præsident Macron, som beklagede, at “tiderne med overflod” er forbi, og den belgiske premierminister Alexander De Croo, som sagde, at “de næste 5-10 vintre vil blive vanskelige”. Mens en tilbagevenden til schachtiansk økonomi – den politik som Hitlers finansminister, Hjalmar Schacht, førte – kan være “vanskelig” for det, man næsten må kalde de “tidligere industrialiserede lande”, ville den være altødelæggende for udviklingslandene, hvilket ville udmønte sig i en befolkningsreduktion i milliardvis.
Det er derfor tvingende nødvendigt at finde en passende platform til at reorganisere det nuværende fejlslagne finansielle system. Det kan være inden for G20-formatet, eller, hvis det ikke kan lade sig gøre, inden for en anden passende ramme, f.eks. BRICS-landene, SCO eller en anden institution i det Globale Syd. Der bør etableres et nyt Bretton Woods-system med de retningslinjer, som præsident Franklin D. Roosevelt oprindeligt havde til hensigt at indføre, men som aldrig blev gennemført på grund af hans alt for tidlige død. Det primære og uangribelige mål for dette nye system skal være en kvalitativ og kvantitativ forøgelse af levestandarden for befolkningerne i udviklingssektoren og for de fattige i verden generelt.
Det nye kreditsystem må yde langsigtede, lavt forrentede lån, som skal anvendes til investeringer i grundlæggende infrastruktur, landbrug og industri med det formål at øge produktiviteten i den fysiske økonomi i hvert enkelt land. Hvad der udgør en sådan produktiv investering, og hvad der ikke gør det, bør bestemmes ud fra de videnskabelige principper for fysisk økonomi, som de blev udviklet af den amerikanske økonom Lyndon LaRouche, dvs. at de skal sigte mod en forøgelse af energi-gennemstrømningstætheden i produktionsprocessen, hvilket fører til en forøgelse af den potentielle relative befolkningstæthed i hvert land.
Overalt hvor dette økonomiske system blev anvendt, førte det til en vellykket industrialisering af landet. Det var tilfældet med Alexander Hamiltons Amerikanske økonomiske System, den tyske kansler Otto von Bismarcks anvendelse af Hamiltons og Friedrich Lists teorier, Meiji-restaurationen i Japan, grev Wittes industrialisering af Rusland, Roosevelts New Deal, det tyske økonomiske mirakel i forbindelse med genopbygningen efter Anden Verdenskrig, de sydøstasiatiske landes økonomiske mirakel og sidst, men ikke mindst, Kinas økonomiske mirakel, som løftede 850 millioner mennesker ud af fattigdom.
Det vigtigste træk ved dette system er, at staten har den suveræne beføjelse til at skabe kredit, og så længe denne kredit er strengt rettet mod produktive investeringer, er den ikke inflationær, men derimod vil skabelsen af reel fysisk rigdom altid være større end det oprindeligt udlånte beløb på grund af arbejdskraftens evne til at skabe værditilvækst. Da den eneste kilde til samfundsmæssig værdi hverken er besiddelsen af naturressourcer eller evnen til at købe billigt og sælge dyrt, men udelukkende individets kreativitet, er det statens pligt at fremme alle borgeres kreative potentiale i videst muligt omfang. Investeringer i et moderne sundhedssystem og et fremragende universelt uddannelsessystem har derfor høj prioritet. Naturligvis skal alle tilgængelige ressourcer, f.eks. naturressourcerne, og en international arbejdsdeling, der tager hensyn til geografiske og klimatiske forhold, mobiliseres for at sikre en optimal udvidet reproduktion af økonomien. Målet med økonomien er ikke at berige nogle få, men at sikre velfærd og lykke for alle.
Der foregår på nuværende tidspunkt allerede mange udviklinger i retning af skabelsen af en multipolær verden, hvor landene vælger økonomiske modeller i overensstemmelse med deres egne kulturer og traditioner. Men det er NAM’s enestående kald at forsøge at overvinde den farlige blokdannelse, der fremmer krig, ved at tilbyde et nyt Bretton Woods-system, der omfatter alle. I traditionen fra præsident Sukarnos tale på Bandung-konferencen i 1955 kunne de tage udgangspunkt i hans henvisning til den “første vellykkede antikoloniale krig i historien”, dvs. Den amerikanske Uafhængighedskrig, og hans citater af digteren Longfellow og hans digt om Paul Reveres berømte ridetur.
Hvis man kan finde en måde at minde USA og de europæiske nationer om deres bedre traditioner, om Benjamin Franklins eller John Quincy Adams’ politik, om Enrico Mattei, Charles de Gaulle eller det tysk-indiske samarbejde om opførelsen af stålværket i Rourkela, kan der skabes et nyt paradigme for et verdensomspændende samarbejde baseret på Pancheel, de fem principper for fredelig sameksistens.
Hvorfra skulle man hente den optimisme, at Bandung-ånden vil bidrage til at overvinde denne alvorligste krise i menneskehedens historie? Måske hvis vi husker på det, som den tyske raketforsker Krafft Ehricke, “faderen til Centaur-raketten” i Apollo-programmet, opfandt som den første lov i rumfartens videnskab: “Ingen og intet under universets naturlove sætter nogen begrænsninger for mennesket, undtagen mennesket selv.” I denne ånd kan vi skabe et nyt kapitel i menneskehedens historie.
EIR-pressemøde: “En atomkrig kan ikke vindes og må aldrig udkæmpes
Den 5. november 2022 (EIRNS) – Den 5. november indkaldte Executive Intelligence Review (EIR) til en ekstraordinær tre timers pressekonference, der samlede en international gruppe af talere med videnskabelig, militær, efterretningsmæssig og politisk baggrund, alle pligttro til det princip, som præsident Ronald Reagan fastslog i sin Tale om unionens Tilstand i 1984, nemlig at “en atomkrig ikke kan vindes og aldrig må udkæmpes”. I sin tale til både USA’s og Sovjetunionens befolkning tilføjede præsident Reagan: “Den eneste værdi i at vores to nationer besidder atomvåben består i at sikre, at de aldrig vil blive anvendt. Men ville det så ikke være bedre at afskaffe dem helt og holdent?” Naturligvis ville det være bedre. Men 38 år efter denne betydningsfulde udtalelse er Vestens “regeringsskib” blevet kapret af geopolitiske galninge, som hensynsløst styrer os mod en atomkrig, der vil forårsage menneskehedens udslettelse. Kan denne vanvittige proces vendes?
Formålet med denne pressekonference og med tidligere og fremtidige konferencer, som EIR og Schiller Instituttet er værter for, består i at overbevise verden om, at der eksisterer en bevægelse af fornuftige mennesker i Vesten, som ikke blot er imod udryddelseskrig, men som også foreslår positive ideer til at skabe en velstående og harmonisk fremtid for nuværende og kommende generationer. Vil denne bevægelse lykkes? Som mange af talerne gjorde det klart, vil det afhænge af almindelige borgeres vilje til at opgive tilskuerrollen på sidelinjen og deltage i kampen. Nedenfor følger et kort resumé af de indledende betragtninger fra hver enkelt af de talere, der deltog i pressekonferencen.
Her er et fremhævet resumé:
Steven Starr, pensioneret direktør for University of Missouris Clinical Laboratory Science Program og ekspert i atomkrig, gav en skræmmende præsentation, som omfattede et overbevisende lysbilledeshow, hvori han klart påviste, at en atomkrig ville forårsage menneskets og de fleste dyrs udslettelse på planeten Jorden. Han forklarede, at den destruktive kraft, som nutidens atomvåben rummer, langt overgår den effekt, som blev brugt mod Japan under Anden Verdenskrig. Et sprænghoved, der detoneres over New York City, ville skabe en ildstorm, der ville brænde alt til aske i en radius på 150 kvadratkilometer. Hvis et missilangreb mod USA blev opdaget, ville præsidenten få en briefing på 30 sekunder om angrebets art og derefter maksimalt have 2-3 minutter til at beslutte, hvordan der skulle reageres! Hvis der blev beordret et modangreb, ville missilerne være i luften i løbet af to minutter uden mulighed for at trække dem tilbage, hvis advarslen skulle vise sig at være falsk. Følgerne af en atomkrig ville være en atomvinter, hvor 70 % af sollyset ville blive blokeret på den nordlige halvkugle og 35 % på den sydlige halvkugle i en periode på mindst ti år, hvilket ville gøre det umuligt at dyrke afgrøder. Dette ville medføre massiv hungersnød og mulig udryddelse af mennesker og dyr.
Resten er på engelsk
Former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer and chief UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter followed with a presentation aimed at shaking people out of their complacency regarding the dangers of nuclear war. He began with the assertion that the majority of American people are ignorant of the reality of nuclear conflict. The son of an Air Force officer stationed in Germany during the Cold War, whose responsibilities included nuclear weapons delivery, Ritter grew up acutely aware that nuclear annihilation could happen at any time. After joining the Marine Corps, he was assigned to a nuclear artillery unit which constantly trained to carry out attacks. He then went on to become a weapons inspector during the 1980s at the height of the dangerous very period where Soviet SS-20 and U.S. Pershing II intermediate missiles could reach targets within seven minutes eliminating any chance for reasoned deliberation on how to respond to an attack. In Ritter’s words, “The 1980’s was all about dodging nuclear Armageddon.” He believes one of the most underappreciated moments in history is when President Reagan signed the INF Treaty with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev because this event saved the world from nuclear suicide. However, with the collapse of the Soviet Union we no longer respect Russia and are now reconstituting intermediate nuclear weapons. Ritter ended his presentation as a warning to those in the West who believe a nuclear war against Russia is winnable by describing the Russian system called the “dead hand.” Were a successful decapitation strike carried out against Moscow, the “dead hand” system would automatically launch communications rockets which would travel across the territory of Russia activating a retaliatory second strike which would mean the end of the world.
French Col. Alain Corvez (ret.), former advisor to the General-in-Commander of the UNIFIL in Lebanon and former international relations advisor to the French Foreign Ministry, began his remarks by expressing gratitude for participating in an event where speakers know what they’re talking about. The problem in his opinion is that leaders in the West know nothing about nuclear war. He recounted Charles de Gaulle’s intention to constitute a nuclear force (“force de frappe”) under the sole control of France strictly for the purpose of nuclear deterrence. De Gaulle was well aware that a nuclear war would result in the deaths of hundreds of millions of people. He questioned whether today’s leaders have any understanding of the fact that a nuclear war cannot be won and that as a consequence the nature of war has been fundamentally changed. Even a war with a small nuclear armed power like North Korea would have unimaginable consequences.
Colonel Richard Black (ret.), U.S. Marine Corps combat veteran, former chief of the Army Criminal Law Division at the Pentagon and former Virginia State Senator, began by stating that we are in a footrace with the globalist demons intent on starting World War III. According to Black, given that there may be a shift away from support for the Ukrainian regime were the outcome of the midterm elections to favor the Republicans, as is highly likely, there is an effort by NATO to accelerate the war. As empirical evidence of this accelerated war drive, Black cites events such as the Sept. 26 Nord Stream pipeline sabotage (including British Prime Minister Liz Truss’s “It is done” text message to Secretary of State Tony Blinken), the Oct. 8 attempt at blowing up of the Crimean Bridge across the Kerch Strait and the foiling by Russian security forces of sabotage attempts deep within Russian territory. Black believes the intention is to “trip up” the Russian leadership causing an overreaction which creates the pretext for a counterattack by NATO. He also pointed to the recent highly unusual surfacing of two U.S. nuclear armed attack submarines as an intended signal to Moscow that NATO has the capability to launch a nuclear ’Pearl Harbor” at any time. He stated that President Biden has the capability of ending the war at anytime but right now is not listening to the American people but only to the globalists. Black ended his remarks by voicing his opinion that the Schiller Institute is the preeminent voice for peace in the world today and thanked the young “gutsy” Schiller Institute activists for their interventions confronting the warmongers.
The next speaker, Jacques Cheminade, is a three-time candidate for the French presidency and leader of the Solidarité et Progrès party as well as a leader of the Schiller Institute. Cheminade’s remarks were very brief, expressing his full support for Diane Sare’s Senate campaign in the Nov. 8 U.S. election. What she expresses as her political objectives echoes the voice of people he has met in France who are suffering the same hardships as the American people. She is the only candidate campaigning for peace, stability and cooperation for the entire world. Cheminade advised all New Yorkers to vote for Sare to help bring about peace and the best of all possible worlds.
Dr. Cliff Kiracofe, former senior advisor to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee and president of the Washington Institute for Peace and Development, began by stating his opinion that a diplomatic process is the only way to end the war in Ukraine and the sooner this diplomatic process takes place the better. Russia, having a policy of what Kiracofe characterized as “old school” diplomacy, is open to negotiations. However, the Ukrainian government at this point is refusing to negotiate, and without negotiations diplomacy is impossible. France and Germany failed to advance the Minsk II process which was endorsed by the UN Security Council in 2015. As a consequence Ukraine has lost the Donbass territory (formerly known as Novorossiya) which has been incorporated into Russia. The question now is will Russia launch a winter offensive to absorb more territory and would this lead to a general European war or even nuclear war? Kiracofe ended by stating his belief that as peace advocates we must insist on a diplomatic process now.
General Dominique Delawarde (ret.), former French liaison officer to the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, began by thanking Scott Ritter for his exemplary work which is followed very closely by his colleagues in France. He also stated that as a citizen of the world he endorses Diane Sare’s Senate campaign; that she is a rare candidate who understands that Russia cannot afford to lose the war with Ukraine and that miscalculations would have potential catastrophic consequences. He expressed his fear that the globalists in the West directing foreign policy unless stopped are leading us to war. He ended his remarks by noting that Sare deserves to be Senator as she represents a powerful voice for peace and, as in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, we must be willing to compromise.
Retired CIA analyst Ray McGovern started by recounting his experience as a 2nd Lieutenant in the U.S. Army during the Cuban Missile Crisis at which time he was stationed near Key West, Florida. He then amplified remarks made earlier by Scott Ritter regarding how close we came to nuclear war with the Soviet Union, a nation President Reagan had labeled “the evil empire,” in 1983. In particular, McGovern singled out a NATO exercise in 1983 called Able Archer which simulated a nuclear attack against the Soviet Union. At the time serving as a CIA intelligence officer, a colleague named Mel Goodman sounded the alarm bells to his superiors that the Soviets saw this exercise as a serious threat and if we didn’t “tone it down” it could trigger a nuclear war. Whereas Bob Gates refused to heed his warnings, he went over Gates’s head to William Casey, who did listen to him seriously, to our great fortune. The problem now in the current political climate is that very few people know what’s really going on. That means those who do know have to “get off their butts and do something.” McGovern then explained what he calls the Noah principle: “No awards for predicting rain, awards only for building arcs.” This means each person has to get off their derriere and do their part in helping to building the arc (i.e. do something!). And although we can’t expect immediate success, by being faithful and telling the truth we set an example for future generations. McGovern ended his remarks by calling out the older generation with a “little bit of gray” in their hair. According to McGovern these people have an advantage because while the actions of younger people may be dismissed by the general population when they get arrested or beaten up, most people don’t like to see old people getting beaten up. Under today’s circumstances it’s important for older people to put this advantage to good use and get out there and do something!
The final speaker was Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder and chairwoman of the Schiller Institute. Echoing several of the prior speakers, she started by saying that we are in the most dangerous moment in history and most people know nothing. During the 1980s, during the Pershing Missile crisis, hundreds of thousands of people were in the streets protesting. Today very little is happening. Her late husband, Lyndon LaRouche, created the basis for a new security architecture during that period based on a policy that became known as the Strategic Defense Initiative which was formally adopted by President Reagan on March 23, 1983. With the ongoing collapse of the trans-Atlantic financial system, to prevent World War III we need a new security architecture which takes into consideration the needs of all nations. To succeed, the West must be a part of this new security architecture. She expressed her belief that the reason she is on the Ukraine government’s Center for Countering Disinformation “hit list” is precisely because of the role the Schiller Instituting is playing in this process. Zepp-LaRouche ended her remarks by wholeheartedly wishing Diane Sare success in her Senate campaign.
Videokonference: For verdensfred
STOP FAREN FOR ATOMKRIG
Andet seminar for nuværende og tidligere folkevalgte politikere i verden.
Torsdag den 27. oktober kl. 16
Andet seminar for nuværende og tidligere folkevalgte politikere i verden |
Dato: Torsdag den 27. oktober 2022
Tid: Kl. 16-19 dansk tid
Sted: Konferencerum E, Repræsentanternes Hus, Mexico City; og
På internetet (med simultantolkning mellem engelsk og spansk)
Speakers include:
HOSTS
Helga Zepp-LaRouche (Germany), Founder, Schiller Institute
María de los Ángeles Huerta (Mexico), Former Congresswoman
THE VIEW FROM LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN
Donald Ramotar (Guyana), Former President
Jorge Robledo (Colombia), Former Senator
Elpidio Tovar de la Cruz, (Mexico), Former Congressman
THE VIEW FROM EUROPE
General Dominique Delawarde (ret.) (France)
Alf Schmidt (Germany), Farm leader
Sergio Tancredi (Italy), Former state Parliamentarian, Sicily
Video highlights from demonstrations in Eastern Germany, protesting collapse of the German economy
THE VIEW FROM THE UNITED STATES
Richard Black (U.S.), Former state Senator, Virginia
Diane Sare (U.S.), Candidate for U.S. Senate, NY
George Koo (U.S.), International business advisor, retired
Otte måneder inde i krigen mellem Rusland og Ukraine, i hvilken USA og NATO spiller en aktiv rolle, er der mange døde og sårede, omfattende ødelæggelser af alle former for ejendom og meget skadelige økonomiske og sociale konsekvenser i Europa og hele verden, hvilket forårsager chok, der forværrer de meget dybe problemer i verdensøkonomien med konsekvenser i form af en forværring af krisen og forøget arbejdsløshed, fattigdom og sult.
Det er kendt, at denne krig kan få langt alvorligere konsekvenser end dem, vi allerede lider under, herunder massive ødelæggelser og en krise af globale dimensioner, som aldrig tidligere er set, fordi krigen kan føre til en konfrontation med atomvåben mellem Rusland og USA og NATO.
Blandt de tiltagende stemmer, der opfordrer til en forstandig tilgang, fremhæver vi pave Frans’ opfordring til en forhandlet, fredelig løsning.
De undertegnede politiske og sociale ledere, nuværende og tidligere lovgivere og andre folkevalgte fra forskellige lande opfordrer Rusland, Ukraine, USA og NATO til at nå frem til en aftale, der først og fremmest afviser den voksende løsagtige snak om eventuel anvendelse af atomvåben og bekræfter den grundlæggende forpligtelse i den såkaldte Reagan-Gorbatjov-formel fra 1985, at “en atomkrig ikke kan vindes og aldrig må udkæmpes”. For at være varig skal en sådan aftale også etablere en ny international sikkerhedsarkitektur, der anerkender og respekterer de legitime sikkerhedsinteresser, som samtlige verdens nationer måtte have.
Vi anerkender og insisterer på, at Rusland i lighed med USA, NATO, Ukraine og alle andre lande har legitime sikkerhedsinteresser, som skal tages i betragtning og blive en af hjørnestenene i den nye sikkerhedsarkitektur. En tilbagevenden til de vellykkede principper fra den Westfalske Fred i 1648 – respekt for suverænitet, engagement i den andens, modpartens, bedste og eftergivelse af gæld, der forhindrer ægte økonomisk udvikling – er den slags arkitektur, vi efterstræber i dag.
Det almene gode for den fælles menneskehed er den obligatoriske forudsætning for det gode for hver enkelt nation. På den måde vil vi blandt alle verdens nationer kunne bidrage til at opbygge en organisation af borgere i en fælles international indsats, og på den måde etablere os som en drivkraft, der kan have indflydelse på den internationale politiske debat.
Vi opfordrer mennesker af god vilje i hele verden – uanset vores forskelligartede og naturlige forskelle – til at deltage i denne proces med overvejelser og søgen efter fredelige løsninger, herunder en grundig undersøgelse af en alternativ økonomisk politik med henblik på at erstatte spekulation, som har skabt så megen fattigdom og lidelse, med et system baseret på produktion og fremskridt, der kan tilgodese behovene hos en voksende verdensbefolkning.
Vi afviser alle forsøgene på at begrænse, intimidere eller forbyde en sådan overvejelsesproces. Og vi opfordrer USA, NATO, Ukraine og Rusland til at bevæge sig i den retning, som vi præsenterer i denne respektfulde opfordring.
UNDERSKRIVERE:
-
SIGNATURES:
Tom Gillesberg, formand, Schiller Instituttet, Folketingskandidat udenfor partierne i Københavns Storkreds
1. Donald Ramotar (Guyana); former President (2011-2015), former member of parliament (1992-2011, PPP)
2. Helga Zepp-LaRouche (Germany); founder, Schiller Institute
3. Jorge Robledo (Colombia); former Senator (2002-2022, Partido Dignidad)
4. María de los Ángeles Huerta (Mexico); former Congresswoman (2018-2021, MORENA)
5. Dr. Kirk Meighoo (Trinidad & Tobago); former independent Senator (2004, United National Congress)
6. Dr. Rodolfo Ondarza (Mexico); former Representative, Mexico City Legislative Assembly (2015-2018, PT)
7. Diane Sare (U.S.); candidate for the U.S. Senate from New York (2022, independent/LaRouche)
NEW SIGNERS:
8. Richard Black (U.S.); former Virginia state Senator (2012-2020), former member Virginia House of Delegates (1998-2006, Republican)
9. Elpidio Tovar de la Cruz (Mexico); former Congressman (2003-2006, PRD)
10. Claudia Yáñez Centeno (Mexico); former Congresswoman (2014-2017, Morena)
11. Alberto Vizcarra (Mexico); former Sonora state Congressman (1988-1991, PARM)
12. Sergio Tancredi (Italy); former member of the Sicilian Parliament (2017-2022, Fratelli d’Italia)
13. Alessia Ruggeri (Italy); trade unionist, Comitato per la Repubblica
14. Graham Fuller (U.S.); former U.S. diplomat, CIA official, and Islamic scholar
15. Dr. George Koo (U.S.); International business advisor, retired
16. Gen. Edwin de la Fuente Jeria (Bolivia); former Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of Bolivia (2012-2013)
17. Emil Guevara Muñoz (Venezuela); former member of the Latin American Parliament (2006-2011)
18. Dr. Mohammad A. Toor (U.S.); Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Pakistani American Congress
19. Ramón Emilio Concepción (Dominican Republic); former presidential precandidate (2020, PRM)
Rand Corporation og den amerikanske hær indledte Ukraine-operation i 2019
– Moon of Alabama, Caitlin Johnstone, Jimmy Dore m.fl.
Den 22. september 2019 (EIRNS) – Kritikere af det militærindustrielle kompleks har bemærket, at den igangværende konflikt i Ukraine, som kommer tættere og tættere på en nuklear konfrontation, ser ud til at have været en del af en planlægning, fremlagt i et 354-siders Rand Corporation-dokument, “Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground”, som den amerikanske hær har indgået kontrakt med, og som blev offentliggjort i 2019.
Moon of Alabama dækkede det, og podcaster Jimmy Dore blev tilskyndet af den australske blogger Caitlin Johnstone til at producere en kort udsendelse om dokumentet i går. Dore afslørede simpelthen, hvordan Ukraines militære operation, som er koordineret og betalt af den amerikanske regering og andre NATO- og EU-institutioner, følger de anbefalinger, der gives i “Extending Russia”, i hovedtræk med ringere resultater end forventet.
Det ser ud til, at Rand nu er blevet lidt flov over hele sagen og ønsker at flytte skylden fra dem, der har skrevet teksten, til dem, som har læst den. De har indsat en erklæring på deres hjemmesides introduktionsside, hvor der er anført: ” Redaktørens bemærkning, september 2022: Vi opfordrer dig til at udforske denne rapport og den ledsagende forskningsrapport. Eftersom russiske enheder og personer, der sympatiserer med Putins beslutning om at invadere Ukraine, har misfortolket denne forskning i de seneste uger, tilskynder vi dig ligeledes til at udforske denne nyttige ressource om Ruslands tilgang til propaganda med ‘brandslukning af løgn’ og vores forskning om begrebet ‘sandhedsforfald’, som er et fænomen, der til dels skyldes spredningen af desinformation.”
Dores indledende citat er Rands forklaring om, at de søgte efter “muligheder, der afslører omkostninger, som kunne skabe ubalance og overbelaste Rusland.” Man tilføjede, at resultatet ville være “ideelt set større byrder end dem, der ville blive tilføjet USA for at forfølge disse muligheder”, og “Indførelse af mere indgribende handels- og finansielle sanktioner ville … sandsynligvis nedbryde den russiske økonomi, især hvis sanktionerne er omfattende og multilaterale. Således vil deres effektivitet afhænge af andre landes vilje til at deltage i en sådan proces. Men sanktioner er forbundet med omkostninger og, afhængigt af deres strenghed, betydelige risici.” Rand tog fejl i deres prognose af den skade, som Rusland blev forvoldt.
Rand fortsatte med at rådgive om, hvordan man skulle overveje “dødbringende støtte til Ukraine”, som kunne “fremprovokere en meget bredere konflikt, hvor Rusland på grund af sin geografiske nærhed ville have betydelige fordele.”
Dore fortsatte i yderligere ti minutter med at belyse Rand-anbefalingerne, med advarsler angående deres gennemførlighed. De overvejelser, som blev behandlet, omfattede positionering af bombefly, jagerfly inden for rækkevidde af Rusland og taktiske atomvåben i Europa og Asien”, for at “lokke Rusland ud i et dyrt våbenkapløb ved at bryde ud af ordningen om atomvåbenkontrol”.
Kort sagt var Rand-rapporten tætpakket med råd om at forsøge en række udstationeringer, hvoraf mange kunne udløse russiske kontraindsatser eller modangreb med en umådelig destruktiv kapacitet. Adskillige af de muligheder, der blev undersøgt, minder meget om det der rent faktisk er sket, og som kulminerede i præsident Putins trussel om at gengælde kraftige eller nukleare trusler på lignende vis.
Dore’s udsendelse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVjPh-8JMJQ.
Parlamentsmedlem fra Die LINKE fremsætter officiel forespørgsel
til den tyske regering om den ukrainske “fjendeliste”
Den 9. august 2022 (EIRNS) – den 2. august 2022 offentliggjorde Andrej Hunko, tysk medlem af Forbundsdagen (Die LINKE), teksten med de officielle spørgsmål til den tyske regering vedrørende den nye “fjendeliste” i Ukraine.” https://twitter.com/AndrejHunko/status/1554532149004587011
Hunko er en meget prominent, mangeårig forbundsparlamentariker, med omfattende internationale aktiviteter; han er medlem af PACE (Europarådets Parlamentariske Forsamling) og har rejst til talrige lande som valgobservatør for OSCE. Han fremsatte tidligere, efter kuppet i 2014, forespørgsler om de involverede nazistiske netværk; han rejste også til Donbass sammen med en kollega for at levere humanitær hjælp, hvorefter han fik indrejseforbud i Ukraine. Han blev desuden placeret på en ukrainsk fjendeliste for to år siden (se nedenfor).
Her er teksten til det spørgsmål, som han stillede ifølge et opslag på twitter:
“Har forbundsregeringen på nuværende tidspunkt forholdt sig til, at tyske statsborgere, herunder offentlige personer som Alice Schwarzer og Dr. Rolf Mützenich, er blevet opført på listen over formidlere af russisk propaganda (se https://cpd.gov.ua/ samt “Ukraine blacklists Alice Schwarzer” i Berliner Zeitung, s. 13, 29.7. 2022) af ” Center for bekæmpelse af Desinformation i Ukraines nationale sikkerhedsråd” og reageret (i bekræftende fald hvordan?), og blev denne liste sat på dagsordenen hos den ukrainske regering af forbundsminister Nancy Faeser (SPD) samt forbundsarbejdsminister Hubertus Heil (SPD) under besøget i Ukraine? (https://www.bmi.bund.de/SharedDocs/kurzmeldungen/DE2022/07/faeserukraine.html) (hvis ja, angiv venligst omstændighederne, f.eks. dato og kontaktniveau).”
Sammen med dette henviser Hunko i et andet indlæg til den “berygtede Mirotworez-liste”. Han er blevet anbragt på denne ukrainske fjendeliste, som har eksisteret i to år. Ifølge dette tweet siger Hunko, at “mindst to af dem på listen er blevet myrdet i mellemtiden”. Den [tyske] forbundsregering fordømte listen, men tog aldrig for alvor initiativ til at fjerne listen.”
Ifølge andre rapporter blev Viktor Orban, Ungarns premierminister, også sat på Mirotworez-listen, fordi han nægtede at lade vestlige våbenleverancer til Ukraine passere, modsatte sig energiembargoen mod Rusland og udøver “anti-ukrainsk” propaganda. Listen indeholder private adresser på politiske fjender.
NYHEDSORIENTERING MAJ-JUNI 2022:
Dansk-svensk videokonference d. 25. maj 2022:
For en ny sikkerheds- og udviklingsarkitektur for alle nationer,
ikke en styrkelse af geopolitiske blokke.
NEJ til at afskaffe forsvarsforbeholdet
NEJ til Sverige og Finland i NATO
Hvorfor Danmark bør afstå fra et intensiveret geopolitisk militært engagement,
af næstformand Michelle Rasmussen:
Fra videokonferencen den 25. maj 2022.
Jeg vil lige bruge et par minutter på at tale om den danske situation, idet jeg afløser Tom Gillesberg, der er formand for Schiller Instituttet i Danmark.
Schiller Instituttet i Danmark siger helt klart, at folk skal stemme NEJ ved folkeafstemningen, som skal afholdes den 1. juni. Folkeafstemningen drejer sig om en situation, hvor fem partier i den danske regering i forbindelse med Ukraine-krigen stemte for at få en folkeafstemning, som en del af et nationalt forsvarskompromis, herunder Socialistisk Folkeparti, som i første omgang havde sørget for fravalgene. Det var tilbage i 1992, hvor den danske befolkning først havde stemt NEJ til Maastricht-traktaten. Derefter kom forhandlingerne, der førte til Edinburgh-aftalen, frem til fire undtagelsesbestemmelser. Derefter stemte befolkningen JA til at acceptere Maastricht-traktaten.
En af undtagelserne var, at Danmark ikke ville deltage i de fælles europæiske EU-militære aktiviteter. Vi mener, at befolkningen skal stemme NEJ. Det ville være en måde, ikke blot at forhindre Danmark i at øge sine militære aktiviteter med EU, men også at sætte en stopper for en militariseringsproces, der især siden 2001 har været i gang. Personligt er jeg amerikansk statsborger, og for nylig er jeg også blevet dansk statsborger. Og jeg vil sige, at Danmark, mit nye hjemland, i stedet for bare at følge med i USA’s politik, mit oprindelsesland, at Danmark i stedet burde arbejde for at ændre USA’s politik.
Lyndon LaRouche opfordrede for mange år siden til en fire-magts-aftale. Hvis USA, Rusland, Kina, Indien og Rusland samarbejder om at etablere et nyt retfærdigt økonomisk verdenssystem, et nyt kreditsystem, kunne dette har været grundlaget for konfliktløsning gennem økonomisk udviklingssamarbejde. Som Li Xing sagde, er det bedste alternativ til krig at få iværksat et økonomisk samarbejde. [Dermed kunne den nuværende konflikt have været undgået.]
Siden 2001 har Danmark deltaget i alle de krige, som USA, tilskyndet af briterne, har indledt, fra Afghanistan under statsminister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, og det var især under statsminister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, som senere blev NATO’s generalsekretær, at militariseringen blev optrappet. Danmark deltog i krigene i Irak, og så havde vi Libyen. Vi var med i de andre krige, der kom bagefter.
Nu er Danmark i forhandlinger med USA om etablering af en bilateral forsvarsaftale, som formentlig vil omfatte permanent udstationering af amerikanske tropper på dansk jord, hvilket vil sige, at udenlandske tropper for første gang i fredstid vil blive permanent udstationeret her.
Der var et spørgsmål til de fem partier, der kom med dette nationale forsvarskompromis, fra en journalist til de to højrepartier, Det Konservative Folkeparti og Venstre, om, hvad de ville sige, hvis USA ville bede om at forhandle om opstilling af atomvåben i Danmark. Og deres svar var: “Jamen, det må vi da tale om.” Det er også en total kursændring i forhold til den tidligere danske politik.
Den anden ting er, at det ikke er nok at stemme NEJ ved folkeafstemningen. Det vil ikke løse problemerne. Men det vil være en måde at dæmme op for denne trinvise militarisering.
For det, Schiller Instituttet siger, er, at nøglen til en mere fredelig verden ikke er at øge militariseringen, men at etablere en ny arkitektur for sikkerhed og økonomisk udvikling, hvor man kan undgå krigsudbrud. Som Jan Øberg påpegede, kan man have konflikter, men hvordan sikrer vi, at de ikke fører til krig? Hvordan kan vi løse disse konflikter på en fredelig måde?
Det er her, at idéen om fremgangsmåden med den Westfalske Fred dukker op. Jeg vil snarest stille et spørgsmål til Helga for at få mere at vide om det.
Danmark har også haft en anden tradition. Et af vores slogans her har været, at i stedet for krigsførelse skal vi bygge broer. Der er en dansk tradition for økonomisk udvikling, partnerskab med lande om vandudvikling, om brobygning og om energiudvikling. Det er det, vi skal fremhæve.
In English:
I will just take a few minutes to speak about the Danish situation, standing in for Tom Gillesburg, the chairman of the Schiller Institute in Denmark.
The Schiller Institute in Denmark is definitely saying that people should vote NO in the referendum, which is to be held on June 1st. The referendum concerns a situation where after the Ukraine war, five parties in the Danish government voted to have a referendum as part of a National Defense Compromise, including the Socialist People’s Party, which had organized the opt-outs in the beginning. Back in 1992, where the Danish population had first voted NO to the Maastricht Treaty. Then, the negotiations that led to the Edinburgh agreement came up with four opt-outs. Then, the population voted YES to accept the Maastricht Treaty.
One of the opt-outs was that Denmark would not participate in the joint European EU military activities. We think that people should vote NO. This would be a way, not only to prevent Denmark from increasing its military activity with the EU, but would also put a stop to a process of militarization that has been going on, especially since 2001. Personally, I’m an American citizen, and recently, I also became a Danish citizen. And I would say that Denmark, my adopted countr, ought to, instead of just following along with the policies of the United States, my native country, that Denmark should, instead, work to change the policies of the United States.
Lyndon LaRouch, many years ago, called for a four power agreement. If the United States, Russia, China and India would cooperate to establish a new just world economic system, a new credit system, this could be the basis of conflict resolution through economic development cooperation. As the Li Xing was saying, the best alternative to war is to get economic cooperation going.
Since 2001, Denmark has participated in every war that the United States, goaded on by the British, have launched, from Afghanistan under Prime Minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, and it the militarization was especially escalated under Prime Minist Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who later became the NATO’s general secretary. Denmark participated in the the wars in Iraq, and then we had Libya. We had the other wars that came after that.
And now Denmark is in negotiations with the United States for setting up a bilateral defense treaty, which will probably include permanent stationing of United States troops on Danish soil, which would be that foreign troops would be permanently stationed here for the first time in peacetime.
There was a question to the five parties that came up with this National Defense Compromise from a reporter to the two right parties, the the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party (Venstre), about what they would they say if the United States would ask for negotiating about stationing of nuclear weapons in Denmark. And their answer was, “Well, we’ll have to talk about it.” This is also a total reversal of the previous Danish policy.
The other thing is that it’s not enough to vote NO in the referendum. That will not solve the problems. But it will be a way of of stemming the tide of this step by step by step militarization.
Because, what the Schiller Institute is saying, is that the key to a more peaceful world is not increasing the militarization, but it is establishing a new security and economic development architecture, where you can avoid the outbreak of war. As Jan was saying, you can have conflicts, but how do we make sure that it doesn’t lead to war? How can we solve these conflicts in a peaceful way?
And that is where the idea of the Peace of Westphalia approach comes in. I will soon ask a question to Helga to explain more about that.
And Denmark has also had a different tradition. One of our slogans here has been, instead of war fighting, bridge building. There is aa Danish tradition for economic development, partnership with countries about water development, about building bridges, about energy development. And this is what we need to be emphasizing.
So, I would like to introduce, then, the question period, by asking the question to Helga. This is from Sarah on YouTube, who would like to ask Helga “What is a foreseeable path to reaching a position to propose the peace of Westphalia? Is war the only way? How much can transparency work towards reaching this goal?” To sum it up. What is the idea of the Peace of Westphalia? How can these principles of peace building be used today? And how can we actually implement this?
Helga Zepp-LaRouche:
The answer will come soon.
Næstformand Michelle Rasmussen på LaRouche-organisationens videoprogram den 29. maj 2022,
om Schiller Instituttets danske-svenske videokonference
for en ny sikkerheds- og udviklingsarkitektur
Næstformand Michelle Rasmussen fortalte, hvorfor vi tog initiativ til at holde videokonferencen den 25. maj 2022 og om organiseringsprocessen.
Michelle Rasmussens indlæg begynder 57 min. inde i videoen.
Bagefter er der spørgsmål og svar fra Michelle og medpanelist Richard A. Black, Schiller Instituttets repræsentant i FN, som talte om den første Euræsiske Økonomiske Forum i Kyrgyzstan den 26. maj 2022. Der var også spørgsmål om kultur og om at komponere klassisk musik.
Jens Jørgen Nielsen: Baggrunden for krigen mellem Ukraine-NATO og Rusland. Background of the war between Ukraine-NATO and Russia.
Speech at the Schiller Institute’s seminar May 25, 2022.
Mange tak for invitationen. Jeg synes, at denne konference er meget aktuel og yderst relevant, for jeg har levet i mange år – man kan se på farven på mit hår – og man kan være sikker på, at jeg har levet i flere årtier. Jeg kan ikke huske, at vi i alle disse år efter Anden Verdenskrig har befundet os i en situation, som den vi befinder os i nu. Jeg var en lille dreng under Cuba-krisen i 1962 og vidste ikke særlig meget om den, men erindrer, at mine forældre og alle voksne var meget nervøse over situationen. Men alligevel vil jeg sige, at jeg nogle gange ser tilbage på denne tid under Den kolde Krig, og finder at tingene var meget bedre på dette tidspunkt. Jeg havde aldrig troet, at det skulle komme til dette punkt. Nogle gange vågner jeg op om morgenen og håber, at alting var et mareridt, men er bange for, at det ikke er tilfældet. Er bange for at være i live, og sover ikke, drømmer ikke; det er virkeligheden lige nu. Jeg vil blot sige om Cuba-krisen, at Khrusjtjov og Kennedy fandt et fælles sprog, som man siger på russisk [sætning på russisk 57:01], og de kom godt ud af det sammen, og de fandt en løsning ret hurtigt. De respekterede på en eller anden måde hinanden. Tænk på Nixon og Brezhnev; deres forhold var – selvfølgelig var de modstandere, konkurrenter – selvfølgelig var de det, men de havde en vis respekt for hinanden. Det samme gælder for Reagan og Gorbatjov osv. Så derfor mener jeg, at tiden lige nu er forfærdelig, fordi vi ikke har denne respekt. Hvis man ser på, hvordan de beskriver Putin i alle medierne, og det har de gjort i de 15, næsten 20 år, så er det som nedgørelse, åbent had, foragt og den slags ting. Jeg synes, det er et meget dårligt varsel, det er et meget dårligt tegn på, at vi går nogle meget besværlige tider i møde.
Jeg vil gerne tale lidt om to spørgsmål, som meget sjældent bliver stillet, og som meget sjældent bliver besvaret. Det første spørgsmål, som jeg vil tale lidt mere udførligt om, er: “Hvordan er vi endt der? Hvordan er det sket, at vi nu, 30 år efter Sovjetunionens opløsning, er endt i denne situation, hvor vi faktisk er tættere end nogensinde før på menneskehedens udslettelse?” Jeg synes, det er et meget grundlæggende spørgsmål. Det andet spørgsmål er naturligvis: “Hvad gør vi? Hvordan skal vi komme ud af dette? Hvordan kommer vi til forhandlingsbordet for at forhandle om fredsbetingelser og den slags forhold?” Og måske et tredje spørgsmål er naturligvis: “Hvordan opbygger vi en ny verden? Det er ikke lige nu, for nu handler det om, hvordan vi forhindrer en atomkrig?”
Jeg vil behandle disse to spørgsmål. Hvordan nåede vi dertil? Jeg tror, Jan Øberg vil tale lidt mere om, hvad vi skal gøre, eller måske snarere, hvad vi ikke skal gøre. Jeg har været med i næsten 30 år, faktisk også i denne årrække hvor jeg arbejdede i Rusland, jeg arbejdede på nogle ambassader i de tidligere sovjetrepublikker, og begyndte at lære det russiske sprog allerede før det. For det andet blev jeg gift med en russer for 30 år siden, i 1992. Vi havde håb om en ny verden, vi havde lige forladt Den kolde Krig, og vi havde håb om, at vi skulle leve i en fredelig verden. Og her er vi så, 30 år senere. Men der er noget håb; vi er ikke blevet skilt, vi har ikke planer om at blive skilt, så der er lidt håb, vil jeg mene.
Tilbage til det, der er sket. I 1991, da Sovjetunionen blev opløst, og Warszawa-pagten blev opløst, rejste jeg meget i Rusland. Jeg var meget i Rusland, og jeg havde russiske venner. De var alle entusiastiske, de var alle optimistiske. “Nu går vi ind i en ny verden. Nu har vi en harmonisk verden præget af harmoni og fred og udvikling og den slags ting.” De sagde, at de udtrykkeligt ønskede at være en del af Vesten; de ønskede at dele vores værdier og den slags ting. Hvis man har dette billede i begyndelsen af 1990’erne, var det meget svært at leve i Rusland, fordi alt brød sammen, og der var kaos. Men de ønskede at være en del af Vesten. Så det interessante spørgsmål er, hvad skete der egentlig? Hvorfor gik det ikke sådan? Der er flere trædesten i dette, vil jeg sige, for allerede i begyndelsen af 1990’erne kom Bill Clinton til magten i USA. Han støttede først en plan om, at de østeuropæiske lande skulle blive en del af NATO og lade Rusland stå udenfor. På den måde vil jeg påstå, at han afviste Gorbatjovs forslag om at opbygge et europæisk hus. Der var faktisk en plan om at opbygge et europæisk hus, men det var et europæisk hus baseret på militæret, og Rusland stod udenfor. På dette tidspunkt advarede mange folk i FN, selv i Europa, om, at det ikke ville fungere; det ville helt sikkert ikke fungere, for selv de liberale i Rusland, og mange af disse pro-vestlige liberale sagde: “Det er en meget dårlig idé”.
Men det fungerede på denne måde, fordi Clinton insisterede ihærdigt på dette. Det startede på dette tidspunkt. Så havde de, jeg ved ikke, om det var uheld, måske var det med vilje, at de godkendte Polen, Ungarn og Tjekkiet, samtidig med at man begyndte at bombe i Serbien. Serbien er en meget tæt historisk allieret for Rusland.
Så på dette tidspunkt var jeg journalist. Jeg talte med en masse mennesker. Jeg talte med Sakharovs enke, Jelena Bonner; jeg talte med alle de liberale – hvem talte jeg ikke med på dette tidspunkt? Og alle var meget skarpt imod dette. På dette tidspunkt, jeg tror, hvis man skal sætte et årstal, var det 1999, et år hvor splittelsen faktisk begyndte; måske begyndte den lidt tidligere, men på dette tidspunkt var den åbenlys. Så kom Putin ind i billedet; han skabte ikke denne situation. Mange mennesker tror, at russerne var liberale, og at den onde Putin kom til. Nej! Det er den anden vej rundt. Faktisk fulgte Putin det russiske folks dagsorden, og endda ikke kun det, for sjovt nok var Putin meget ivrig efter at komme med i NATO. Det er meget interessant at tale om dette i dag. Han ønskede, at Rusland skulle tilslutte sig NATO, det sagde han i hvert fald i et interview med BBC i 2000, da han først blev præsident.
Men selv i Afghanistan støttede Putin Vesten. Han hjalp Vesten i Afghanistan. Han gjorde alt for at opnå venskab. Han holdt en tale i Forbundsdagen i Berlin, og han gjorde alt, hvad han kunne. Men han fandt ud af, at det var forgæves, fordi Rusland var dømt til at blive udelukket fra denne nye sikkerhedsarkitektur, fordi den europæiske sikkerhed bestod af NATO uden Rusland.
Jeg tror, at alt begyndte at forværres fra dette tidspunkt. Man kunne foretage nogle tiltag. Jeg vil blot nævne nogle få. Man kan sige, at der i 2008 var et NATO-topmøde i Bukarest i Rumænien. På dette tidspunkt var George W. Bush præsident, og han inviterede Georgien og Ukraine til at blive en del af NATO. Frankrig og Tyskland var ikke så begejstrede for dette, så de afviste det faktisk. Men det blev holdt på dagsordenen, at disse to lande fik en invitation. Putin var til stede på denne konference, og han var meget, meget vred. Men der skete ikke rigtig noget. Man kan sige, at løsningen på NATO-topmødet var den værst tænkelige løsning, fordi man for det første fik ukrainerne og georgierne til at tro, at de ville få opbakning fra NATO, hvis de angreb Rusland, eller som Saakashvili i Georgien gjorde i 2008. For det andet øgede den russernes mistanke, og det løste ikke noget. Ud fra det blev det endnu værre. I Ukraine havde man selv på dette tidspunkt en meget russofobisk regering. I Ukraine er der ca. 50 % russisktalende personer, som ikke ønskede at tilslutte sig Rusland, men at have venskabelige forbindelser med Rusland og i det mindste være neutrale som en stat. Mange mennesker i de vestlige dele af Ukraine mente noget andet, nemlig at de skulle tilslutte sig NATO og EU. Så det er på mange måder et splittet land.
I det mindste blev Ukraine på dette tidspunkt i 2008 inviteret [til at blive medlem af NATO]. Det er interessant nok, at 17 % af den ukrainske befolkning ønskede at tilslutte sig NATO, mens 66 % ikke ønskede at tilslutte sig NATO. Jeg synes, at det er meget interessante tal, for det siger alt om, hvordan USA havde en dagsorden om at trække Ukraine ud af den russiske sfære, og de skjulte det ikke engang. Zbigniew Brzezinski, som var national sikkerhedsrådgiver, skrev en bog om ”det store skakbræt” {Grand Chessboard}: han skrev åbent, ja, vi ønsker at rive Ukraine ud af Ruslands område. Så hvor meget stabilitet kan man opbygge der? Og tingene blev endnu værre.
Interessant nok blev Viktor Janukovitj fra Regionernes Parti i 2010 valgt til præsident, og i 2012 havde hans parti og nogle andre partier flertal. De gik ind for, at Ukraine fortsat skulle være et neutralt land, og for det andet gik de ind for et tæt samarbejde med Rusland med hensyn til gasleverancer og leje af flådebasen i Sevastopol og på Krim osv. Derefter havde de en diskussion – Helga har allerede nævnt det – om associeringsaftalen med EU. Janukovitj læste den meget omhyggeligt og fandt ud af, at den ikke var særlig velgørende for Ukraine, og han afviste at underskrive den.
Så kom Maidan og alle den slags ting, og i februar 2014 var der faktisk, hvad jeg ville kalde et kup. Efter min mening kan man ikke kalde det andet end et kup. Det var ikke i parlamentet. Der var ikke nok stemmer i parlamentet, og det var et militærkup, intet mindre end det, vil jeg påstå.
Derefter kom ødelæggelsen af Ukraine, for i den østlige del havde de stemt i byer som Lugansk, hvor næsten 90 % havde stemt på Regionernes Parti, i Donetsk var det 85 %, og det samme på Krim, 85 % havde stemt på dette parti, som netop var blevet smidt ud af regeringen. Så de reagerede naturligvis på dette. Og på Krim skete der en løsrivelse fra Ukraine, og de blev i sidste ende en del af Rusland.
Herefter startede krigen: Den ukrainske hær begyndte at angribe de republikker, der havde erklæret sig uafhængige. For man kan sige ud fra et juridisk synspunkt, at hvis man kan lave et kup i Kiev, kan man også lave et kup i Donetsk. I Donetsk og Lugansk havde de i det mindste folkeafstemninger. De valgte nye regeringspartier i disse to republikker. Så, sanktionsregimet begyndte allerede der, og der skete en endnu kraftigere forværring af forholdet mellem NATO og Rusland, meget voldsommere. På dette tidspunkt var der faktisk en reel krig i gang i Donbass, den østlige del af Donbass, som er en region i Ukraine.
Mange mennesker i Danmark, – jeg diskuterede på nuværende tidspunkt disse ting med mine danske landsmænd, og jeg sagde: “Måske ved du, at 14.000 mennesker er blevet dræbt i denne krig?” “Hvad? Nej, det er russisk propaganda.” Jamen, det er det bestemt ikke, for det er en vurdering fra OSCE, Organisationen for Sikkerhed og Samarbejde i Europa, som jeg vil mene nok er den eneste kilde, vi har til den slags tal. Mindst nogle tusinde af disse 14.000 er civile mennesker, og blandt disse er der mange børn. Men russerne kan også se, at vi ikke græder over disse børn, og vi hejser ikke russiske flag for disse børn i vores lande i Vesten. Så mange russere har en tendens til at tænke “OK, så hvis vi ønsker at sikre de russisk talendes sikkerhed, bør det være Rusland, for EU er slet ikke interesseret.” Den ukrainske regering er bestemt ikke interesseret i at beskytte menneskerettighederne for de mennesker, der ønskede at bevare deres sprog eller have nogle normale forbindelser med Rusland.
Dette er altså noget, der foregår i Rusland og i det mindste i en del af det opdelte land, Ukraine. I februar 2015 var der en meget interessant konference i Minsk, og Lukashenko var vært. Der blev indgået en aftale mellem Frankrig, Tyskland, Rusland og Ukraine og også disse to republikker. De underskrev en aftale, ifølge hvilken Ukraine skulle have direkte forhandlinger med lederne af de to republikker – Donetsk og Lugansk – med disse to republikker. Ideen var, at Ukraine skulle ændre sin forfatning for at tillade autonome enheder i Ukraine. Tanken var, at Donetsk og Lugansk skulle være autonome enheder i Ukraine, der skulle bestemme, hvilket sprog der skulle være, og som også skulle bestemme, om de skulle have vetoret i spørgsmål om militærpolitik og lignende forhold. Jeg tror faktisk, at det var det bedste, man kunne opnå, og jeg vil gerne rose Merkel, fordi hun indgik denne aftale uden USA’s umiddelbare støtte. Hun gjorde det på egen hånd; hun tog Hollande fra Frankrig med sig og indgik denne aftale, som var det bedste, man kunne opnå på det tidspunkt.
Men meget hurtigt blev det klart, at den ukrainske præsident Petro Porosjenko ikke var herre i eget hus, som vi siger, fordi han ønskede at få det igennem i parlamentet. Hvad skete der? Nogle af disse højrefløjsgrupper, som Helga også omtalte, eksploderede. Medlemmer af parlamentet, tre mennesker blev dræbt på dette tidspunkt. De truede Porosjenko, og sagde at hvis han overhovedet ville fortsætte med at gennemføre disse bestemmelser i Minsk II-aftalen, ville han blive dræbt i en kælder. Han ønskede ikke at blive myrdet i en kælder, så han stoppede det. Senere, Zelenskij, gjaldt det samme for ham. Han sagde, da han stillede op til præsidentvalget, at han ønskede at skabe fred. Han ønskede også at opfylde Minsk II-aftalerne, og hvad skete der? Han blev også truet, og der skete ikke noget. Både Porosjenko og senere Zelenskij sagde, at vi ikke vil opfylde denne aftale. Det er klar tale, kan man kalde det.
Men på dette tidspunkt sagde Tyskland og Frankrig ikke noget. Man kunne have forestillet sig, at de ville have sagt til den ukrainske regering: “Vær nu venlige, I har underskrevet en aftale. Vi forventer, at I vil opfylde aftalens bestemmelser.” Så meget mere, så denne Minsk II blev en del af FN’s politik. Sikkerhedsrådet har vedtaget den som officiel FN-politik, men den ukrainske regering var ligeglad med den, og intet vestligt land ville nogensinde nævne, at de skulle opfylde denne aftale.
Nu kan jeg se, at jeg er ved at løbe tør for tid. Jeg vil blot sige, at hvis man går lidt længere frem, kom Zelenskij til magten – 70 % af den ukrainske befolkning støttede ham. Hvorfor? Fordi han sagde, at han var for fred; han ville gerne have en aftale med Rusland; han vil løse deres problemer med forhandlinger i Donbass, med Lugansk og Donetsk. Men han blev også truet, og han veg tilbage fra denne politik. I stedet inviterede han endnu mere [militær støtte fra USA] fra 2017-18, det var under Donald Trump. Ukraine blev bevæbnet mere og mere, og de begyndte at have fælles militærøvelser. De installerede også militær teknik i den østlige del, og også i Ukraine. Så man kan sige, at selv om Ukraine ikke var en del af NATO, så var NATO selvfølgelig i Ukraine. Jeg vil gå endnu længere og sige, at der sidste år, i 2021, var flere interessante ting. For et år siden, eller endnu tidligere, det var i marts sidste år, hævdede Zelenskij, at han var nødt til at erklære krig. Han sagde, at han gerne ville tage Krim og Donbass tilbage med militæret og støttet af NATO, ikke med NATO-soldater, men med NATO-udstyr, NATO-træning og lignende ting.
I 2021 var der en flådeøvelse i Sortehavet med deltagelse af 32 lande. Yderligere kan man sige, at i februar 2022, den 16. februar, hvis man ser på OSCE’s vurdering af, hvad der skete, hvor de tæller hvor mange eksplosioner, hvor mange skyderier, hvor mange drab, hvor mange dette og hint – det er deres job at gøre dette. De udtalte, at der fra den 16. februar var en stigning på næsten 30 gange flere eksplosioner. Hvad betyder det? Det betyder, at den ukrainske hær på dette tidspunkt allerede havde startet en krig! 110.000 ukrainske soldater var klar i Donbass og klar til at gå ind i Donbass. Desuden havde de som sagt hævdet, at de gerne ville indtage Krim.
Så nu er vi nået frem til den 24. februar. Putin var nødt til at forholde sig til situationen. Jeg billiger ikke Putins beslutning. Jeg er ikke sikker på, at det er rigtigt; jeg siger ikke, at det er rigtigt. Men han stod i en meget, meget vanskelig situation. Så denne situation kom ikke bare ud af det blå, ud af ingenting: Der er naturligvis en sammenhæng, der er en historie forud for dette. Hvis vi gerne vil løse problemet, bør vi finde måder at finde fredelige løsninger på. Jeg mener, at vi bør begynde her. Vi bør starte med “Hvorfor er vi endt her?” Vi er også nødt til på en eller anden måde at undersøge “Hvorfor endte vi her?” Måske har vi begået nogle fejltagelser, måske har vi gjort nogle ting her i vores del af verden. Måske har vi gjort noget, der kunne få Putin til at tro, at vi havde onde hensigter. For meget ofte siger vi, at NATO er en defensiv organisation, som ikke kunne drømme om at forstyrre noget som helst. Men hvis man ser på, hvad der sker i Ukraine i det sidste år, i hvert fald fra marts 2021 til februar 2022, hvis man ser på, hvad der skete der, hvis man sidder i Rusland og ser på, hvad der sker der, er det meget, meget tydeligt, at der er intentioner om at tage det tilbage.
Dette er en rød linje for Rusland. Det har de sagt. Der er ingen tvivl om, at Rusland har en rød linje, og på en eller anden måde er man nødt til at agere på den. Jeg siger ikke, at det er det rigtige at gøre, men at sige at Putin er en galning, at han bare er blevet skør eller noget, det synes jeg ikke er relevant. Jeg siger ikke, at han har truffet den rigtige beslutning, men han er ikke gal. Han ser faktisk på verden fra en anden vinkel.
English: Jens Jørgen Nielsen, degrees in the history of ideas and communication, a Moscow correspondent for the major Danish daily Politiken in the late 1990s, author of several books about Russia and Ukraine, a leader of the Russian-Danish Dialogue organization, and an associate professor of communication and cultural differences at the Niels Brock Business College in Denmark.
English:
English transcript: Introduction and Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s keynote speech
at the Schiller Institute’s Danish-Swedish seminar
We Need a New Security And Development Architecture for All Nations,
Not a Strengthening of Geopolitical Blocs,
May 25, 2022
May 25, 2022 (EIRNS)—Michelle Rasmussen, vice president of the Schiller Institute in Denmark, opened the online seminar this afternoon:
Your Excellencies and diplomats from many countries on four continents, guest speakers, members and friends of the Schiller Institute, ladies and gentlemen,
Welcome to this seminar sponsored by the Schiller Institutes in Denmark and Sweden, which is also being live streamed on YouTube. The title is, “We Need a New International Security and Development Architecture, Not a Strengthening of Geopolitical Blocs. NO in the Danish June 1 referendum about abolishing the EU Defense opt-out, and NO to Sweden and Finland joining NATO.” I am Michelle Rasmussen, vice president of the Schiller Institute in Denmark, and I will be the moderator today.
After the start of the war in Ukraine, a dramatic shift in defense policy has been proposed in three of the Nordic countries. Denmark is having a referendum on June 1 about joining the EU’s military activities, and Sweden’s and Finland’s governments want to join NATO. We think that it is necessary to discuss these issues from a higher standpoint.
Our keynote speaker, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the founder and international chairwoman of the Schiller Institute stated on May 19, that this is the most dangerous moment in world history. There is war in Europe, and many experts are warning that if the war were not ended soon, and a diplomatic solution crafted, and if those advocating increasing the geopolitical confrontation were not politically defeated, the war could escalate to, even, nuclear war. At the same time, the world economy is in crisis.
While the dangers are great, there is hope, because there are solutions in the form of a new security and development architecture, including proposals by the late Lyndon LaRouche, the founder of our political movement, Helga Zepp-LaRouche and the Schiller Institute,for a security agreement modeled on the Peace of Westphalia, combined with increased economic development cooperation between countries.
We have called this meeting to discuss:
• What caused the current extremely dangerous military, and economic crisis.
• Why strengthening the EU military arm with Danish participation, and Sweden and Finland joining NATO would only exacerbate geopolitical conflict, and
• What are the principles upon which we can create a new security and development architecture, for the benefit of all nations and people.
We want to ensure that both the dangers and solutions are known, and that an effective movement is built to stop a further escalation of this war and its economic effects, and prevent future wars and economic destruction. Somehow, humanity must create the conditions where war is not an option, in this era of nuclear weapons.
————–
Helga Zepp-LaRouche Keynote
May 25, 2022 (EIRNS)—Here is the Keynote of Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche: We Need a New Security And Development Architecture for All Nations, Not a Strengthening of Geopolitical Blocs: Why Sweden and Finland Should Not Join NATO, and ‘No’ in the Referendum in Denmark to Join EU’s Military,” the online seminar in Denmark and Sweden today. She was introduced by Schiller Institute in Denmark Vice President Michelle Rasmussen, who moderated the seminar.
The video is available here:
On the international Schiller Institute YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/8Dt9D_D_U4U
On the Danish YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/1Pji0vjD9Kg
Helga Zepp-LaRouche: Hello, good day, Ladies and Gentlemen: As Michelle just said, I have stated that we are facing the most dangerous crisis in the history of mankind. Now, why am I am saying that? Obviously, that includes two world wars in the 20th century, the Cuban Missile Crisis, so it’s a big order. Well, the first reason is the most obvious, for the very first time, we are facing the real danger of a global nuclear war, and if it would ever come to that, it for sure would mean the annihilation of the human species.
In the recent period, the illusion has developed that a limited nuclear war can be fought, and won, or that protracted, hybrid nuclear/conventional war can take place. This was the subject of a maneuver in January of this year, called “Global Lightning,” which had the idea that you have some nuclear bombs, neutron bombs, space war, cyberwar, and this would go on for weeks. Now, the famous nuclear arms specialist, former MIT Prof. Ted Postol has developed all the arguments why this is completely ludicrous, that why, if one uses only one single nuclear weapon, it is the logic of nuclear war, that all will be used.
In the recent months, since the war in Ukraine started, you hear from all kinds of politicians and journalists and who knows who else making reckless talk, saying things like “even if there is the risk of nuclear war, we have to send heavy weapons to Ukraine. We can’t be blackmailed.” Or, “it won’t happen, because nobody would be so foolish to do this.” Well, I don’t think that that is a convincing argument.
The second reason why I am saying we are in the worst crisis ever, is that we experience a civilizational breakdown, the end of an entire system. Now, this has many elements. We have an immediate danger of an escalation of the war, as a result of the present chicken-game policies conducted by NATO against Russia. We are facing a hyperinflationary blowout of the Western neoliberal financial system, which was long in process, even before the war in Ukraine started. We are looking at a world famine, which according to the United Nations is threatening 1.7 billion people with starvation. That is 20% of the entire human species. The pandemic is not over, and all of this is threatening social chaos as a result, and that chaos, all by itself, could threaten to plunge the world into a war.
If one listens to the Western media, and all kinds of politicians, it is naturally all to be blamed on Putin. He is being given all possible names right now, that he has caused an “unprovoked war of aggression”; that he responsible for world famine; that he is the cause of inflation; and so forth and so on. If you say any argument for the real causes of the present situation, you are immediately accused of fake news, you are called a “Putin agent,” it is denounced as Russia propaganda.
Well, it has very little to do with Ukraine. In reality, this present confrontation is about the world order. It is a fight between an unipolar world, which is really a world empire based on the “U.S.-British special relationship,” whereby the Anglo-American hegemon insists that only the so-called “rules-based order” which they have defined is valid; versus a world in which the rise of China and countries associated with Russia and China insist on their own right for economic development.
We are right now at the most precarious moment: The neoliberal system is collapsing. It is not strong enough any more to enforce its will, but the new order is not yet clearly defined. Naturally, in the officially allowed discussion, it is being said that this is a fight between the “democracies” and the “autocratic regimes.” Well, right now, if you listen to what certain politicians and people like Stoltenberg are saying, we are heading toward a potential total decoupling between the West, plus the Five Eyes, plus Japan, Australia, and South Korea, versus a part of the world which includes Russia, China, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the BRICS, plus many countries that are now trying to become part of the BRICS, which is most of the Global South.
In frantic trips, Blinken is running around the world, trying to convince people to join the faction of the “democracies.” President Biden right now is in Asia, doing the same thing. Chancellor Scholz just went to Africa, von der Leyen to India, all in an effort to isolate Russia and China, but it’s not working: Because India, Indonesia, Brazil, Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa, and many others do not want to be pulled into a geopolitical confrontation between the two sides. And what we are actually experiencing is a real renaissance of the Non-Aligned Movement.
Well, we should not overlook, given the American policies, the role of the British, which is “Global Britain,” which is really a new word for the British Empire, which contrary to the views of many, has only changed its shape, but not its essence. Take, for example, an article by Malcolm Chalmers, Deputy Director General of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), which happens to be the oldest official think tank associated with the Royal household, and the British military. They describe themselves as the “world’s oldest and leading U.K. defense and security think tank.” They’re proposing a “Cuban Missile Crisis on steroids,” which could result over the Ukrainian attempt to retake Crimea, which would make it easier, in their view, to settle the Ukraine-Russia war. And this is the stunning proposition in this article, which has the headline, “This War Still Presents Nuclear Risks—Especially in Relation to Crimea,” which was published on May 20 by the RUSI think tank. [https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/war-still-presents-nuclear-risks-especially-relation-crimea]
Chalmers discusses how Russia could be forced into a nuclear confrontation, by sending evermore sophisticated weapons to Ukraine, from which it would ultimately back down. Chalmers describes NATO’s strategy over the last three months as that of “boiling the Russian frog.” You all remember the picture—according to the story, I don’t think it’s actually true—but according to the story, if you throw a frog into boiling water, the frog it will jump out; but if you put the frog into the water pot, when the water is cold, and then you slowly increase the temperature, the frog ends up being boiled without noticing. So he talks about “boiling the Russian frog” by progressively increasing “size and sophistication of the weapons they have been prepared to supply to Ukraine.” Because of those weapons, “the next period will see Ukraine reversing most of Russia’s recent territorial gains, including Kherson and even Mariupol.” That, however, would not occasion a nuclear threat, nor would Ukraine, using those weapons and territorial gains to destroy bridges, railheads, storage sites, and airbases inside Russia. But should Ukraine move to retake Crimea, strike a “tempting target,” of the Kerch Bridge for example, now, that could lead to a “Crimea Missile Crisis,” Chalmbers argues. “A specific threat to use nuclear weapons in relation to Crimea … might be viewed by Putin as a way to restore some of his coercive power, even if he (and the U.S.) doubted whether he would deliver on such a threat…. If a red line were not accepted by Ukraine, Russia might then feel that it had to consider a series of further escalatory options, such as putting its nuclear forces on higher alert.” They are already on alert. “Faced with the alternative of the likely loss of Crimea, Putin might believe that Ukraine (with U.S. encouragement) would be likely to blink first. It would be a moment of extreme peril, with all the parties seeking to understand the intent of each other even as they looked to pursue their national interests.
“Precisely because of the peril inherent in such a situation, a nuclear crisis of this sort could make it easier for leaders to make difficult compromises. Provided that the war was ended and the blockade of Odesa lifted, Ukraine’s leaders might be willing to postpone a settlement of the Crimea question. For Putin, the failure of the invasion, and the subsequent success of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, would have been a massive humiliation. But he would at least be able to argue that the might of the Russian strategic arsenal had, at a moment of great national weakness, successfully deterred NATO’s designs for dismembering Russia. This could be enough for both sides to avoid the worst outcome of all.”
I mean, this is complete insanity, you know! Saying that one has to threaten to retake Crimea, and then get all the nuclear weapons on the highest alert, and then we can sit down and settle. So he calls that a Crimea Cuban Missile Crisis on steroids.
Now, that policy of “boiling the Russian frog,” that has not started three months ago, but that has been the method since 1990, when on Feb. 9, 1990, James Baker III promise to Gorbachev, that NATO would not move one inch eastward. In the entire Yeltsin period, there was a policy to reduce the former superpower into a raw materials exporting nation, with the “shock therapy” of Jeffrey Sachs, and between 1991-1994, the industrial potential of Russia was reduced to only 30%. There is a very important book by Sergei Glazyev, which describes the 1990s, with the title Genocide: Russia and the New World Order, because that is what was imposed on Russia at that time.
Now, the crime of Putin is that he tried to reverse that, and had some success with it. The answer was color revolutions, regime change, humanitarian wars, like the 20 years in Afghanistan, where as a result of the hasty retreat of NATO and the U.S. in August, now, there are 24 million people at starvation levels in Afghanistan, exposed to COVID, measles, polio, without adequate medicine. So, if one would have equally detailed TV coverage of Afghanistan for 20 years, like we see it now with Ukraine every day, maybe the world would have been equally upset—or, maybe not, because the Afghanis are not white.
Then you had the Iraq War in 2003, about which Nancy Pelosi admitted publicly that all responsible people knew ahead of time that there were no weapons of mass destruction. You had Libya. Hillary Clinton, during the Durham investigation in the United States, had to admit that the entire basis of Russiagate were all lies. Did one see anything about that in the mainstream media? Absolutely not! At least not in Europe. Then there was Syria. Then you had the 2014 Maidan coup, about which Victoria Nuland bragged, $5 billion were spent by the State Department on NGOs, and, let’s not forget, the Azov Battalion, which media in the West are now saying, there are no Nazis in Ukraine—but it is a documented fact that there are.
Now, Putin, as a result of this “boiling the Russian frog,” over almost 30 years, on Dec. 15 demanded legally binding security guarantees from the United States and NATO. He has not received an answer from the U.S. or NATO on the core demands, only on arms control, but that was not the essence of what he was demanding. The head of the Russian Security Council, Nikolay Patrushev, said that Russia had no other way, because they were threatened in the existence of the statehood of Russia, when they made what they call the “special military operation” in Ukraine. And one can absolutely argue that Russia was in a situation, according to UN Charter Article 51, which is a question of self-defense and not of aggression.
Now, we are facing with Finland and Sweden, the sixth expansion of NATO. That is the answer, which Stoltenberg even brags about. He says, “Putin wanted less NATO, now he gets more NATO.” So the boiling temperature is just being increased.
One has to take this insane policy of causing a Crimea Cuban Missile Crisis, together with another British policy, which was exposed in a paper by the Henry Jackson Society in 2020, which they put again on the front page of the Henry Jackson Society website, which means it’s ongoing policy of that think tank. It is a report outlining a strategy to use the infamous “Five Eyes” alliance—U.K., U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand—as the instrument to force through the decoupling of the West from China. This rabidly anti-Russia, anti-China neocon think tank is run by British intelligence, through among others, the former MI6 Chief Sir Richard Dearlove, who is the main brain of Russiagate, which was completely discredited as a lie; and he was one of the founders of the Henry Jackson Society and is one of its principals today.
So, even the attempt to decouple China from the international system, before consummated, could detonate an economic nuclear bomb upon the entire world economy. China is not just the world’s largest trading power: It’s currently generating the highest rate of scientific and technological development on the planet, a productive power which the developing sector nations and the collapsing Western nations urgently require if they want to survive. But actual nuclear warfare could also be the result, because part of the Henry Jackson Society strategy is to build up ties with Taiwan leading to its separation from China. China has made abundantly clear that it will respond with overwhelming military force to any attempt to split Taiwan off from the rest of the nation of China. This is as dangerous a proposition as a NATO-backed Ukraine moving to retake Crimea. So, when President Biden made a gaffe in answer to a reporter on his recent trip to Japan, “Would the United States defend Taiwan militarily?” Biden said, again, “Yes.” And he had to be correct, again, by the White House.
Now, the Chinese already had editorials where they said, this is not a “gaffe,” this is a signal of what is the real intention of the United States. And Chas Freeman, who was Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, and he was the official translator for President Nixon in his 1972 trip to China, and a career diplomat, he warned, and called it a colossal mistake for Biden to have made such a stupid statement.
President Biden is currently championing these precisely British strategies on his current trip to Asia. Fresh from celebrating the expansion of NATO, Biden is to unveil a grandiose Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) during his stop in Japan as the highlight of the trip. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan stated bluntly on Wednesday, May 18, that the message of the IPEF is that “democracies and open societies of the world stand together to shape the rules of the road. We think that message will be heard everywhere. We think it will be heard in Beijing.”
Fifty-two U.S. Senators sent Biden off on his trip with instructions that Taiwan be incorporated as one of the “countries” participating in the IPEF, which is clearly not acceptable from the standpoint of China, because it is a violation of the One China policy.
Now, just today, if you open the media, if you look at the TV, if you look at TV or newspapers, a huge scandal story about pictures from the supposed labor camps in Xinjiang, were “investigated” by a group of international media, that 1 million Uighurs would have been tortured, beaten in labor camps, forced labor, and so forth. Naturally, our so-called Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock immediately had an outcry demanding a transparent clearing up of the accusations. Calls that all relations with China should be cut—after cutting relations with Russia—and that all trade with China should be stopped, now, let’s look at it realistically: China in 2021 was the third largest partner for the EU export of goods, 10.2%, and the largest partner for the EU import of goods, 22.4%; for Germany, it was the largest trading partner for goods in 2021, with a volume of trade of over €245 million. To cut that would mean total economic suicide, which is already happening with the relations with Russia.
What is the source of this incredible story? The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of the leading newspapers in Germany, says, all the photos and data have been made available through Adrian Zenz, a German anthropologist, and longtime Xinjiang observer. Now, this Mr. Adrian Zenz claims that he got all of that from an “unnamed source” who had access to cyber, cyberwar spying and whatnot. Well, that’s a very dubious observation. But Adrian Zenz is not an unknown entity: The blog, The Grayzone, and the very respected investigative journalist Ajit Singh and Max Blumenthal already wrote articles in 2019, after he had come up with a similar story about genocide in Xinjiang, that Mr. Zenz is a “far-right fundamentalist Christian who opposes homosexuality and gender equality, supports ’scriptural spanking”’ of children, and believes he is ‘led by God’ on a ‘mission’ against China.,” because the end-times are near and the rise of the anti-Christ is also coming. He is on a complete rampage, saying that [there is genocide in] Xinjiang because of a collapse of the demographic curve of the Uighurs, and Lyle Goldstein, who is professor at the Naval War College in the United States, says that such a statement is “ridiculous to the point of being inciting to those who lost relatives in the Holocaust.”
There is ample evidence that there is no “demographic collapse” of the Uighurs in Xinjiang: Just the opposite. There is a 2019 study in the British medical journal Lancet, which talks about a massive improvement of life expectancy among the Uighurs, a demographic growth rate which is much higher than that of the Han Chinese, an improvement in maternal health, in infant mortality, and all of this represents “a remarkable success story.”
Zenz’s so-called testimony comes from Uighur exiles who are cultivated by the U.S. State Department. Zenz served as a fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington, D.C., which is a right-wing lobbying group born out of the National Captive Nations Committee. Now, that is a very, very interesting connection, because that was founded by Ukrainian nationalist Lev Dobriansky, who is heading this institution whose co-chairman was Yaroslav Stetsko, who was a leader of the OUN-B militia, which is the Nazi group that fought along with German Nazis during the occupation of Ukraine in World War II. Stetsko and his wife had a residence in Munich during the entire postwar period, and led from there the “Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations.” After he died, Mrs. Stetsko went to Ukraine and rebuilt the OUN-B, the Bandera organization, in the tradition of the ideas of Stepan Bandera. Now, that is a direct connection to that apparatus, which was heavily led by the Western secret services—Bandera himself joined the MI6 in 1947, and the BND in Munich had a close, at least “knowledge” about these people (to say the least).
Zenz was also deployed by the Jamestown Foundation, a neocon think tank in D.C., which was founded by CIA director William Casey as an extra-governmental channel to pay Soviet dissidents.
If Germany or other European nations fall for this intelligence operation, which is exactly what the Henry Jackson Society talked about, namely the “Five Eyes” at work, if they follow this, it would be complete economic suicide. Now, even Henry Kissinger, at the age of 99 years, is more reasonable, and at Davos, he said the world has at maximum a window of two months to end the Ukraine war through negotiations, and he appealed to Ukraine that they should agree to a territorial compromise to get peace.
At the Schiller conference on April 9, we presented a completely different approach: There is an alternative to the complete decoupling between the so-called “democracies” and the Global South on the other side. The new system is already emerging rapidly. There are many countries which at the recent foreign ministers’ meeting of the BRICS, want to be part of: Argentina, Indonesia, Egypt, Nigeria and many others. You have the BRICS enlarged, you have the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, almost all organizations of the Global South that want to be part of a new international security and development architecture, which basically is the combination of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, together with two other proposals by President Xi Jinping: The Global Development Initiative and the Global Security Initiative, which is actively being implemented.
Now, what we need is such a conference, for a new international security and development architecture, in the tradition of the Peace of Westphalia. Now, the Peace of Westphalia was the recognition of all war parties that if they would continue the war, no one would be left to enjoy the victory, because they would all be dead. And that is why they developed the principle that any peace must be based on the interest of the other. The security interest of every country on the planet, which today would mean a security architecture emphatically involving Russia and China. And such a conference, must address the causes for such a war danger: Because it is not enough at this point to be against the war. You have to solve the problem that the collapse of the neoliberal financial system is in progress.
Lyndon LaRouche has a unique record that he foresaw what is happening today, the present crisis, already in August 1971, when Nixon ended the old Bretton Woods system, by replacing the fixed-exchange-rate system, with a floating exchange-rate system, and LaRouche predicted at that time, that if you would continue on that road, it would lead to a new depression, the danger of a new war, and fascism. And that is exactly where we are today.
LaRouche proposed Four Laws to solve the crisis. The first step, a global Glass-Steagall banking separation system, must end the casino economy. There must be capital and exchange controls to prevent the speculative manipulation of currencies, which we see right now in much of the world.
Every country must have a National Bank to make credit generation again the question of the sovereign government, and not that of private bankers, in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton. Then, these National Banks must be connected through a credit system which provides long-term, low-interest credit for real investment in the physical economy.
Also, the Fourth Law is that we must have a crash program for fusion technology, which in the recent period has made tremendous progress, and the commercial use of it is visibly on the horizon. Because we need a massive increase in the productivity of the world economy because just the fact that 1.7 billion people are threatened with starvation, that 2 billion have no clean water, is the proof that the present level of productivity has fallen way below the level of maintaining the present world population of 8 billion people.
And there must be international cooperation, not only for fusion technology, but also for space technology and space travel, because that is the vanguard of scientific and technological realm today.
So we are right now confronted with a situation where the leading governments and institutions are challenged: Are we able to solve the problems of the world, are we able to address the problems which threaten the very existence of mankind, or not? Now, the Schiller Institute has proposed for more than 30 years, first, the Eurasian Land-Bridge; the New Silk Road, and in 2013, we proposed the “New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge.” Please show the slide: Now, this is a blueprint how we can overcome world poverty, how we can eradicate underdevelopment forever, and how can we create a new, modern world health system for every country in the world, which is the only way how we can overcome old and new diseases, this pandemic and threatening new pandemics.
This is absolutely possible, and this is the vision of how the world will look in a few years, anyway, if we avoid the present danger of nuclear war. The development of infrastructure connecting all continents is the natural way how infrastructure development will continue, provided there is peace. So I think that is something we need to put on the agenda for discussion, and the reason why, despite the incredible danger, one can be optimistic, is because we are the human species, we are capable of reason, and we are not barbarians.
Thank you.
Rasmussen: OK, we have 10 minutes now questions to Helga. … We have a question from Elena. While we’re waiting for Elena, we have a question from Jens Jørgen Nielsen, one of our speakers.
Jens Jørgen Nielsen: Thank you for a very good presentation. I essentially agree with you. I have one question. As you may know, I live in Denmark, where we will have a referendum in a week’s time, about the European Union: We are discussing in our country for the time being, the role of the European Union and whether it should have an army, how should we have security. I would like a few words: How do you think about the European Union in this context? Because I am somehow skeptical, but I would like to hear your opinion on the European Union and the development right now of the European Union in this context? And also specifically the question of the European military arm, which is the subject of referendum? And the policy toward Ukraine and Russia?
Zepp-LaRouche: When there was a referendum about the EU Constitution in France and Holland 2005, which was defeated, because the majority voted against it. And then they shifted it to the Lisbon Treaty, because by not calling it a “constitution” but by calling it a “treaty,” it did not require a vote. So this was decided in great secrecy, but we were extremely closely watching it at the time. And if you look at the Charter of the EU as it was agreed upon in Lisbon in December 2007, it is practically interwoven with NATO, in such a degree that the Article 5 of NATO practically also involves the EU. In other words, when you join the EU, you are practically also part of whatever NATO does. And the character of NATO has also dramatically changed, in the last 30 years, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In the time of the Soviet Union, it was a defensive apparatus against the Warsaw Pact. But in the recent period, it has turned into a completely anti-Russian Russophobe alliance, and therefore, when, in November 2013, when the Ukraine government under Viktor Yanukovych refused to join the EU Association Agreement, it was clear that if Ukraine would join the EU, it would give NATO access to the Black Sea, and that is why he opted out in the last moment.
So, I think that that is an important thing to keep in mind. And the fact that Ursula von der Leyen is at the forefront of all of the policies which I described as British, in my various examples, such as the fight of so-called democracies and so-called autocratic regimes, when she is talking about that every day: She went to India talking like that.
I think the present EU has completely lost touch with the interest of its member-states. I think they have become a gigantic waterhead of a bureaucracy in Brussels which makes for the most part completely ridiculous decisions and orders and rules which are absolutely contrary to the interest of the member countries. And I actually have called for Germany to move out of the EU, because we don’t need a bureaucracy to have a unified Europe! We could have a Europe of the Fatherlands, in the spirit of Charles de Gaulle! We could work together for a join mission to contribute to shaping a new world order in a positive way: We could do that by having national sovereign governments just working together. You don’t need this bureaucracy. That is my view, and I would just advise anybody who has an interest in their own sovereignty to not join this colossus.
Rasmussen: Elena, why don’t you ask your question now?
Elena: Thank you so much. I find everything that Madam Helga said very, very interesting. And of course, at the moment, as I am very interested in the situation between Ukraine and Russia, my optimistic feeling is that Russia is going to come to a solution with Ukraine. Because as I have heard today, Putin has been somehow winning in the territories. So most likely something good will happen.
However, I think what Madam said is so beautiful, I would like to have something to read if possible. Because my connection was not very good, and I was not able to hear well. However, I would be very grateful if Madam could let me have what she said in a written form, that I can read and study. And I can write an article about what she has said, what are the goals of this new architecture and let other people to know about it.
Rasmussen: Elena we will have a transcript of Helga’s comments, and we can send those to you and all the participants. And also the video of this conference will be available to send around.
We have one more questioner, Kwame. We can take a short question.
Kwame: I’m a Swede. Thank you for a nice presentation. My question, because I don’t know: Would you say that China is united and in full control of the Chinese Communist Party? Or, are there some Chinese oligarchs that have good connections with their American counterparts? As for they send some money into the [inaud 51:09] laboratory, maybe to somehow get them connected to the globalists in the Western hemisphere. So, my question is, does the Chinese Communist Party have full control of the country?
Zepp-LaRouche: I would say, absolutely yes. And I just should say something, because right now, when you say “Communist,” some people fall completely into a coma and have hysterical outbursts. I mean, the Communist Party of China is, in my view—and I don’t even think that they would agree with that—but I think they’re 90% Confucian, in the tradition of the ancient Chinese traditions and philosophy, which influenced Chinese policy for more than two millennia. And naturally, there is an element of Marxism and communism, but it’s a meritocracy.
The way people look at the CPC in the West is completely uninformed, and I can only—my best way of answering is that I was in China for the first time, in 1971, in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, and I could travel around in Shanghai, Tientsin, Qingdao, Beijing, I could visit the countryside: And I saw a country which was really distraught! People were poor, the conditions were very terrible. The beautiful garden of the Summer Palace had been painted all red by the Revolutionary Guards. In any case, this was 51 years ago, and when you go to China now, it is so developed! They have 40,000 km of fast train system, of which nobody in the United States or Europe can even dream, because we have nothing like that! China has made an incredible development: 850 million people have been lifted out of poverty. And I could say many, many more things.
Deng Xiaoping coined the term “judging truth from facts.” And if you look at the facts of the gigantic development of China in the last 40 years, in particular, then this Communist Party has done something right. And if you travel to China, and study Chinese history, and meet people in all ranks of life, professors, students, people living in the countryside, other professions, you go to restaurants, and you see how people live, you find a population which is primarily content. They’re optimistic: They’re not like the Europeans and they’re for sure not like the Germans, who are completely pessimistic, and think nothing can function and you can’t do anything anyway. No. That is not the view in China. They are optimistic; they have, to a very large extent, trust in the government. And I think that the Chinese model, which the West is now regarding as a big competitor and threat, the Chinese model is doing something right, which the West is not doing right! And rather than opposing it, we should go to the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, and say: We should respect each other, even if the other one has a different social system, and even if the other one has a different way of doing things, according to their history, and their tradition. And I think then, we can absolutely peacefully live together. And that is my stated view, and I think all the slanders about China are really absolutely unfounded, and in particular, this present campaign by this very dubious Adrian Zenz, we should squash before it really takes hold.
Rasmussen: All right, thank you very much Helga! We really appreciate your very in-depth discussion.
Schiller Instituttets Dialog mellem eksperter den 26. maj:
Politikernes vanvid udgør en trussel om atomkrig
Den 26. maj 2022 (EIRNS) – Schiller Instituttets online konference i dag med titlen “U.S. and European Military and Security Experts Warning: The Insanity of Politicians Threatens Nuclear War”, indeholdt præsentationer og udvekslinger mellem fire militær- og strategispecialister fra Frankrig, Italien og USA og med Schiller Instituttets grundlægger Helga Zepp-LaRouche og ordstyrer Dennis Speed. Få timer efter begivenheden var der næsten 2.000 visninger på YouTube.
(https://youtu.be/8Dt9D_D_U4U)
Dagens dialog fulgte efter en drøftelse i går, som Schiller Instituttet i Sverige og Danmark var værter for, og som blev gennemført online, med centrum i København, og hvor deltagerne omfattede fem talere med hjemsted i denne nordlige region samt også fru LaRouche. Arrangementet den 25. maj havde titlen: “Vi har brug for en ny sikkerheds- og udviklingsarkitektur for alle nationer, ikke en styrkelse af geopolitiske blokke; hvorfor Sverige og Finland ikke bør tilslutte sig NATO”.
https://schillerinstitute.com/blog/2022/05/24/87866/
Disse to arrangementer er en del af Schiller Instituttets igangværende aktivitetsforløb, der opfordrer kræfter og enkeltpersoner overalt til at mobilisere imod krigens vanvid og for en ny ramme for fred gennem udvikling. Udskrifter og uddrag af begge denne uges konferencer vil blive offentliggjort i det ugentlige EIR, dateret den 3. juni.
Zepp-LaRouche sagde i sine afsluttende bemærkninger i dag: “Slut dig til os som organisator, som en mulighed for at forbedre menneskeheden”. I weekenden den 18.-19. juni vil Schiller Instituttet afholde en verdensomspændende dialog i flere etaper for en indledende gruppe af kræfter, der er optaget af at skabe en ny global økonomisk og sikkerhedsmæssig arkitektur. En underskriftsindsamling fra Schiller Instituttet til dette formål, der blev udsendt den 23. februar, har nu omkring 4.500 underskrifter fra alle kontinenter. (https://schillerinstitute.nationbuilder.com/convoke_an_international_conference_to_establish_a_new_security_and_development_architecture_for_all_nations)
Zepp-LaRouche fastlagde indledningsvis fokus for dagens knap tre timer lange arrangement: “Enhver politisk overvejelse, der ikke starter med overvejelser om faren for atomkrig, er værdiløs”. Hun og de næste talere uddybede derefter forskellige aspekter af, hvordan vi er havnet i denne situation, i samme ånd som et videoklip af Lyndon LaRouche, der pointerer, at “Ingen begivenhed har sin egen årsag…. Man må tage udgangspunkt i verden som helhed.”
Schiller Instituttets grundlægger skitserede et levende billede af krigens vanvid, fra aktuelle eksempler på hvem der diskuterer atomvåben som en del af en strategi, der kan “vindes”, til historien med dæmonisering af Rusland og Kina som fjenden, imod hvem krig skulle give mening. Derefter præsenterede hun i detaljer tilgangen fra den “Westfalske Fred” som en vej ud af dette. Hun brugte de fem principper for fredelig sameksistens (Panchsheel) fra 1950’ernes periode med national suverænitet. Hun drøftede globale økonomiske og videnskabelige prioriteter, fra behovet for en “global Glass-Steagall” for at gøre en ende på kasinoøkonomien, til relaterede foranstaltninger med nationalbankvæsen til gavn for offentligheden og rigelig kredit til prioriteringer inden for videnskab og teknologi, herunder en “landsby på månen, en by på Mars, interstellar rumfart”, som alle kræver et gennembrud inden for fusionsenergi og milliarder af kreative sjæle. Under diskussionen berettede hun, at hun så “en fremvækst af en alliancefri ånd” blandt mange nationer i dag, som afviser bestræbelserne på at indføre det dødbringende globale NATO-verdensherredømme.
General Leonardo Tricarico (pensioneret), tidligere stabschef for det italienske luftvåben, tog hårdt fat på spørgsmålet: “Hvad kan vi gøre for at stoppe denne meningsløse krig?” Han anførte datoer, med nøjagtig dokumentation, om de FN- og endog NATO-vedtægter, der er blevet overtrådt, hvilket har bragt os i denne fare, og udtalte: “I stedet for at hælde benzin på bålet i en krigsfremkaldende hetz, bør vi have forhandlinger” om Ukraine. Det er vores “ufravigelige pligt” at få dette til at ske.
Oberst Richard H. Black (pensioneret), tidligere leder af den amerikanske hærs strafferetlige afdeling i Pentagon og tidligere senator i Virginia, gav en gribende redegørelse for begivenhederne siden det “revolutionære kup” fra 2014, som MI6 og CIA påtvang i Ukraine mod Rusland. Han sagde om vores nuværende situation: “Dette er vores “1914-øjeblik”.” Han påpegede, hvor ulovlige, forkerte og farlige personer som Steny Hoyer (D-MD) er, der udtaler: “Vi er i krig mod Rusland”.
Den næste taler, Eric Denécé fra Frankrig, tog fat på dette synspunkt og indledte med at stille spørgsmålet: “Hvordan er dette sket? Jeg er hverken for eller imod Rusland eller Ukraine. Men denne krigsførelse burde aldrig have fundet sted. NATO burde være blevet afviklet ved afslutningen af Den kolde Krig.” Denécé er direktør for det franske Center for Efterretningsstudier (CF2R). Han påpegede, at de vestlige nationer, der forsyner Ukraine, er “direkte krigsførende” mod Rusland. Han sagde, at “læren af geopolitik er, at ingen stat kan sikre sine interesser på bekostning af nabostater”.
Ray McGovern, tidligere CIA-analytiker og stiftende medlem af Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), valgte at indlede med en formaning om at “se under overfladen”. Se med hjertet i stedet for kun med øjnene”, og derefter brugte han dette til at give en forklaring på de politikere, der fører verden ind i denne katastrofe, idet de handler gennem MICIMATT, et nu berømt begreb af McGovern, som henviser til det militær-industrielle-kongres-efterretningstjeneste-medie-akademia-tænketank-kompleks.
Spørgsmål fra det internationale publikum, og fra talerne indbyrdes bragte mange punkter frem, herunder Zepp-LaRouches bemærkning om, at politikernes og mediernes “drejebogs”-aspekt, manifesterer sig i en forfærdelig og hadefuld grad i Tyskland og andre steder. I forbindelse med bemærkningerne blev forslaget om en model af “østrigsk karakter” for Ukraine rejst, hvor man anvender neutralitet i forbindelse med håndteringen af de dybtliggende komplikationer, der er involveret.
Oberst Black var fast besluttet på, at vi bør forstå, at hensigten om at fremstille våben ikke virker, medmindre man har fjender, så vi bliver manipuleret med hensyn til, hvem vores fjender er. Folk må gøre sig fri af dette. Når det drejer sig om Rusland og Kina, må vi “slippe ud af illusionen om, at “de er ude efter os”. Den “eneste aggressor er USA, Storbritannien og NATO”.
Zepp-LaRouche opsummerede situationen i løbet af den afsluttende firepersoners dialog: “Den gamle orden er ved at falde fra hinanden. Det gamle paradigme er dødt.” Tænkende mennesker må overveje, hvad principperne for det nye system burde omfatte. Dette påtvinges os af omstændighederne, fra hungersnød til knaphed, til sygdom og til krig. “Det nye navn for fred er udvikling.”
“Dan et partnerskab mellem unge fra hele verden for at kæmpe for en bedre fremtid
Den 4. maj 2022 (EIRNS) – I løbet af et omfattende interview med forfatter og publicist Daniel Estulin
https://vimeo.com/704208930/0bb85d2c8d svarede Schiller Instituttets grundlægger Helga Zepp-LaRouche i dag på et spørgsmål om emnet for Schiller Instituttets kommende internationale internet-dialog lørdag den 7. maj kl. 17 dansk tid om “Ungdommens rolle i skabelsen af en ny international økonomisk arkitektur”.
“I det væsentlige vil det være en fortsættelse af den sidste videokonference [den 9. april, “For en konference til etablering af en ny sikkerheds- og udviklingsarkitektur for alle nationer”], fordi det vi har iværksat er idéen om, at man er nødt til at have en international sikkerhedsarkitektur, der omfatter alle nationers interesser. Derfor havde vi på den sidste konference talere fra Rusland, USA, Europa, Indien, Sydafrika og Latinamerika. Det er tanken om, at hvis vi som menneskehed ikke kan mødes og beslutte os for principper, der sikrer vores alles overlevelse, så er vi ikke bedre end nogle vilde dyr – selv om vilde dyr ikke er så onde, som den måde nogle mennesker nogle gange opfører sig på. Så det var en meget produktiv konference.
“Jeg har den idé, at man er nødt til at forme den internationale sikkerhedsarkitektur på grundlaget af fælles økonomisk udvikling, så det bliver en international sikkerheds- og udviklingsarkitektur. For når man først har en aftale om udvikling for alle nationer – Afrika, Latinamerika, Asien, de fattigere dele af Europa og USA – så kan denne fælles interesse danne grundlag for en fælles sikkerhedsarkitektur.
“Så den næste videokonference henvender sig primært til unge mennesker. For hvis man sætter sig i et ungt menneskes sted, lad os sige i Tyskland, Frankrig, Italien, USA osv., ser fremtiden ikke særlig lys ud. Man har udsigt til 3. Verdenskrig, man har udsigt til en kollapsende økonomi, et kollapsende finanssystem, sult i verden, en pandemi, som endnu ikke er under kontrol.
“Denne konference har til hensigt at danne et partnerskab mellem unge fra hele verden for at kæmpe for en bedre fremtid, thi fremtiden tilhører de unge. De bliver ikke spurgt lige nu: Er det virkelig i deres interesse, at verden skal gå op i en atomar svampesky efterfulgt af en atomvinter? De unge skal have indflydelse på, hvordan deres fremtid skal se ud.
“Der er så spændende udviklinger i gang! Vi er f.eks. på tærsklen til at få fusionsenergi. Det er utroligt, for når vi først har kommerciel fusionsenergi, har vi energisikkerhed og råstofsikkerhed på planeten. Desuden vil rumrejser blive meget forbedret, fordi vi har en ny brændstofkilde til rumrejser. Og så er der hele idéen om samarbejde i rummet: opbygning af månelandsbyer og senere opbygning af en by på Mars.
“Alt dette er ting, som begejstrer unge mennesker. Det er der, hvor menneskeheden kan bevæge sig hen, forudsat at vi kommer ud af den nuværende krise. Så det er hvad denne konference vil tage fat på, og jeg tror, at vi vil have mange unge mennesker fra alle fem kontinenter til stede.”
POLITISK ORIENTERING den 28. april 2022:
Vesten har startet den nye verdenskrig.
Kan den stoppes inden det bliver en atomkrig?
Klik her for lydfilen.
Med formand Tom Gillesberg
Lyd:
Resumé:
Mødet på den amerikanske luftbase i Ramstein, Tyskland, hvor Morten Bødskov deltog, var NATO ++. Ud over NATO-medlemmer og Ukraine var også Israel, Japan, Sydkorea og andre af USA’s partnere til stede for at aftale massiv militær støtte til Ukraine og fortsat udvidet militært samarbejde. Tysklands kansler Scholz gav efter for presset til at levere tanks og tunge våben til Ukraine. NATO er i total krig mod Rusland via sin proxy Ukraine. Ukraines præsident Zelenskij er blot en skuespiller, der læser de manuskripter op, der er skrevet i London og Washington.
USA, NATO og EU lyver om at lave sanktioner for at stoppe krigen. Man har på intet tidspunkt forsøgt at stoppe krigen i Ukraine, men har tværtimod skabt den for at bruge den til at ødelægge Rusland, som en uafhængig magt. Se analysen fra den amerikanske tidligere militærmand og senator Richard Black og læs de rystende fakta fra den schweiziske tidligere FN og NATO-militærrådgiver Jaques Baud. Det var ikke Rusland der startede krigen den 24. februar. De reagerede blot på den igangværende planlagte militære operation, som Vesten har haft i gang i Ukraine siden kuppet i Kiev i 2014. Der har aldrig været en massiv russisk militær overlegenhed. 130.000 russiske kombatanter har stået over for 250.000 på den ukrainske side. Rusland havde aldrig opbygget den 3-1 fordel, en angriber gerne skal have, for det var aldrig Rusland, der ønskede krigen. Man handlede i desperation for at imødegå det planlagte vestligt støttede ukrainske angreb imod Donbas og Krim.
Der er masser af krigsforbrydelser i krigen, men i modsætning til den ukrainske (britisk iscenesatte) ukrainske propaganda er det ikke russerne, der er unødigt brutale, men de ukrainske ideologiserede specialstyrker. Se interviewet med Richard Black. Var der nogen der troede på, at videoen med nyvaskede smilende blonde børn virkelig var indspillet efter to måneders mareridt i jorden under stålværket i Mariupol? Eller var det blot endnu en iscenesat propagandafilm. Er der 50 franske militærmænd gemt i værkets underjordiske gange, der var ansvarlige for sænkningen af Ruslands flagskib Moskva?
I lighed med Tyskland og de andre europæiske vasalstater har Danmark opgivet sin suverænitet og parerer blot ordrer fra USA (EU) og NATO. Stem nej til ophævelsen af forsvarsforbeholdet, men det er ikke nok til at stoppe krig. Der skal også være et massivt nej til fortsættelsen af verdenskrigen imod Rusland og andre (som f.eks. Kina), der nægter at opgive sin suverænitet. Ellers får vi atomkrig.
Den fortsatte krig i Ukraine og sanktionerne imod Rusland vil medføre global fødevaremangel der kan true over en milliard mennesker på livet, men hvem hører stemmer i Vesten bekymre sig om det? Kun Rusland, Kina, Indien og andre ikke-vestlige nationer har iværksat tiltag for at undgå det. Vil Indien indgå i en alliance sammen med Rusland og Kina for at opretholde sin suverænitet? Ruslands lukning af gassen for Polen og Bulgarien er blot et skud over boven. Tyskland og Italien er langt mere afhængige af russisk gas, der ikke kan erstattes med andet i løbet af flere år. Hvis EU fortsætter konfrontationen vil man påføre Tysklands og Europas økonomi og levestandard ubodelig skade.
Det vestligt ledede globale finanssystem er allerede i nedsmeltning pga. kæmpe gæld, stigende inflation og eksploderende renter. De vedvarende paniske aktioner for at skade Rusland og andre, der ikke makker ret, trækker tæppet væk under det vestlige system og den vestlige globale magt. Vil Vesten forstå sin fejltagelse inden alt forsvinder i atomkrig?
Det er ikke Rusland imod verden men Vesten imod det meste af Verden. Schiller Instituttets konference fra den 9. april om en ny global sikkerhedsarkitektur viser vejen ud. Kinas Xi Jinping har svaret med en opfordring til et globalt sikkerhedsinitiativ. Kan vi få folk i Vesten til at hæve deres stemmer og sige fra over for selvmordspolitikken?
Bliv aktiv. Gå med i Schiller Instituttets kampagne. Skab historie. Stop katastrofen og skab en fredsorden og en global renæssance.
NYHEDSORIENTERING APRIL 2022: Fredelig sameksistens eller atomkrig?
Panel 1: hovedtale af Dennis Small ved Schiller Instituttets videokonferenece
For at etablere en ny sikkerheds- og udviklingsarkitektur for alle nationer den 9. april 2022
Jeg er meget glad for at være her i dag blandt denne fremragende gruppe af internationale tænksomme aktører eller aktive tænkere, som er samlet for at udarbejde løsninger på verdens problemer. Problemerne er virkelig store. Jeg kommer til at tænke på, hvad Ramsey Clark engang sagde om det, der gjorde Lyndon LaRouche så farlig for hans fjender i det internationale finansielle etablissement, nemlig at hans organisation var en “frugtbar idémotor”.
Og det er igen i dag præcis det, der gør os til en så stor en trussel mod det eksisterende finansielle etablissement med centrum i London og en vigtig gren i Wall Street. Det haster nu med at få gang i disse motorer for at håndtere en krise af en størrelsesorden, som vi ikke har set siden Den sorte Død i det 14. århundrede.
Vi kigger f.eks. i retning af en global hungersnød, hvor det for blot et par måneder siden blev anslået til at 235-250 millioner mennesker ville dø af sult i løbet af dette år, men nu er de bedste vurderinger – og de er desværre præcise – at så mange som 1 milliard mennesker meget vel kan dø af sult i år.
Det er en ottendedel af den menneskelige befolkning. Situationen i bestemte lande, især i Mellemøsten og Nordafrika, er slem på grund af deres ekstreme afhængighed af import. Ved at afskære den russiske og ukrainske eksport gennem disse supersanktioner der er blevet anvendt – de to lande har tilsammen en tredjedel af al den hvede, der handles på verdensmarkederne – rammes især Afrika og Mellemøsten endnu hårdere.
Energisituationen er endnu værre. Det rammer Europa særlig hårdt. Europa er fuldstændig afhængig af russisk eksport af olie og gas. Tyskland, den mest industrialiserede af Europas nationer, får 24 % af sin samlede energiforsyning fra russisk gas og olie, som det fremgår af grafikken på skærmbilledet. Men dette rammer ikke kun Afrika, det rammer ikke alene Tyskland. Disse supersanktioner, der kommer oven på et igangværende sammenbrud af hele det globale finanssystem, berører hele verden.
Det, vi nu har at gøre med, som I kan se ved at kigge på Lyndon LaRouches berømte Triple Curve, tredobbelte kurvefunktion, som giver en idé om forholdet mellem væksten i finansielle spekulative aktiver og det fysiske økonomiske sammenbrud nedenunder. Det ses, at dette problem faktisk begyndte med et kollaps i vækstraterne i den fysiske økonomi tilbage omkring 1971, da det flydende valutakurssystem blev indført internationalt. Bretton Woods-systemet med faste valutakurser, der blev indført af Franklin Delano Roosevelt, blev skrottet, og det åbnede dørene for en flodbølge af spekulation, som i dag har skabt en boble af derivater, der er på et sted mellem 1,5 og 2 billioner dollars.
Det der er sket, som man kan se på den anden version af denne tredobbelte kurve, er, at oven på dette igangværende sammenbrud har vi haft en nedgang pga. pandemien, som forårsagede frygtelige kriser i hele verden. Oven i det var der en yderligere forværring af den forsætlige afindustrialisering, der blev indført efter COP26-mødet og miljøpolitikken på internationalt plan generelt.
Og nu er der så en tredje tilbagegang af en dramatisk art med de sanktioner, der er blevet indført internationalt. Så siden 1971, da det flydende valutakurssystem blev indført, var det begyndelsen til enden på det, der i virkeligheden var Glass/Steagall-systemet internationalt, som adskilte produktiv anvendelse af valuta og kredit fra spekulative aktiviteter. På internationalt plan taler vi om et system med faste valutakurser; i USA er det Glass/Steagall-systemet. Det er det samme med hensyn til de økonomiske grundprincipper.
Lad mig gå over til spørgsmålet om, hvordan vi løser dette problem, for jeg mener, at det er det, som vores opmærksomhed og vores diskussion virkelig skal fokuseres på. Vi har sammensat et program til at løse denne krise globalt, til at skabe en ny økonomisk arkitektur med udgangspunkt i LaRouches grundlæggende økonomiske politik, der er centreret omkring hans Fire Love. Se, det man begynder med, og man er altid nødt til at begynde med dette, er den fysiske økonomi. Ikke de finansielle aspekter, men den fysiske økonomi.
Hvis man ser på kombinationen af Rusland, Indien og Kina – hvad Primakov kaldte den strategiske trekant – kan man se, at disse tre nationer i sig selv, som alle bliver angrebet og ødelagt af de spekulative angreb fra London og Washington og de politiske angreb og også de militære angreb, tilsammen udgør 38% af verdens befolkning; de producerer 42% af hveden, 66% af stålet. 45% af de nye atomkraftværker der bygges. Det er ikke sådan, at de kan fungere på en selvstændig måde, men de har et meget godt grundlag for at bryde med det spekulative system og etablere – og dette er det andet punkt i vores forslag – en fælles valuta, der indledes mellem disse nationer, som ville etablere en fast valutakurs indbyrdes og med en absolut barriere mellem dem og det spekulative dollarsystem.
Der har været mange diskussioner i finansielle kredse på internationalt plan om, hvordan man kan gøre dette. Ville den blive bakket op af guld, af råvarer, af hvad? Det vigtigste, der gør en valuta værdifuld, er, at den er bakket op af realkredit, der udstedes i en produktiv retning. Jeg vil gerne citere for jer, hvad Lyndon LaRouche sagde om dette på et seminar den 29. juni 2005 i Berlin. Han sagde:
“Regeringers og ledende institutioners populære opfattelse af penge er vanvittig, når man ser på virkningerne af begrebet, og den måde det anvendes på. Pengenes værdi bør bestemmes ud fra et videnskabeligt princip, ikke et regnskabsprincip. Og det videnskabelige princip er, hvad der er en fysisk forsvarlig bestemmelse af regeringernes vilje og evne til at skabe kredit på lang sigt til udvikling af deres økonomier og deres produktivitet. Viden om regeringens vilje og kompetence til at skabe værdi, til at skabe rigdom og til at have tilstrækkelig velstand til at tilbagebetale den gæld, som man skaber, rettidigt. Dette er et fysisk spørgsmål, ikke et regnskabsrelateret spørgsmål.”
Jeg mener, at dette er afgørende for opgaven med at sammensætte en sådan fælles blok og en valuta, der kan understøtte den med hensyn til dens fysiske økonomiske kapacitet.
For det tredje skal de nationer, der er en del af denne genopretning af de fysiske økonomier ved at bryde med det synkende Titanic, etablere nationale valutaer med faste valutakurser, ikke en flydende valutakurs, som åbner døren for spekulation med dollaren, og forsvare den med valutakontrol. Brug dette til at etablere hamiltonisk kredit udstedt til produktive aktiviteter af præcis den slags, som Lyndon LaRouche netop beskrev. Behovet for en sådan fuldstændig mur mellem den spekulative økonomi og den produktive økonomi er kernen i en ordning af Glass/Steagall-typen.
Med dette på plads som en byggesten eller et udgangspunkt har vi så kravet om de tre RIC-nationer [Rusland, Indien, Kina], som erindres var starten på BRIC efter RIC, og derefter BRICS [Brasilien, Rusland, Indien, Kina, Sydafrika]. De burde udvides ved at låne kapital til produktive aktiviteter til udvikling af Den tredje Verden, udviklingssektoren. De fleste nationer i udviklingssektoren vil være meget glade for at tilslutte sig en sådan ordning, fordi de bogstaveligt talt bliver dræbt af politikken fra det synkende, selvdestruerende, transatlantiske finanssystem.
Det er ekstremt vigtigt som et femte punkt, at USA og de europæiske nationer kan tilbydes denne type ny mekanisme. Det er det, som Lyndon LaRouche altid havde foreslået; en fire-magts-aftale mellem Rusland, Indien, Kina og USA. I forbindelse med forslag som f.eks. Kinas Bælte- og Vej-Initiativ tilbydes USA og Europa at tilslutte sig disse aktiviteter, som naturligvis vil være til gavn, ikke for Wall Street eller City of London, men for befolkningen og industrien i hele den pågældende region. Det er ikke en så stor ændring for USA. Det betyder udelukkende, at man skal vende tilbage til Alexander Hamiltons principper, som vores amerikanske system for politisk økonomi faktisk blev grundlagt på.
Endelig, og for det sjette, foreslår vi, at denne nye orientering, denne tilgang til øst-vest-samarbejde med henblik på win-win-udvikling anvendes på Ukraine; det måske vanskeligste problem på planeten. Ukraine er blevet ødelagt af 30 års liberal økonomisk politik, ikke kun af krigen. Det har betydet, at landets befolkning er faldet med en tredjedel, at arbejdsstyrken er styrtdykket, at arbejdsstyrken i fremstillingsindustrien er gået ned med 25%.
Og dette i en økonomi, som havde været en af de mest avancerede industrielt udviklede økonomier med højteknologi, rumfart og andre kapaciteter, atomkraft osv. Og naturligvis den berømte sorte muldjord, der sørgede for udvikling af landbruget. Alt dette skal genopbygges, og det må ske i et fælles samarbejde mellem øst og vest. På denne måde vil Ukraine ikke blive udløseren for en potentiel atomkrig, men en reorganisering omkring det westfalske princip om, at den andens fordel skal være grundlaget for løsningen af hele jordens problemer. Vi må tage udfordringen med Ukraine op, ikke fordi den er let, men fordi den er svær.
Jeg takker Dem.
Den økonomiske politik, der skabte den vestfalske fred (1648)
[Print version of this article]
This is a newly edited version of an article, originally published in EIR, on the history of the famous treaty that established the modern idea of cooperation and non-intervention among nations (EIR Vol. 30, No. 21, May 30, 2003). British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s speech in Chicago in 1999, in which he declared that the era of the Treaty of Westphalia was over, opened a period of unceasing wars by major powers on smaller nations. The principles of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia are needed now more than ever.
This article appears in the March 11, 2022 issue of Executive Intelligence Review. SUBSCRIBE TO EIR
Author’s Introduction to this Republication
March 4, 2022—Power never smashes itself in anger on the reef of righteousness. Power is agapē, the love of God and humanity. As the Apostle Paul demonstrated in his First Letter to the Corinthians, chapter 13, agapē is generous and never envious; it is never righteous nor vengeful; it is patient and always merciful, and forgives easily. Agapē gives and never takes. Because of all of these qualities of leadership, agapē has no place of its own, and has no need of one, because it builds its home and takes its residence in others, as others take their happiness and rest in it. It is for these reasons that the power of the Peace of Westphalia is able to endure the rages of others, and it never traffics with them for some popularity. Thus, the secret of this Peace of Westphalia is to internalize, ahead of time, what other people are thinking, or are afraid of thinking, about themselves and their fellow man, and to give them the benefit of the doubt.
The Treaty of Westphalia says it explicitly, that it abolishes all competition, pretentions, and advantages over others, and “forgives the sins of the past by leaving all wrongs that have been committed to perpetual Oblivion.” Such is the beauty of power when it is proportional with reason, and such was the commitment of France in 1648, in the Peace of Westphalia, pledging to entertain a good and faithful, neighborly relationship with all nations. Such is the beauty of proportion between power and reason that Leibniz had identified as the basis for his idea of the Republic, and for which the recognition and remembrance of others grow unceasingly.
This is also what Rabelais meant when he said that gratuitousness, that is, what is given with benevolence, is the only living power that does not decrease and perish with time. It can only increase as time passes, because it decreases hatred in the same proportion that it increases love. Therefore, this principle of agapē represents the best that Western civilization has to offer: the idea of power found in the Athens of Solon in the 6th Century B.C., the sacrifice of Jesus Christ in 33 AD, the Council of Florence in 1439, the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, and the adoption of the American Constitution in 1787. This is how the idea of power became the power of an idea. The question is: Is the world ready to accept such an idea for the benefit of future generations yet to come?
May 30, 2003—In view of the currently collapsing world financial system, which is tearing apart the Maastricht Treaty, European governments have a last opportunity to abandon the failed Anglo-Dutch liberal system of private central banking and globalization, and organize the new Eurasian axis of peace centered on Russia, Germany, and France. To solve the collapse as sovereign nation-states with a common interest, their historical foundation is the 17th-Century Peace of Westphalia, which began “the era of sovereign nation-states” and is now attacked by all the new imperialists and utopian military strategists.
The 1648 Westphalia Peace succeeded only because of an economic policy of protection and directed public credit—dirigism—aimed to create sovereign nation-states, designed by France’s Cardinal Jules Mazarin and his great protégé Jean-Baptiste Colbert. Colbert’s dirigist policy of fair trade was the most effective weapon against the liberal free trade policy of the central banking system of the maritime powers of the British and Dutch oligarchies.
Similarly, it is only with a return to the Peace of Westphalia’s principle of “forgiving the sins of the past,” and of mutually beneficial economic development (see box, Principles of Westphalia, Article I), that the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict could be solved on the basis of two mutually-recognized sovereign states.
In the Peace of Westphalia, Mazarin’s and Colbert’s common-good principle of the “advantage of the other” triumphed over the imperial designs of both France’s Louis XIV and the Venice-controlled Hapsburg Empire. In the 18th Century, the same principle brought the posthumous victory of Gottfried Leibniz over John Locke in shaping the American republic’s founding documents—the victory of “the pursuit of happiness” and the principle of the general welfare—over Locke’s “life, liberty, and property.”
Today, that principle has created the Eurasian Land-Bridge policy, as designed by U.S. Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche, and as expressed in the economic development policies of China and some other Asian powers. This aims at “transport corridors of development,” spanning Eurasia from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Bering Strait, and from the North Sea to the Korean Peninsula and Southeast Asia.
How Mazarin Looked Toward Westphalia
By the early 1640s, after witnessing so much abuse by the Hapsburg Emperor’s feudal authority against the peoples of the small and war-devastated German states, and realizing that the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War were leading toward the destruction of civilization, Cardinal Jules de Mazarin acted to shift the attention of Europe away from Venetian-manipulated religious conflicts that had become an endless cycle of vengefulness of each against all. He sought to base a peace on the economic recovery and political sovereignty of the German Electorates and States, to move them toward freedom and away from the tyranny of the Emperor, and from Venice’s intrigues.
In 1642, six years before the signing of the Peace of Westphalia was to end the Thirty Years’ War, Mazarin sent a negotiating team to Münster to begin working on his peace plan. The two French plenipotentiaries, Claude de Mesmes Comte d’Avaux, and Abel Servien, were his close associates. The mission was to use the power of France to intervene between the Emperor and the German Electors and princes in such a way that the Emperor would be forced to relinquish his overpowering authority and France would facilitate an economic program for the German states by helping them rebuild their territories.
This result could not be achieved, however, unless France, as the most powerful nation outside of the Empire itself, were to be given the role of guarantor of German freedom on their own territory—a status of mediator that would give Mazarin’s French plenipotentiaries a friendly and indirect right to intervene inside the government of the Empire. This had to be done in such a way as not to give umbrage to the German princes, who would have rejected any form of direct foreign intervention. Indeed, what would be the benefit of replacing an Austrian imperial power by a French one?
Mazarin directed his plenipotentiaries to make their presence necessary, primarily along the Rhine River, by engaging in the only form of French expansion that would correspond to Mazarin’s principle of “the advantage of the other,” and that was, to engage in a productive economy of fair trade and commerce. Thus, Mazarin began to play an entirely new and unique role inside the Empire by increasing German freedom in trade and commerce along the main waterways of the Empire.
The Rhine River, running through very fertile lands, had long been the target of Mazarin’s predecessor, Cardinal Richelieu, who, as the First Minister of Louis XIII, had waged 14 years of war to acquire key territories along the High Rhine, with the presumption that the Rhine River was a God-given “natural border of France.” This foolish idea stemmed from the days of the Roman Empire, that is, from the same imperialist outlook that was to be Louis XIV’s folie des grandeurs, and was to become the pretext for Napoleon Bonaparte’s mad imperial conquests, a century later. The imperial Roman historian Strabo had concocted the geopolitical delusion whereby “an ancient divinity had erected mountains and traced the course of rivers in order to define the natural borders of a people,” whereby, consequently, the Rhine River had to be viewed as a natural border of France.
The Rhine: Boundary, or Corridor?
However, that was not the view of Mazarin. He saw the Rhine River as a great economic project rather than a way to grab more territory. It was a natural communication canal within German territory, a corridor of development. But it was unfortunately being commercially misused by river princes, who were going against their own best interests by imposing such outrageously expensive tolls, that tradesmen preferred using alternative routes, which had become more to the advantage of the Venetians, the Dutch, and the English, than to the German people themselves. This had to be changed.
According to the German historian Hermann Scherer,
The expansion of Amsterdam and of the Dutch market had given the last blow to the ancient commercial greatness of the German principalities. The Rhine River and later the Escaut, were closed to the German people; an arbitrary system of rights and tolls was established, and that became the end of wealth and prosperity in the heart of Europe. The defection of many Hanseatic cities from the interior, and the diminishing foreign trade of the Hanse, destabilized internal commerce and the relationship between the northern and southern regions of Germany. Add to this, the interminable wars, the religious conflicts and persecutions, and on top of all of this, the addition of customs barriers established under all sorts of pretexts, and for which the smallest princes of the empire added a cost as if it were an essential attribute of their microscopic sovereignty.[fn_1]
Each region was measuring its “sovereignty” by the power to raise Rhine customs fees. The interruptions of trade traffic between southern and northern Germany were bringing the German economy to a halt. This became particularly disastrous for Braunschweig and Erfurt, while Frankfurt-am-Main and Leipzig prospered, thanks to their annual fairs. The very geographic situation of Germany required precisely the opposite: that it free itself of the burden of customs barriers and open all of its internal mini-borders for anyone who wanted to trade in and out of the country, at low cost, not only north-south, but also east-west. Such were the conditions that Mazarin was attempting to address during the 1640s negotiating period of the Peace of Westphalia.
Fair Trade on Europe’s Rivers
Mazarin conducted a thorough study of the entire river system of the Hapsburg Empire, including the region of Poland. He established a complex intelligence network from among his German allies, to report back to the French negotiators who were involved in the preliminary negotiations for the Peace of Westphalia in Münster, and to inform them of how many German cities would be willing to increase their freedom within the Empire, by collaborating with France.
Mazarin examined closely the potential for a north-south expansion of trade and commerce of goods being produced along all of the rivers of the Empire (see Figure 1).
First, farthest east, on the northeastern border of the Hapsburg Holy Roman Empire, Mazarin studied the potential of the Vistula River going through the Polish regions of Silesia, Mazovia, and Eastern Prussia (today Poland), and emptying into the Baltic Sea near Gdańsk. That river provided for Gdańsk all of the riches coming from all of these regions, and could make it the major port city of Poland.
Second, he wrote of the Oder River—which also empties into the Baltic Sea—that if all of the commerce from the Brandenburg, Silesia, and Pomeranian plains were to flow into the city of Szczecin, it could transform that city into a major international port city.
Third, the Elbe River, which starts in Bohemia (today the Czech Republic) after having gone through Saxony and Brandenburg, then flows into the North Sea northwest of Hamburg. Mazarin noted that most of the goods coming from the provinces of Lower Germany also flowed northwestward past Dresden, Magdeburg, and Leipzig. Those cities could improve their economic situation by offering commercial houses for transshipment of regional goods to foreign countries.
Fourth, Mazarin was given a report that the Weser River, which also flows through the fertile regions of Middle Germany, could be provided with a number of canals acting as import and export channels, to make the city of Bremen on the Weser into a significant port.
Fifth, Mazarin saw another expansion of north-south trade by way of the Ems River, which crosses Westphalia, and brings all of the trade and commerce from Münster and the North Rhine region into a north-south axis opening to the North Sea.
Sixth, and farthest west, Mazarin studied the Rhine River as the most economically viable communication channel among Switzerland, Germany, France, and the Netherlands, connecting Mulhouse, Strasbourg, Mainz, Bonn, and Cologne, and carrying a great amount of trade from Alsace Lorraine, the Swiss Counties, Baden-Württemberg, and the Rhineland Palatinate, to its exit into the sea through the cities of Rotterdam and Amsterdam.
Mazarin saw that the surest way to bring about peace was to develop the general welfare of the German people, by developing, for their greatest advantage, the cities located at the mouths of these rivers or along them. Thus, those war-torn regions of the Empire could be rescued and rebuilt, by creating new infrastructure. He considered this to be the way to counter the British-Dutch mercantilist control over key cities of the Baltic and North Seas.
In 1642, Mazarin summoned his negotiators at Münster to announce and circulate everywhere that the precondition to the peace negotiations was to forbid the creation of new tolls along the Rhine River. The proposition was written as follows:
From this day forward, along the two banks of the Rhine River and from the adjacent provinces, commerce and transport of goods shall be free for transit for all of the inhabitants, and it will no longer be permitted to impose on the Rhine any new toll, open birthright, customs, or taxation of any denomination and of any sort, whatsoever.
Because the injunction included the mention “and from adjacent provinces,” it proposed to bring fair trade and economic expansion deeper into the heart of Germany.
Centuries of Canal Building
Under the protection of the French, as the guarantor of the Peace of Westphalia, the different princes of the Empire were able to establish a whole series of houses of commerce in Huningue, Strasbourg, Mannheim, Frankfurt an der Oder, Coblenz, and Cologne. Thus, Mazarin’s plan to build the economic basis for the nation-state of Germany began to take shape. With goods produced in France, Lower Bavaria, Upper Palatinate, Swabia, and so forth, the river communication system began to revive the economies of the cities of Huningue and Strasbourg, as well as to give access to Switzerland and to the extended parts of Austria.
The economic development was to go farther by access to the seventh and longest river in western Europe, the Danube, expanding the import-export trade of goods to and from Bavaria, Austria, Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldavia, and all the way East to the mouth of the Danube in the Black Sea.
As early as 1642, Mazarin had singled out 28 primary cities along the Danube River alone. It is from this standpoint that a new understanding began to emerge from the rubble of war in Europe, capable of creating thousands of jobs and new markets along the main rivers of the Empire. It was under Mazarin and Colbert that the idea of a Rhine-Main-Danube canal began to be considered as a feasible project, a corridor of development only completed three centuries later, connecting the North Sea to the Black Sea.[fn_2]
By the time a number of Electors and princes began to realize that Mazarin’s project was entirely to their advantage, and decided to modify their allegiance to the Emperor, war had reduced the German people from 21 million to only 13 million as of 1648. Without peace, European civilization was going to be destroyed.
On the other hand, the Venetians saw that Mazarin was accelerating the process of negotiation in Münster, and that his economic initiatives with the German Electors were beginning to gain some momentum. Venice and the Hapsburgs saw the paradox—the more you increase economic freedom within the Empire, the more you are destroying that Empire itself—and smelled danger. The more the German leaders were won over to the principle of “the advantage of the other” (especially since they were “the other”), the closer they were to replacing the predatory Empire with nation-states. This principle had such a corroding effect on the minds of the Venetians and the Hapsburg Emperor that they were ultimately forced to accept the conditions set by Mazarin for the Peace of Westphalia, which was signed on Oct. 24, 1648, in Osnabrück for the Protestants, and in Münster for the Catholics.[fn_3]
Colbert and the Birth of Political Economy
Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-83) was, without a shadow of a doubt, the greatest political economist and nation-builder of the 17th Century, and his ideas and influence have determined the entire course of development of all modern nation-states, including the United States of America, since the Treaty of Westphalia.
Initially promoted as Steward of the Household of Cardinal Mazarin, Colbert later became Comptroller General of the Finances of France during most of the reign of Louis XIV. Colbert was the first world leader to successfully apply the new principle of Westphalia to economics, the which would later be followed successively by Gottfried Leibniz, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Quincy Adams, Henry C. Carey, Friedrich List, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
Colbert’s seminal contribution to a humanist republican conception of political economy was initially reflected in France’s historic fight to liberate the peoples of Europe from the predatory control of the Austrian Hapsburg Empire, and from the central banking role of the Venetian and Dutch oligarchies. Colbert applied the principle of the Peace of Westphalia—that is, the principle of “the advantage of the other”—to a grand design of economic development of France itself.[fn_4]
For Colbert, the most important asset of the common good, and the most powerful enemy of war itself, was the development of infrastructure projects. Colbert carried the principle of benevolence of Cardinal Mazarin into large-scale economic development projects. If he was the farsighted forerunner of Leibniz, of Franklin, and of LaRouche, it was because his towering figure stood on the shoulders of Jeanne d’Arc, King Louis XI’s creation of the nation-state of France, King Henry IV (1589-1610), Henry’s minister the Duke of Sully, and Cardinal Mazarin. All were the most powerful enemies of British-Dutch-Venetian free-trade and “central bank” liberalism.
The very name of Colbertism, dirigism, still rings as anathema in the ears of the British-Dutch oligarchies today. In fact, any economic outlook organized by a strong centralized government that favors the common good through great public works, stems from Colbertism, and is anathema to British-Dutch monetarism, especially to the Dutch East India Company.[fn_5]
The Industrial Commonwealth Policy
Jean-Baptiste Colbert did not come from a noble family, as many historians have falsely claimed. He was the son of Nicholas Colbert and of Marie Pussort, she of a merchant family, who had traded in Reims and in Lyon from 1590 to 1635. This period was the turning point for French economic development, with the upsurge of manufacturing under Henry IV and his great advisor, the Duke of Sully. Nicholas’ brother, Odart Colbert, was a trader in Troyes, working with an Italian banker partner located in Paris, by the name of Gio-Andrea Lumagna, with whom he had developed an excellent trade in draperies, bolting-cloth, linen, silk, wines, and grains, which they produced in France and traded in England, the Low Countries, and Italy.
Jean-Baptiste worked for a few years in Lumagna’s bank until 1649, one year after the Treaty of Westphalia was signed, when Lumagna became the personal banker of Mazarin and recommended that Colbert become the Cardinal’s Steward of the Household. The meeting of such great minds foreshadowed a true French revolution.
Looking at Colbert from British and some American history books, one would become convinced that he was a mercantilist free trader. But anyone identifying Colbert as a mercantilist has to be either totally ignorant or a British agent, at best. The British hated Colbert precisely because he was not a mercantilist; he was feared because he was a humanist nation-builder. Colbert’s policy was to undertake and fund, from the royal coffers of Louis XIV, all forms of industry, mining, infrastructure, canal building, city building, beautification of the land through Ponts et Chaussées (Bridges and Roads), and Arts et Métiers (Arts and Crafts), including the promotion of all aspects of science through the creation of the Royal Academy of Sciences under the leadership of Christian Huygens.
Thus, clearly, Colbert’s idea of “the advantage of the other” was aimed at benefitting future generations. It precluded primarily the idea of competition, a politically correct term for enmity.
Colbert’s industrial protectionist system is generally known for four major reforms that marked the beginnings of the modern industrial nation-state:
1. He organized and funded a system of industrial corporations and infrastructure projects that provided job security for all types of skilled and non-skilled labor, that is, workers of all types of arts et métiers;
2. He established protectionist measures for all standardized French clothing products, such that no dumping of foreign goods was allowed in France, except at very high cost. Colbertism became synonymous with protectionism;
3. He funded and supported population growth, considering that war and ignorance were the two main causes of population reduction. He believed that the “government had to take care of its poor,” and that its role was to foster the increase of the population density of the nation; and
4. He accompanied industrial measures with a reform of civil justice that became the first Civil Code of France, lasting 130 years until it was destroyed by the imperialist code of Napoleon at the turn of the 18th Century.
These four points were enforced with total energy and determination, and with the full backing of the King of France. In other words, the entire Colbertian system of nation-building was based on state-controlled industrial development, combined with carefully selected and productive private initiatives.
Colbert cared for the nation as a farmer cares for his farm: The entire territory of France was meant to become the land where the common good was to grow unimpeded. He protected it, showered it with public funds, enriched it, and let others reap its beautiful fruits. He cultivated the common good by weeding out the privileges of aristocracy. He encouraged new industries and funded population growth by creating tax incentives and special bonuses for married couples. He put protectionist barriers all around France, against British, Dutch, and Belgian dumping. In one word, Colbert became the champion of skilled labor and the sworn enemy of the commercial aristocracy, which had been living off its privileges, as the feudal aristocracy had done during the past centuries.
So, Colbert re-established the priority of the “common good, the ‘Commonwealth’ of Louis XI.”
The following case suffices to make the point.
During the 1660s, there persisted a three-century-old privilege that dated back to the shameful 1358 edict of King Charles V, that stated that the laws of commerce “are made to profit and favor each craft rather than the common good.”[fn_6] Colbert turned this on its head, instituting his first Edict on April 8, 1666, which was made to secure all of the manufactures and factories of the kingdom for the benefit of the common good. From that day on, Colbert wrote hundreds of measures and regulations until the entire garden of France began to bloom again, after the devastation of the religious wars.
From 1666 on, Colbert not only asserted total control over the production of all French clothing goods, but he instituted a master’s degree for the work force, in order to improve the quality of all manufactured products.
Colbert invested about £5 million a year from the coffers of the King in new manufacturing endeavors. This money went for improvements in technology, for improving skills of the workers to raise the quality of the products, and for incentives to population growth. A lot of the new technologies were imported from Italy, Holland, and elsewhere, to improve the quality of tapestries, linens, silks, etc.; but most of the improvement was done on location. Historian Pierre Clement reports that Colbert—
stopped at nothing in order to fortify the new establishments; each dyeing manufacturer received £1,200 of encouragement; the workers who married girls of the locality where they were employed, would receive a bonus of 6 pistoles, plus 2 pistoles at the birth of their first child. All apprentices were given £30 and their own tools at the end of their apprenticeship. Lastly, the tax collectors were ordered to give a tax exemption of £5 for those employed in certain more privileged manufactures.[fn_7]
Colbert further established that all workers who married under the age of 20 were exempt from taxes (tailles and other public charges) for a period of five years, and four years if they married at 21. The very same advantages were extended to older workers who had 10 children, including those who died in combat. As of July 1667, all workers who had 10 children could receive a pension of £1,000 a year, and £2,000 a year if they had 12 children. After 16 years of such a regime, from 1667 to 1683, the French population had reached a level of 20 million, the largest national population in all of Europe. The policy was called Colbert’s “revenge of the cradles” (revanche des berceaux). The same policy was established in the French colony of Canada.
Colbert’s Reform of Justice
The reform of the civil justice system, in 1669, was one of Colbert’s greatest and most enduring achievements. It was so efficient and complete that it became accepted as the Civil Code of France for a period of 138 years, until the feudalist faction of the French oligarchy replaced it with the Code Napoleon in 1807, and turned France, one more time, back to a fascist imperial police state. The Code Napoleon rules France to this day.
In the spirit of Mazarin, Colbert was able to launch a great offensive against the very powerful aristocracy of France, and go against all odds; that is, against both public opinion and backward local prejudices, to implement his reforms. He established a most sweeping reform of justice, succeeding in accomplishing what even the great Sully before him had attempted, but was not able to do. Colbert systematically extirpated venality (the practice of buying public offices and profiting from them). He established a system of state counsellors to replace the old civil order of Roman law, and totally transformed the traditional, regional, customary law. One of his most effective administrators and collaborators was the King’s Counsellor to the Parliament of Toulouse (Court of Justice), the famous mathematician, Pierre de Fermat.
As early as the reign of Louis X le Hutin (1314-16), judicial offices had been sold to the nobility at a minimal fee paid to the King, but they brought incredible profits to the office holders. This was done as a matter of course, under the absolutely trusting, axiomatic assumption that “the monarchical system was based on honor and that the nature of honor is to have for Censor, the entire universe” (Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Law). This being the case, why should anyone raise an eyebrow about the “honesty” of any member of the Court to whom the public good was entrusted? As Montesquieu himself argued, after all, “No one believes he is lowering himself by accepting a public function.”
However, the heart of man being everywhere the same, Colbert understood very well that, under any government, at any time, the honor of fulfilling the duties of an office of state can always be mixed with a certain amount of personal interest, which brings justice to tilt its balance to one side rather than the other.
For example, public opinion had it, in those days of the monarchy, that the rich were not only better off, but also better educated than the rest of the population, and because of that, they had more dignity and impartiality; and since paying for their public office was a way to bring in money for the King, they demonstrated themselves less venal than others, and therefore should not pay any taxes; because the investment of their capital was obviously benefiting the kingdom more than could the people with less money, and whose contribution to the common good was less than their own, and should therefore be made to pay taxes more readily. And, that is the way the balance of justice tilted for centuries.
The most famous example of abuse of public trust during that period was known as the Fouquet Affair, the scandalous case of the Superintendent of Finances of King Louis XIV. In November 1661, Colbert forced Nicolas Fouquet to be brought before the tribunal for having stolen an immense fortune from different public offices, and from the treasury of the King. [Box: Principles of Westphalia]
Acting as a central banker, and borrowing for the King and Mazarin—to whom bankers were told not to lend any money—Fouquet had been playing the interest rates game in his favor; and since he had all of the controls to blur the differences between public and personal interests, he was able to hide a huge fortune, until Colbert got a whiff of it. In one instance, Fouquet had managed to reassign to his own bank account the value of a loan that was never made, but for which the State “repaid” him £6 million. During the last four months before his trial, he had managed to siphon off a total of £4 million in amounts of between £10,000 to £140,000 that he stole from the different tax-farms of the Charente, Pied-Fourche, Lyon, Bordeaux, the Dauphine, etc. Fouquet had even prepared himself a fortified refuge in Belle-Isle, in case of disgrace.
In 1661, the government brought him to trial, where he was found guilty of massive embezzlement. All of his goods were confiscated, he was condemned to exile, and then later imprisoned for life in the fortress of Pignerol.[fn_8]
A Coup d’État Against the Oligarchy
In March 1661, the 23-year-old King Louis XIV replaced Nicolas Fouquet with Colbert as the Superintendent of Finances. If Louis XIV was so upset by corruption, it was not because of moral indignation, but because it was taking place under his watch. Colbert recognized that fact and did not miss a moment in applying the principle which Alexander the Great used to get his (indifferent) generals to act effectively.
Never was there as effective and universal a minister as Colbert, during the entire history of France. Formed at the school of Sully and Mazarin, Colbert served during 22 years successively as the Superintendent of Buildings, Controller General of Finances, Secretary of State of the Maison du Roi, Secretary of State of the Navy, Minister of Trade and Commerce, and last but not least, the equivalent of a Minister of Sciences and Technology. He made profound reforms in all of these public domains, including criminal justice, commerce, police, fine arts, water and forestry.
After the scandalous trial of Fouquet, Colbert became a popular hero, and was given the green light for the creation of a Chamber of Justice that he had already proposed to Mazarin, in 1659. This Chamber of Justice was composed of the presidents and top counsellors of the Parliaments of Paris, Toulouse, Grenoble, Bordeaux, Dijon, Rouen, etc. In all, 27 judges were commissioned by Colbert to clean up the biggest financial mess the nation had ever seen.
Colbert’s edict, which circulated in every city of the kingdom, stipulated that all of the financial officers of the nation who had been at their posts since 1635 were required to establish a justification for all of their legitimate goods, including their inheritances, the acquisitions they had made, and the amounts given to their children for anything from weddings to acquisition of offices. If the information was not given to the attorney general within eight days, all of their goods and properties were to be confiscated.
Colbert established all sorts of means to force the truth out into the open. The edict stipulated that the King would reward an accuser with the value of one-sixth of the fine given to anyone convicted of fraud, financial abuse, or embezzlement. On Sunday, Dec. 11, 1661, as well as on the following three Sundays, Colbert had all of the curates of the Paris churches make the announcement that the parishioners, under threat of excommunication, were obliged to speak out about all known financial abuse in their parish.
The first operations of the Chamber of Justice created total panic throughout Paris. Friends of Fouquet, such as François Vatel, Braun, and Jean Herauld Gourville, left for London; others were tried and sentenced. After a few financiers were sent to the Bastille, the whole nation began to realize that Colbert really meant business. Then a lot of people began to be identified to the Chamber of Justice.
After Colbert made a public showcase of this insane system, the idea of buying a public office became so unpopular that people circulated a Colbert quip that said: “Each time the King creates an office, a new idiot is created to buy it.” The reforms were so sweeping that in only a few years, a total of £419 million was recovered from the income of venal offices, and no fewer than 40,000 noble families were affected by this axiomatic change.
All of those funds were then invested in Colbert’s program of development of new industries. Slowly, but surely, the balance of justice began to tilt back toward the common good.
The Royal Academy of Sciences
The greatest achievement of Colbert was the creation of the Royal Academy of Sciences and its technological projects. This was not just another academic teaching institution, but rather, a research center for scientific and technological development that had the mission of creating innovations in specific areas of scientific activities: to improve economic development in the fields of astronomy, chemistry, optical physics, geometry, geography, industrial engineering, canal building, agriculture, and navigation. Each area was to be oriented toward technological advances through the application of new discoveries of physical principles. This Colbertian Academy of Sciences became the model institution from which Gottfried Leibniz later created his academies in Berlin and St. Petersburg.
In 1662, Colbert’s good friend and collaborator, the Toulouse Counsellor of Parliament and mathematician Pierre de Fermat, joined Blaise Pascal, Gilles de Roberval, Pierre Gassendi, and a few others, to form the core of a society that met regularly, and in private with Colbert in the Royal Library, until the time the Academy was to be officially located in the Louvre Museum in 1699. Scientists and mathematicians from all over Europe were invited to join the new institution—all of whom had been challenged, in 1658, by the young Pascal into discovering a geometric construction for determining the characteristics of the cycloid curve.
The offers of salaries and pensions were very attractive, and the prospects of collaborating with the best scientists of Europe were even better. Colbert sent out personal invitations to the Dutch astronomer and geometer Christian Huygens, one of the few to solve Pascal’s cycloid problem; the Italian astronomer and civil-military engineer Gian Domenico Cassini; the young Danish astronomer who was to establish the speed of light, Ole Rømer; the German mathematician Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus; the German astronomer Johann Hevelius; the Florentine geometer Vincent Viviani; and even the British mathemagician Isaac Newton. Huygens, Cassini, and Rømer immediately accepted the invitations; others accepted a little later.
On Dec. 22, 1666, Huygens was nominated as President of the Royal Academy.
Colbert believed that the most important means of securing the future of France was to persuade the young King to fund and support great scientific and technological projects that would both increase the power of the nation internally, and extend its contributions abroad.
There were several great projects of note. One was an accurate method for the determination of longitude, a project as old as the Platonic Academy of Alexandria, following through the astronomical discoveries of Erastosthenes and Hipparchus. This caused a major advance in the geographic knowledge of Europe by improving the accuracy of maps and sailing charts through the introduction of new geodesic studies (the Cassini maps), a precursor to the revolutionary study that Carl Gauss made two centuries later. This effort resulted in the first accurate knowledge of the Earth’s geography. Parallel to it, was the creation of the Paris Observatory, and the successful precision grinding of very powerful telescope lenses, designed and hand-polished by Huygens himself.
The second and most far-reaching scientific breakthroughs came with new discoveries in the field of optical physics, especially the revolutionary discovery of principle by Rømer in the determination of the finite speed of light; by Huygens in the discovery that light propagates in spherical waves; by Fermat in demonstrating the principle of least-time in light refraction; and by Leibniz with the revolutionary application of his least-action principle to optical processes by means of his calculus.[fn_9]
A third project, involving the special collaboration of Huygens and Leibniz, was the development of a steamboat invented by Denis Papin.[fn_10]
In 1673, Leibniz built a working model of a calculating machine with the collaboration of the Royal Librarian Pierre de Carcavy, and Huygens. It became such a success that he was immediately asked to build three models, one for the new Observatory, one for the King, and one for Colbert.
After Colbert died in 1683, a new witch-hunt began against the Protestants of France, and the Academy suffered greatly when, in 1685, under the revocation by Louis XIV of the Edict of Nantes, which had guaranteed freedom of religion for Protestants since Henry IV, Ole Rømer and the other “undesirable Protestant,” Christian Huygens, were forced out of the country. The Academy survived for a hundred years under Fontenelle, Condorcet, and Lavoisier, but was ultimately destroyed in 1793 by the Jacobin counter-revolution.
Continental Challenge to the ‘Sea Powers’
But the most immediate and powerful industrial result of Colbert’s Academy project, was the realization of the greatest hydraulic engineering masterpiece of the era—the Languedoc Canal.
The Canal Royal en Languedoc (built 1667-81), known also as the Canal du Midi, was a typical example of how Colbert, and his engineer protégé, Pierre-Paul Riquet, realized the Mazarin principle of the Peace of Westphalia. In fact, the Languedoc Canal represented, for several hundred years, the most advanced form of hydraulic technology in the world, and the most economical route for the transport of merchandise between the northern nations—Sweden, Denmark, Poland, Northern Germany, Belgium—and the southern nations of Italy, Greece, Venice, the Balkan States, Turkey, Africa, and the Orient. The construction of the canal provided a short-cut route of 240 kilometers (145 miles) across France, saving 3,000 kilometers represented by the sailing around Spain; and an economy of taxes, by avoiding the Hapsburg Empire’s tolls at the choke point of Gibraltar.
Had the British and Dutch monopolies of the time been reasonable in their trade negotiations with France, this fair-trade system would have also brought down their costs of goods.
As far as external commerce is concerned, Colbert always extended the same fair trade policy to all nations, including the liberal free-traders Holland and England. But neither the liberal Dutch nor the English accepted Colbert’s policy of fair trade. That is why Colbert had to send his toughest ambassador to London: his own brother, Charles Colbert de Croissy, the same who had served Mazarin as ambassador to Vienna in 1660.
After a number of tough negotiating years, in which Charles Colbert was forced to make a certain number of sacrifices, an amusing point of contention came up that could serve as a precursor to the antics of Lewis Carroll in his book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In 1669, Colbert reminded his ambassador “not to be duped” by British pretentions on the high seas; the issue related to the British Admiralty requesting the right to be saluted first on all of the seas of the globe.
In a letter dated July 21, 1669, Colbert wrote his brother a note in which he stated:
As far as the Ocean is concerned, even though they [the British] are the more powerful, we have not, until now, come to the view that their pretended sovereignty has been recognized; therefore it pertains to the common good of the two nations, and of the interests of the two kings, to establish this parity on all of the seas…. As for the treaty on commerce, the ideas of Lord Arlington are very reasonable, since they tend to establish a reciprocal treatment between the two Kingdoms.
Colbert ended up recommending that “salutes” be considered optional; but the liberal free-trade policy of England remained on a steady course.
The control of sea-lanes by the financial oligarchies of maritime powers such as the Venetians or the British-Dutch East India company monopolies, was being challenged by Colbert’s emphasis on a dirigist continental infrastructure project, as the growth principle for economic development of sovereign nation-states. The same principle is applicable today, with the LaRouche Eurasian Land-Bridge concept, in which all European governments see the benefit of Asiatic nations as the natural outlet for export of their technologies. The proposed agreements for the extension of the German-Chinese magnetic-levitation Transrapid train, already commercialized in Shanghai since Jan. 1, 2003, are a prime example of this type of fair trade, technology-sharing policy.
Economics of Generosity:
The Languedoc Canal
The Languedoc Canal Project was the greatest project of the 17th Century: a triumph of engineering skills, built by a self-made geometer-engineer, Pierre-Paul Riquet. This Herculean task, which had been deemed impossible since Roman times, was a gigantic water infrastructure work that Charlemagne himself had dreamed of building. In 1516, François I had asked Leonardo da Vinci’s advice on the feasibility of a canal in that region of France. Leonardo actually spent his last years in Amboise, studying possible canal connections between the Loire and the Seine Rivers. Other studies had been made for a canal through the Languedoc region during the reigns of Charles IX, Henry III, Henry IV, and Louis XIII.
It was not until Colbert that a solution, to what had become known as the impossible Canal du Midi, was discovered.
There were four main reasons for the construction of this great canal:
First, coming out of the Thirty Years’ War, this canal project corresponded to a greatly needed change of strategy and of political economy for the entirety of Europe. As we have said, the crossing of France by canal, between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, provided French and allied ships with a strategic by-pass of Gibraltar, an area that had become very dangerous, and quite costly, during the interminable wars with Spain and the Austrian Hapsburg Empire.
Second, the canal set the example for joint public and private infrastructure development projects along waterways of any nation, providing improvements for land-locked areas, and opening them up to increasing exchange of cultures with other regions and other nations. Moreover, both the King and Riquet were to receive a regular income stream from low-fee tolls. The canal was going to pay for itself in a very short period of time, and provide a small margin of profit, enough for repairs and for the introduction of new technologies. Riquet made it explicit that he had no intention of building the canal for the purpose of financial gain.
Thus, the Peace of Westphalia trade and commerce studies, made earlier by Mazarin for the benefit of the seven river regions of the Hapsburg Empire, became a renewed focus of interest. The canal was going to create the greatest import-export capabilities ever imagined for that time.
Third, the canal provided for an extraordinary increase of economic activities in the Province of Languedoc itself, where Upper Languedoc wheat production could be shipped easily eastward to the wheat-starved Lower Languedoc region. In exchange, the Lower-Languedoc production of excellent wines could be easily shipped westward, while the linen and silk goods of Lyons could also travel the same route.
This corridor also provided the entire region from Toulouse to Beziers with the development of new olive groves, vineyards, greater expansion of granaries in the Lauragais region, new trading companies and gristmills, and prospects for mining. The more farsighted citizens of Castelnaudary, for example, even paid Riquet to divert the canal toward their town. Riquet also projected the creation of new towns along the canal route.
Fourth, and not least, the entire course of the 240-kilometer canal was going to be carved into one of the most beautiful landscapes in the world, and was going to be covered with 130 arched bridges built by the “beautifying engineers” of the Ponts et Chaussées. Colbert and Riquet were both of the conviction that if something is beautiful, it is useful!
Riquet’s ‘Parting of Waters’ Paradox
However magnificent the idea was, and however great the advantages were anticipated to be, all of the proposals to link the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea with a canal, during a period of 1,000 years, were demonstrated to be totally impracticable, and plans presented by the best engineers in the world, were rejected each time..
There were two ostensible reasons why this project was considered to be impossible. One was that the two rivers flowing respectively into the Atlantic and the Mediterranean—the Garonne and the Aude—could not be connected because of difficulties of terrain between them; and the technology to raise any great quantity of water upwards of 190 meters above sea level did not exist. The other reason was that there was no other visible source in this quasi-desert region of Provence that could provide the canal with the required amounts of water.
However, there was a third and more profound and subjective reason. All of the canal plans were rejected because none of them reflected the necessary discovery of principle that would make it work. Just as Filippo Brunelleschi had discovered the physical geometric principle of the catenary for the erection of the “impossible” dome of the Florence Cathedral, Riquet had discovered the required physical geometric principle that solved the problem of the “impossible” Languedoc Canal.
Pierre-Paul Riquet (1604-80) was a descendent of a Florentine family by the name of Arrighetti, changed to Riquetty, and then to Riquet. His father, the Count of Camaran, who was a public prosecutor for the Crown, educated his son in public management and got him a post in the administration of Beziers in the Languedoc region. As a young man, Riquet attended the council meetings of the Counts of Languedoc with his father, at several of which there were presentations of canal projects “linking the two seas.” After witnessing several unsuccessful debates on the question, Pierre-Paul Riquet became passionate about finding a solution to this “impossible problem.”
Since Riquet did make the discovery, and built the canal, the following description must hold some truth, with respect to the discovery which must have happened in the mind of this great man.
One day, a paradox must have struck Riquet; an anomaly in the form of a simple question must have struck him: “How can the flow of a canal go in two directions at once?” In a way, it was a very simple question; but none of the other engineers over centuries, who had looked instead for ways to connect up the river courses of Languedoc, seemed to have approached the problem quite this way.
That the question was vital to Riquet, is shown by the fact that he had a drawing made, sometime after his discovery, to commemorate a pedagogical reconstruction of his principle. It showed himself demonstrating to the Commissioners of the King and of the States, the solution to the problem that he had called—in a reference to the Moses miracle at the Red Sea—“the parting of the waters.”
The drawing simply shows how a stone, placed before the water rising from the Fontaine La Grave, on the Plateau de Naurouze, divided the stream of water into two opposite directions, one part flowing west, toward the Atlantic Ocean, and the other flowing east, toward the Mediterranean Sea. Riquet’s paradox had become a metaphor for what he then began to call the “canal of the two seas.” He had generated a solution in principle to the “impossible” canal.
The “canal of the two seas” became his life’s mission. Year in and year out, Riquet experimented, created model projects on his own land, and studied different locations around Montagne Noire, travelling the distance many times, searching for the solution to the source of water that would connect the two seas. If the illustration of the “parting of the waters” showed the principle, the fulfillment of that principle was going to be another matter altogether.
There was only one ideal spot in the entire expanse between the two seas where Riquet’s principle could be applied, and that had to be precisely at the highest point that divided the entire region between West and the East. And when Riquet found that unique spot, there was no source of water at that location.
The Engineering Task
It was not until the ripe age of 58, after serving the government of Colbert as a Controller of the Salt Tax (gabelle) in the region of the Languedoc for 20 years, that Riquet confirmed his hypothesis by conducting a crucial experiment. By that time, he had enough of a personal fortune to invest in his “grand design,” as he called it. Riquet asked Colbert to let him resign, and to hire him as chief engineer of the canal project. Colbert agreed, and got his Toulouse Counsellor, Pierre de Fermat, to authorize the project that was going to be built in his jurisdiction.
Riquet was able to solve his paradox by demonstrating how the result of its resolution was going to express itself in the increase of man’s mastery over nature, in a definite increase in man’s potential relative population-density. He knew beforehand, that the construction of the canal would create an expansion in markets inward and outward, which would result especially in the increase of French production of wheat, wines, and fabrics being exported toward England, Sweden, Germany, Holland, Italy, Greece, and so forth.
A Languedoc teacher, Philippe Calas, living today near Béziers, shows on his website called “Le Canal du Midi en Languedoc,” how Riquet tackled the different engineering problems. He writes:
But there was one overwhelming problem facing all of these would-be canal builders: how to supply such an engineering work with water? One part of the route represented no such problem. The section from Toulouse to the Atlantic could be achieved by the canalization of the River Garonne, navigable along this stretch. But from Toulouse at one end of the canal proper, to sea level at the other (Mediterranean end), the canal would have to rise to a summit of 190 meters. How could enough water be found to keep the canal flowing at a constant rate, and at what point should this water be supplied to it in order to distribute it evenly to the western section flowing toward Toulouse and the eastern section flowing towards Béziers?
And who would be foolish enough to think that such a fantastic source of water could ever be found in the quasi-barren mountains of the Languedoc?
As soon as he was ready to make his experiment known, Riquet wrote to Colbert, who immediately saw the solution, and was won over to the project. Colbert always appreciated the character of a man who could not be shaken from a true discovery, and he knew he could absolutely count on Riquet to bring the great work to success, if he gave him the necessary backup. The engineering task was to assemble enough water in a catch basin—from what today would be called a “catchment area” of subsurface water—and at the highest elevation, which could supply all of the necessary water to flow with gravity continuously into a westward slope toward the Atlantic and into an eastward slope toward the Mediterranean, each in a controlled manner.
Riquet found several hidden springs and streams in the vicinity of Montagne Noire, less than halfway between Carcassonne and Toulouse, which could supply a reservoir to be built at Saint-Ferriol. This reservoir of water had to hold a large enough supply of water to feed the canal all year round, including during periods of extreme drought, which occurs regularly in Provence. The reservoir was also to be supplemented by three additional sources—the Sor River, the Alzau stream, and the Fresquel River. A series of secondary basins had also to be constructed, to control the deliveries of the many flows.
Canal and Ports du Midi
In his first testing experiment, Riquet spent £200,000 to build a drainage trench demonstrating to the Council of the State of Languedoc how the whole system would work. At that occasion, on Nov. 27, 1664, Riquet wrote to Colbert, saying:
But in this case [the drainage trench experiment], I am putting at risk both my fortune and my honor, and they won’t fail me. In fact, it seems more reasonable that I shall acquire a little more of one as well as of the other, when I come out of this successfully. I hope to be in Paris during the month of January next…. And then, Monseigneur, I shall have the honor of telling you, in person, and in a better fashion, all my sentiments on the subject. And you will find them reasonable because I will have established precise propositions that will consequently be in accordance with your wish; and in which case I shall follow my natural inclination of frankness and freedom, and without quibbling.
On May 25, 1665, Riquet was in Paris meeting with Colbert, who gave him his patent papers securing him in his rights of ownership. Two months after, on the last day of July, Riquet wrote Colbert, filled with the excitement of Archimedes coming out of his bathtub. His experiment was a total success! He wrote:
Many people will be surprised to see how little time I have taken, and little expense I have used. As for the success, it is infallible, but in a totally new fashion, that no one ever thought of, including myself. I can swear to you that the pathway I have now discovered had always been unknown to me, regardless of all the efforts I had made in attempting to discover it. The idea came to me in Saint-Germain, which is quite far away, and my musing proved me right about those locations.[fn_11]
By 1666, after Riquet had developed extensive feasibility studies and established the financial conditions for the construction of the entire canal, he got permission from Colbert to begin the first phase of construction. The entire project was going to be built in three phases, and be financed both by the State and through private means (Riquet’s).
Phase one, which was to be financed entirely by Riquet himself, included the hydraulic work of a catch basin—the Saint-Ferriol reservoir at the foot of Montagne Noire—with a capacity of 6 million cubic meters of water, the largest man-made lake ever built up to that time; and the building of the Toulouse-Trebes section of the canal going west toward the Atlantic. This reservoir was going to supply the water for the entire work.
The second phase, to be financed by the State, included the canal section from the reservoir to the fishing village of Cette (today called Set), on the Mediterranean.
The third phase, also to be financed by the State, included the creation of a major seaport facility at Set.
Moreover, the canal presented several extremely difficult engineering feats, such as having to go through the Malpas Mountain in an excavated tunnel of 173 meters in length, and then pass as an aquaduct for several hundred yards over the Ord River. The entire project originally contained 75 locks, took 14 years to build, and cost the royal treasury more than £7.7 million, not including the £4 million invested by Riquet personally. Louis XIV and Jean-Baptiste Colbert inaugurated the canal at Set, on May 24, 1681.
Although Riquet, who died eight months earlier, had not lived to see his masterpiece of engineering completed, he had lived and communicated to others the joy of immortality, and was comforted in the knowledge that he had brought a great contribution to mankind. At the turn of the 18th Century, the famous military engineer and admirer of Riquet, Marshal Sébastien de Vauban, made some important improvements and a number of significant additions to the canal. Today, the canal is still in operation, for both trade and tourism.[fn_12]
Riquet also broke new ground in fostering “the advantage of the other” by providing exceptional benefits for his own workers. The Canal Company had a 12,000-man workforce, divided into 240 brigades of 50 men each. These represented the best-paid workers of the period for this type of construction work. Riquet had gotten from Colbert a royal order to pay, for the security of his workers, a salary of £10 a month per worker, which included modest living quarters, Sundays and religious and national holidays off, plus complete medical coverage and full disability in case of injury or death. The royal order also stipulated that “those who present themselves must be fit to do the work, not incapacitated in any way, and must not be younger than twenty years of age or older than fifty.” Riquet’s enemies were very upset, because other workers in the region of Languedoc began to demand similar working conditions.
Riquet’s royal charter for the protection of his labor force was the first of its kind in the history of Europe, guaranteeing the equivalent of good “union wages and conditions.”
The Principle of Discovery
How was Riquet’s canal plan going to guarantee success, when all of the others had failed? How can you guarantee that the LaRouche project of the Eurasian Land-Bridge will succeed, when all free-trade proposals have failed miserably? The answer to these questions lies in the fact that both Riquet and LaRouche understand the principle of discovery.
The irony of Riquet’s discovery was that, while everybody else was trying to use the waters of two rivers whose flows were contrary, and could not be made to climb up to 190 meters above sea level, Riquet solved the problem by tapping the waters of far-away desert streams—up to 65 kilometers away from the canal’s path—and sent them flowing into the only spot from which “the parting of the waters” could send the flows down in two directions at once! The idea was brilliant and the fruit of a true genius.
It is amazing how apparently unsolvable problems get resolved, when they are viewed from above the domain of sense perception. Riquet’s project was so successful, that when Marshal de Vauban visited the site a few years after its completion, he remarked: “There is, however, something missing here: there is no statue of Riquet.”
In May 1788, a year after visiting the south of France, the United States’ Minister to France, Thomas Jefferson, sent some notes about the construction of the Canal of Languedoc to George Washington. Jefferson wrote:
Having in the Spring of the last year taken a journey through the southern parts of France, and particularly examined the canal of Languedoc, through its whole course, I take the liberty of sending you the notes I made on the spot, as you may find in them something perhaps which may be turned to account some time or other in the prosecution of the Patowmac [Potomac] canal.
Jefferson’s acute interest in the Canal du Midi is one more example showing how the economics of the Peace of Westphalia had found its manifest destiny in America.[fn_13]
Under Colbert’s policy, France once again embraced the “principle of benevolence” that Louis XI had institutionalized from the sublime courage of Jeanne d’Arc. The so-called “religious wars” which had decimated Europe for over a century and a quarter, were stopped and overcome. Never, during such a short period as the Mazarin-Colbert reforms, had so much evil been defeated by such a simple and effective principle as “the advantage of the other,” or the common good. Without it, the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, and the era of sovereign nation-states which it launched, would not have been possible.
[fn_1] Hermann Scherer, Histoire du commerce de toutes les nations depuis les temps anciens jusqu’a nos jours, Tôme seconde. Paris: Capelle, Libraire-Editeur, 1857, p. 548. [back to text for fn_1]
[fn_2] The Mazarin plan for developing rivers and canals inside Germany made its way across the empire, and was finally realized in the reigns of the Grand Elector, Frederick William I (1620-88), the founder of the German nation-state, and his successor, Frederick II, the Great (1712-86). According to Scherer, op. cit., it was Frederick II who fully succeeded in creating a real internal economic system centered on a series of canals connecting the rivers from east to west. After Frederick William I built the great trench that connected the Oder and the Elbe rivers in 1668:
“Frederick II continued the canal works of his predecessor. In Westphalia, the Ruhr was made navigable, and an outlet was created to the saline Unna. The canal of Plauen established the most direct connection between the Elbe, the Havel, and the Spree; the Finow canal connected the Havel and the Oder; the Bromberg canal connected the Oder and the Vistula. These navigable channels soon gave a tremendous impulse to the commerce of the steppes and to the neighboring provinces with the basin of the Elbe, Silesia and Poland, and thus contributed greatly to the rise of Berlin as a commercial city.” (Scherer, op. cit., p. 581)
These canal routes correspond today to the different sections of the Mittelland Canal crossing Germany west-east, connecting all of its main rivers from the Rhine to the Vistula and linking the main cities of Bonn, Münster, Osnabrück, Hanover, Braunschweig, Magdeburg, Berlin, and the Polish city of Bydgoszcz (Bramberg). [back to text for fn_2]
[fn_3] See Pierre Beaudry, “Peace of Westphalia: France’s Defense of the Sovereign Nation,” EIR, Vol. 29, No. 46, Nov. 29, 2002, pp. 18-33. [back to text for fn_3]
[fn_4] This principle of benevolence has its political roots in the policy of France’s Henry IV and the Duke of Sully, in the aftermath of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day religious massacre of 1572. As Sully had emphasized to the King later:
“Your intention must be to truly seek all of the means to have them [potentates] live in peace and tranquility among themselves, constantly soliciting them to establish a peace or a truce, whenever there should be contention or diversity of pretentions; and always to endeavor to put forward, with whomever you are dealing, your generous resolution whereby you wish everything for the others, and nothing for yourself” [emphasis added]. Maximilien de Bethune, Duc de Sully, Memoires des sages et royales oeconomies d’estat, domestiques, politiques, et militaires de Henry le Grand, par M.M. Michaud et Poujoulat, Tôme deuxième, Paris, chez l’editeur du commentaire analytique du Code Civil, 1837, p. 151. [back to text for fn_4]
[fn_5] Since the discovery of America and of maritime routes to India, the control of sea-lanes and the monopoly of world trade by global merchant companies have been the main interests of a few maritime financial oligarchies. They have been centered most prominently, during successive periods of history, in the cities of Venice, Amsterdam, and London, whence they wielded the power of their central banking interests over most of the national economies of the planet.
The 17th-Century Dutch East India Company was such a commercial house. It was created on March 20, 1602, for the purpose of establishing a monopoly of trading in the Far East. The new company was placed under the control of the Duke, William of Orange, in Amsterdam, and was composed of 60 administrators elected by the shareholders—that is, by themselves—to form a General Estates that became the real, behind-the-scenes government of Holland. It was a kind of parliamentary group composed of six different chambers, located respectively in Amsterdam, Middelburg, Delft, Rotterdam, Horn, and Enkhuisen.
Their control mechanisms were not unlike the European parliamentary system of today, under the Maastricht Treaty and its central banking arrangement. The general business of international trade was put into the hands of a smaller group of seven directors who would meet, several times a year, in Amsterdam, to determine the number of ships to send out, the period of their voyage, the times of their departure and return, and their specific destinations and cargoes. The directors’ executive orders had to be obeyed to the letter, with the strictest of discipline.
According to its charter, which was later copied by the British East India Company, the Dutch Company was the only one authorized to trade with the East Indies, and no one else from Holland was allowed to engage in any such trading for his own personal benefit. In fact, no other Dutch ship was allowed to take the route of the Cape of Good Hope, or Cape Horn, without the permission of the Dutch East India Company. Furthermore, it had the exclusive right to establish colonies, coin money, nominate or eliminate high functionaries of government, sign treaties with other nations, and even make war against them. This Hobbesian trading arrangement was so powerful that it had life-and-death control over all of the sea-lanes of the world, and of the colonies the Company looted for their labor and products. Holland was no longer a country with a company, but a company with a country.
In his Histoire du Commerce de toutes les Nations, the 19th-Century German historian Hermann Scherer described the monopolistic so-called free trade of the Dutch Company. In 1602, after expelling the Portuguese by force from the Molucca Islands in Indonesia, the men of Admiral Warwyk’s 14 ships occupied the most important islands, especially Java, and made exclusive contacts with the indigenous tribes, for the complete control of spice production and trade of the entire region, that is, to the exclusion of any other country.
Scherer reported: “They [the Dutch East India Company] made war on nature itself, by letting her grow her goods exclusively where they intended to have complete control, and by destroying crops everywhere else. A company order restricted the growth of nutmeg trees on the island of Banda; another imposed a ban on cloves on the island of Ambon. In all of the other Molucca Islands, trees had to be burnt and slashed, and any new plantation was forbidden under threat of severe punishment. Treaties were agreed upon with the indigenous people, which sometimes had to be imposed by force of arms. The Islands were closed to foreign ships, and contraband was watched for, day and night. The whole thing was organized in order to maintain a complete monopoly, and to prevent any price fluctuation in Europe.” (Scherer, op. cit., p. 259.)
After a few years of success that had surpassed all of its anticipations, the Dutch East India Company was transformed into a new colonial and political empire. The Dutch Company even made war against British colonial interests in Jakarta. The British knew precisely what the Dutch were up to, and they wanted a piece of the action. In 1618, Adm. Jean Koen fought the British in Jakarta. The city was burnt to the ground and the British were forced out permanently. The city was rebuilt in 1621, under the old Dutch feudal name—Batavia—and became the center of all of the Dutch operations in the Far East. Batavia then became known as the Pearl of the Orient. Such a monopoly expanded into India, into Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in 1658, into Malacca (Malaysia), Les Isles De Sonde (Sunda Islands), the Celebes (Sulawesi), Timor, Borneo, Sumatra, and then beyond, into Thailand, Taiwan, China, and Japan.
Since the shareholders of the company were the ones fixing the prices, the “little green men under the floorboards of the stock exchange,” in Amsterdam, kept improving the differences between the cost of buying cheap spices and selling them dear, which brought them a profit of 200-300% per annum. In his History of Dutch Commerce, historian M. Lueder estimated that during 137 years, from its founding in 1602 until 1739, the Company had bought for a total of 360 million florins, and sold for a total of 1,620 million florins: a spoiling of nature, and of the general welfare of the people of Holland and of the Far East. [back to text for fn_5]
[fn_6] Pierre Clement, Lettres, instructions, memoires de Colbert, Tome IV. Paris: Imprimerie Imperiale, 1867, p. 216. [back to text for fn_6]
[fn_7] Clement, op. cit., p. 235. [back to text for fn_7]
[fn_8] Historian Pierre Clement wrote that when Mazarin died, “leaving France in a state of peace on the outside, freed from the factions on the inside, but tired out, without resources, and scandalously exploited by any man who had 100,000 ecus to lend to the Treasury at 50% interest, Colbert, who had long followed with diligence the progress of corruption, who knew all of its ruses and weaknesses, and who was revealing them to Louis XIV—Colbert whom the King consulted first in secret, because the need he had of him was so great—necessarily had to be brought into the Council and occupy the first place. His special skills, his antecedents, his character, his hard work, the important fortune of Mazarin that he administered so wisely during 15 years, but most of all the modesty of the functions he had held under the Cardinal [Mazarin], everything pointed him toward Louis XIV.” (Pierre Clement, op. cit., p. 94.
In his article, “Colbert’s Bequest to the Founding Fathers,” historian Anton Chaitkin appropriately likened Colbert’s 1661 bold intervention to a real coup d’état (EIR, Vol. 19, No. 1, Jan. 3, 1992, pp. 20-21). [back to text for fn_8]
[fn_9] See G.W. Leibniz, “The Discoveries of Principle of the Calculus in Acta Eruditorum,” eight unpublished translations by Pierre Beaudry. [back to text for fn_9]
[fn_10] Philip Valenti, “Britain Sabotaged the Steam Engine of Leibniz and Papin,” EIR, Vol. 23, No. 6, Feb. 16, 1996, pp. 18-23; see also Fusion, Vol. 2, No. 4, Dec. 1979. [back to text for fn_10]
[fn_11] Pierre Clement, op. cit., p. 305. [back to text for fn_11]
[fn_12] Sébastien Le Prestre, Marquis de Vauban (1633-1707), was a Marshal of France and a military engineer who had studied Leonardo da Vinci and especially the great works of Pierre-Paul Riquet. A member of the Academie des Sciences, Vauban distinguished himself by establishing the most advanced form of modern fortification, surrounding France with a defensive shield by rebuilding more than 300 fortified cities and creating 37 new ones. (The post-Vauban Fort McHenry, located in Baltimore, Maryland, is a typical Vauban fortification.)
Vauban was a Colbertian economist who was preoccupied mostly with improving the conditions of labor, and who considered that “work is the principle of all wealth.” Louis XIV unjustly disgraced him, but it was in honor of Vauban that Saint-Simon created the French word patriote. [back to text for fn_12]
[fn_13] Roy and Alma More, Thomas Jefferson’s Journey to the South of France. New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1999, p. 157. [back to text for fn_13]
The Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 brought an end to the Thirty Years’ War, the last of wars that had drowned Europe in blood in battles over religion. It defined the principles of sovereignty and equality in numerous sub-contracts. It became the constitution of the new system of states of Europe. We paraphrase the two key principles:
Article I begins: A Christian general and permanent peace, and true and honest friendship, must rule between his Holy Imperial Majesty and his Holy All-Christian Majesty, as well as between all and every ally and follower of the mentioned Imperial Majesty, the House of Austria … and successors…. And this Peace must be so honest and seriously guarded and nourished that each part furthers the advantage, honor, and benefit of the other…. A neighborliness should be renewed and flourish for peace and friendship, and flourish again.
(In other words, peace among sovereign nations requires, according to this principle, that each nation develops itself fully, and regards it as its self-interest to develop the others fully, and vice versa—a real “family of nations.”)
Article II says: On both sides, all should be forever forgotten and forgiven—what has from the beginning of the troubles, no matter how or where, from one side or the other, happened in terms of hostility—so that neither because of that, nor for any other reason or pretext, should anyone commit, or allow to happen, any hostility, unfriendliness, difficulty, or obstacle in respect to persons, their status, goods, or security itself, or through others, secretly or openly, directly or indirectly, under the pretense of the authority or the law, or by way of violence within the Empire, or anywhere outside of it, and any earlier, contradictory treaties should not stand against this.
Instead, the fact that each and every one, from one side and the other, both before and during the war, committed insults, violent acts, hostilities, damages, and injuries, without regard of persons or outcomes, should be completely put aside, so that everything, whatever one could demand from another under his name, will be forgotten to eternity.
—Prepared by Pierre Beaudry from the French and Latin original texts. [back to text]
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Mobilisér for Schiller Instituttets videokonference den 9. april
om en ny sikkerheds- og udviklingsarkitektur.
Klik her for lydfilen.
Med formand Tom Gillesberg.
38 min. videoresumé + hele konferencen:
International videokonference for at etablere en ny sikkerheds- og
udviklingsarkitektur for alle nationer, den 9. april
Del gerne.
PLENARFORSAMLING (90 min.)
Hvorfor det fejlslagne gamle paradigmekræver udformningen af et nyt paradigme i internationale forhold.
PANEL 1: ØKONOMI (90 min.)
For en ny retfærdig økonomisk verdensorden – forebyggelse af én milliard menneskers sultedød
PANEL 2: SIKKERHED (90 min.)
En ny sikkerhedsarkitektur i traditionen fra den Westfalske Fred (1648) og Bandung-konferencen (konferencen i Indonesien i 1955, hvor Den alliancefri Bevægelse blev grundlagt.)
PANEL 3: UDVIKLING (90 min.)
For endelig at overvinde kolonialisme og imperialisme
Udvikling er det nye navn for fred
Behovet for at opbygge et verdenssundhedsvæsen
Opdateret:
Vores verden er under den akutte og livstruende trussel om omfattende krig, herunder atomkrig og dermed den mulige udslettelse af menneskeslægten, foruden økonomisk ødelæggelse, der berører milliarder af mennesker.
Det er derfor tvingende nødvendigt at etablere en ny sikkerheds- og udviklingsarkitektur for alle nationer, som skal tilgodese til alle nationers interesser på jorden.
Den nuværende krig i Europa, rækken af krige i Afghanistan, Syrien, Irak, Libyen, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, og spredningen af hungersnød og sygdomme har allerede dræbt millioner af uskyldige mennesker og ødelagt deres hjem, levebrød og fremtid. Corona-krisen minder os om, at alt liv på jorden er sammenhængende, forbundet og indbyrdes beslægtet, og at vi må fokusere på bæredygtighed og inklusion for at forbedre vores jord og vores befolkningers tilstand. Vores mission er derfor ikke kun at stoppe en sådan selvdestruktiv udvikling, men også at tilrettelægge alle forudsætningerne for fred og velstand på grundlag af menneskehedens fælles formål. Vi må udforme et nyt paradigme, en ny ordning, som fokuserer på vores klode og vores befolkningers interesser for at løfte menneskeheden til det næste niveau.
Bag den umiddelbare trussel om krig ligger det igangværende kollaps af det transatlantiske finanssystem. En hyperinflatorisk proces er blevet udløst globalt, med et deraf følgende sammenbrud af de vestlige nationers økonomier. City of London og Wall Street, som er ansvarlige for et sådant system, er ivrige efter at ødelægge ethvert velfungerende alternativ til deres system, det være sig Rusland, Kina, Indien eller andre. Kinas partnerskab omkring Bælte & Vej omfatter nu omtrent 150 nationer. Det nuværende finansielle system bliver brugt til at opretholde den koloniale tilstand af underudvikling af den tidligere såkaldte udviklingssektor, gennem malthusianske strategier. Derfor er det nødvendigt at etablere et fuldstændig nyt finansielt paradigme med en integrerede tilgang til sikkerhed, økonomi og udvikling af alle nationer.
Den Westfalske Fred er vores referencepunkt. Den fastslog ikke blot den andens gavn, ære og fordel og den evige glemsel, amnesti eller tilgivelse for alt, hvad der er begået, men den omfattede også en finansiel reorganisering af alle lande, der deltog i den. Den sorterede og afviklede misligholdt og ulovlig gæld og finansielle fordringer, for det meste ved annullering af gæld eller forhandlet omlægning af gæld. Den fastlagde også statens rolle i genopbygningen af nationerne efter 30-årskrigen.
Den internationale folkeret udviklede sig på baggrund af den Westfalske Fred, som fandt sit hidtil mest vidtgående udtryk i den såkaldte FN-pagt, der ubetinget må opretholdes i det nye paradigme. Verdenserklæringen om menneskerettigheder, de ti principper fra Bandung og de fem principper for fredelig sameksistens, indeholder alle idéer, som er universelle og fortsat gyldige for fremme af fred, udvikling og samarbejde i verden.
Verdens sidste udformning fandt sted efter Anden Verdenskrig, som gav anledning til FN, Verdensbanken, IMF, NATO, WTO, WHO, osv. Disse institutioner udråbt deres fokus på demokrati, menneskerettigheder, kapitalisme, forbrug og militær og det fungerede for det meste i 75 år. Deres mangler var at de ikke opfyldte FDR’s løfte om Bretton Woods-systemet, som han udformede det for at øge levestandarden i udviklingslandene og gøre en ende på kolonialismen. Det er på tide at omforme verden for at kunne drage fordel af den enorme forbundethed og det nye paradigme for at sikre grundlæggende menneskelige behov, inklusion, ny økonomi, decentralisering, varig overlevelse og fred for alle.
Vi er inderligt overbeviste om, at fred kun kan opnås ved en gennemgribende omformning af det økonomiske system i verden, så dette perspektiv bliver til virkelighed. En sådan ny vision af verden, der er i overensstemmelse med fortidens idealer, vælger bæredygtighed, inklusion og forbundethed i stedet for den internationale regelbaserede orden med fokus på magt og profit.
Vi afholder denne konference for at invitere, engagere og inspirere ledere med visioner, karakter, evner og engagement til at kommunikere, samarbejde og sammen være kreative i retning af enhed, retfærdighed, demokrati, suverænitet og menneskelig udvikling, og holde fast i deres løfter i stedet for at underkaste sig pengemændenes og oligarkernes regler. Det er et spørgsmål om liv eller død at stoppe “dommedagsuret”, før det slår midnat.
Denne nye vision, der skal skabe en ny global platform og føre menneskeheden til nye højder, er meget detaljeret beskrevet i forslagene fra den berømte amerikanske økonom Lyndon LaRouche, som er baseret på det han kaldte sine fire love:
. Den øjeblikkelige gennemførelse af Glass/Steagall-loven, der blev indført af den amerikanske præsident Franklin Delano Roosevelt, uden ændringer og denne gang globalt, med henblik på at gennemføre en konkursbehandling af hele den spekulative finansboble for at forhindre udplyndring af menneskelig arbejdskraft og menneskeliv.
. En tilbagevenden til et system med topstyret og nøje defineret nationalbankvæsen, som det blev fastlagt af USA’s første finansminister, Alexander Hamilton, og senere af dem som han inspirerede til at skabe succesfulde systemer for udvikling.
. Det tilhørende kreditsystem til at skabe høj produktiv udvikling i forbindelse med forbedringer af beskæftigelsen og arbejdskraftens kvalitet med den ledsagende hensigt at øge den fysisk-økonomiske produktivitet og levestandarden for personer og husholdninger.
. Et videnskabeligt drevet lynprogram for fusionsenergi for at fremme opdagelsen af nye fysiske principper og grundlæggende gennembrud inden for videnskab med henblik på at skabe de mest avancerede udviklingsformer med de højeste energigennemstrømningstætheder.
Mennesket er den eneste art, der er udstyret med kreativ fornuft, hvilket adskiller det fra alle andre levende væsener. Denne kreative evne sætter os i stand til kontinuerligt at opdage nye principper i det fysiske univers, hvilket kaldes videnskabeligt fremskridt. Det faktum, at den menneskelige forstand gennem en immateriel idé er i stand til at opdage disse principper, som har en virkning i det materielle univers i form af teknologisk fremskridt, beviser, at der er overensstemmelse mellem det menneskelige sinds lovmæssighed og lovmæssigheden i det fysiske univers. Set i dette perspektiv har økonomi ikke noget at gøre med profit, men med menneskers lykke i den forstand, som Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz mente, dvs. at mennesket er i stand til at udvikle alle de iboende potentialer det besidder til en harmonisk helhed, og dermed bidrage til den bedste videre udvikling af menneskeheden.
Program/Talerlisten:
Plenarmøde
1) Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (1922-2019), afdød statsmand og økonom: »Grundlaget for at tro på optimisme«
2) Helga Zepp-LaRouche; grundlægger, Schiller Instituttet: Velkomst og åbningstale: »Behovet for et nyt paradigme«
3) Anatoly Antonov, russisk ambassadør i USA: »Mulighederne for at bygge en ny international sikkerhedsarkitektur«
4) Sam Pitroda; iværksætter og politiker; USA/Indien: »Behovet for at omforme verden«
5) Jay Naidoo; minister under præsident Nelson Mandela, Sydafrika: »Perspektivet fra den afrikanske medborger«
6) Chen Xiaohan, Det kinesiske folks forening for fred og nedrustning: »Menneskehedens fælles fremtid«
7) Alessia Ruggeri; talskvinde for Comitato per la Repubblica, fagforeningsleder, sammenslutningen af små og mellemstore virksomheder: »For et fædrelandenes Europa med Den Westfalske Fred«
Diskussion mellem paneldeltagerne
Panel 1: Økonomi
1) Dennis Small; Latinamerikansk redaktør, EIR: »Den nye arkitektur: Et program for at forhindre, at en milliard mennesker sulter på grund af sanktionerne«
2) Prof. Justin Yifu Lin; dekan, Institut for ny strukturel økonomi; dekan, Institut for Syd-Syd-samarbejde og udvikling; æresdekan, Skolen for national udvikling, Beijing Universitet: »Kinas BRI: Rationale og sandsynlige virkninger«
3) Saeed Naqvi (Indien), indisk journalist, tv-kommentator og interviewer: »Mediernes rolle og ansvar«
4) Dr. George Koo (USA), pensioneret virksomhedsrådgiver; Formand, Burlingame Foundation: »USA’s sanktioner imod Rusland og Kina er selvmord for dollaren«
5) Fraydique Alexander Gaitán (Colombia), formand for Columbias arbejderforbund CTU-USCTRAB: »ILO-tripartisme, den vigtigste tilgang til en stabil og varig global fred« and Pedro Rubio, leder af CTU-USCTRAB og formand for sammenslutningen af tjenestemænd i Colombias generalregnskabskontor: »Sydamerika og den nye udviklingsarkitektur«
Offentlig debat
Panel 2: Sikkerhed
1) Jacques Cheminade; formand, Solidarité et Progrès, Frankrig: » Den Westfalske Fred for at undgå Thukydid-fælden «
2) Diogène Senny; formand for den panafrikanske liga UMOJA Congo, Republikken Congo: »Hvad Afrika forventer af verden«
3) Caleb Maupin (USA), stifter og direktør for Center for Political Innovation: »Sikkerhedsvirkninger af USA’s og Vestens ensidige sanktioner«
4) Mike Callicrate (USA), kvægavler fra Kansas, politisk fortaler og stifter og ejer af Ranch Foods Direct: »Kartel-æraen er forbi: Flere suveræne landmænd, mad til alle, fordobling af verdens fødevareproduktion«
Offentlig diskussion
Panel 3: Udvikling
1) Dennis Speed; Komitéen for Modsætningers Sammenfald, forfatter og mangeårig leder af LaRouche-bevægelsen; »Det presserende behov for et verdenssundhedssystem«
2) Helga Zepp-LaRouche: »Operation Ibn Sina«, Dipl. Ing. Daud Azimi – Bestyrelsesmedlem Afghanistans nationale fredsfront: »Afghanistan: Dagens presserende økonomiske og politiske nødvendigheder«
3) Princy Mthombeni; kommunikationsspecialist, stifter af Africa4Nuclear: »Kernekraftteknologi til Afrikas dagsorden for bæredygtig udvikling«
Offentlig debat
Afsluttende bemærkninger
Helga Zepp-LaRouche
Foredrag af Rusland-ekspert Jens Jørgen Nielsen: Hvad sker der i og omkring Ukraine? den 5. marts 2022
“Jens Jørgen Nielsen, som er historiker, Ruslandskender og forfatter til bøger om både Ukraine og Rusland, holdt dette foredrag d. 5. marts 2022 på Aarhus mod Krig og Terrors debatmøde om situationen i Ukraine.” fra hjemmesiden Flygtninge og Fred her.
Diabilleder:
“Vi må sætte en stopper for den selvdestruktive selvmordspagt”
Schiller Instituttets ugentlige webcast med Helga Zepp-LaRouche den 10. marts 2022
Schiller Instituttets formand, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, kom med en kraftig appel til alle borgere om at gøre fælles sag med hende for at samle tilslutning til en konference, for at etablere en ny strategisk arkitektur, inden de vanvittige krigshøge i det transatlantiske område roder sig ud i en atomkrig.
Hun beskrev den nuværende situation som “forfærdelig … ude af kontrol”, og fastslog at den totale kontrol med medierne har gjort det muligt for regeringerne at sætte økonomierne i en krigstilstand, hvilket truer med at udløse massedød som følge af hungersnød. Den nuværende sanktionsordning mod Afghanistan truer fem millioner børn nu, sagde hun. I stedet for at tage stilling til dette er USA og NATO-magterne i gang med at dæmonisere Putin og knuse Rusland.
Jeg opfordrer jer til at slutte jer til os, sagde hun, for at indkalde til en konference “i ånden fra den Westfalske Fred (1648)” for at skabe en sikkerhedsarkitektur, der tager hensyn til alle nationers og folkeslags behov. Centralt i hendes forslag er at acceptere tilbuddet fra den kinesiske udenrigsminister Wang Yi, som opfordrede til en integration af USA og Europa med Bælte- og Vej-Initiativet.