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European Conference Call Excerpt with Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Tuesday, April 27, 2021

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: I think we have to wake up the international population much more than even we have been doing so far, because in going through the intelligence in preparation for this phone call, when you are looking at the picture as a totality, it is absolutely horrifying. To start with what I think could be really a detonator of the situation, you remember that when Putin gave his speech on April 21 to the Federal Assembly, he said there are red lines which cannot be crossed, and then he said there was an assassination attempt against Lukashenko and a coup attempt against Belarus, and that that had really gone too far.

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

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

I find this absolutely incredible, because we published in the recent period, a lot of the activity of Michael Carpenter, who is among other things, nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. He was in the in the Obama administration, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense with responsibility for Russia, Ukraine, Eurasia, the Balkans, and Conventional Arms Control; director for Russia in the National Security Council; and he’s now Managing Director of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2018, he made some waves when he accompanied the Ukrainian neo-Nazi then-Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada Andriy Parubiy on a trip to Washington, and when he was questioned concerning Parubiy’s connection to the Nazi movement which was involved in the Ukraine coup in 2014, he defended Parubiy as a patriot and fantastic leading personality.

Carpenter was also together with Biden, the author of an article in Foreign Affairs publication of the Council on Foreign Relations for January/February 2018 “How To Stand Up to the Kremlin: Defending Democracy Against Its Enemies”  He’s obviously close to Biden.

I find this absolutely incredible, because if this turns out to be the case, we could be closer to World War III, than anybody realizes: Because this is exactly the kind of stuff which happens in the forefront of world wars.

And we should also note the fact that, today, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin announced on April 26 that China will support Russia in front of the sharpened Western sanctions. He said: “China has all along maintained that differences should be properly resolved through consultation as equals on the basis of mutual respect. We reject the approach of wantonly resorting to unilateral sanctions or threat of sanctions…. China and Russia are comprehensive strategic partners of coordination in the new era. We will continue to understand and support each other in safeguarding our respective sovereignty, security and development interests.”

And we should keep in mind that when Wang Yi and Sergey Lavrov met in the Chinese city of Guilin on March 23, they were already talking about such an increase in the global governance partnership between Russia and China.

Then one should also remember that just last week, on April 19, the U.S. Strategic Command announced what they called a “preview of the Posture Statement Review,” it’s addressed to U.S. Congress every year, and there they tweet: “Posture Statement Preview: The spectrum of conflict today is neither linear nor predictable. We must account for the possibility of conflict leading to conditions which could very rapidly drive an adversary to consider nuclear use as their least bad option.”

StratCom is the same thing, what the Commander Adm. Charles Richard had told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, last week [April 20] that the Chinese nuclear capabilities are advancing so rapidly that it’s not worth to update it, because it’s going so fast that each new report is outdated; and that a portion of China’s nuclear arsenal has been recently primed for ready use, that is launch on warning.

And then, we should remember that Tulsi Gabbard had warned against this kind of anti-Russia brinksmanship, where she had in the “Tucker Carlson Tonight” show [April 12], said that “such a war would come at a cost beyond anything that we can really imagine.” An entirely accurate picture of “hundreds of millions of people dying and suffering seeing their flesh burned from their bones.” She is one of the few people who are warning about that, but it is an absolute scandal that there is no discussion.

However, I will come to that in a second. I think there are indirect indications that some people in Europe are slowly waking up, that this confrontation against Russia is insane.

But one should see this, what I just reported about the accusation concerning the possible plot against Belarus, also in the context of the absolute increased tension with Czechia, where now, after President Milos Zeman, who is generally reasonable concerning Russia—he had been attending the Rhodes Conference several times—in any case, he had said that the Czech secret services would know that there was no Russian involvement in this 2014 blowup of this ammunition depot [in Vrbetice]. Now, as a result of his saying that, the leader of the Czech parliament is investigating the possibility of a suit against Zeman for high treason, because supposedly he would have revealed state secrets in this speech; and he or some other speaker announced that there is already a collection of signatures on a petition to the Senate, a constitutional complaint that he was being responsible for treason.

Obviously, this story was at the bottom of why the 60 Russian—that’s not a little, I mean, there’s almost nobody left—60 Russian diplomats have been expelled from the Czech Republic. And then you have a similar process going on with Poland.

So naturally the hand of the British is visible: Chatham House had an article on that story of the 2014 explosion in the Czech ammunition depot, in which it states that this is the key issue to which Europe must respond, that the failure to do so would be inexcusable and be highly dangerous. [“Europe Must Admit Russia Is Waging War,” And they say that these are the same Russians who were responsible for the Salisbury poison attack on the Skripals in 2018, and this would be tantamount to an act of state terror, on the territory of a NATO and EU member state.

So, Lavrov responded to that, by basically saying, this indeed the territory is where the EU should investigate this. And he said that Zeman’s statements were absolutely reasonable, but the attack on him means that “those who make such statements have already decided everything for themselves, decided that there are no alternative explanations other than the guilt of Russia.”

Also as part of this insane war-mongering environment, Politico reports that U.S. spy agencies are now looking to declassify more intelligence on Russia and China’s “malign behavior,” and there is a memo signed by 9 of the 11 U.S. military four-star commanders, demanding that more intelligence for the information war against Russia and China should be published, that the world must know what Russia and China are doing.

I think if you look at this, it’s really hair-raising: If you have the accusation that Russian and Belarus secret services that the U.S. is involved, and they’re naming this guy Michael Carpenter—I have not had the time to talk to the U.S. before making this briefing, but I think there is a story behind it, which either it turns out to be true, and then it’s really serious and extremely dangerous; or it’s some fake, which I doubt very much that you would joke with such stuff—I just want to say that this is extremely alarming for the state of affairs.

Now, the reason why I think that some Europeans are waking up, is because, for a two days or so, the German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas has slightly modified his tone, saying there cannot be a continuation of the confrontation with Russia; and in contrast to what Green Chancellor candidate Annalena Baerbock is saying, who blasts Russia and China, and is on a complete confrontation course, and she is the invited guest of the conference by the Atlantic Council on May 5. But Maas is calling for de-escalation, and so is Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, who, in an interview with Neue Zürcher Zeitung said that he’s against more sanctions against Russia, that there must be a de-escalation, and that peace in Europe is possible with Russia, and not against it.

So, I think we should try to talk to many people and get a reason, what is really the perception in Europe about this state of affairs. Because if there would be any kind of escalation, it would be nuclear, because the U.S. forces and the NATO forces in Europe will not be involved in a war against Russian forces—that’s a complete joke—and the whole discussion about “low-yield nuclear weapons,” the modernization of nuclear weapons, I think it would affect European countries immediately, and it would be the end of Europe: That’s what we should really realize….

OK, so I will not go through a whole plethora of other subjects, because I think what I said in the beginning is the most worrisome, and that means that our upcoming conference on May 8 is more urgent than ever before, to really get a resistance against the war danger, against the sanctions, against all of these policies, which can only mean a disaster as the outcome, and we should really try to convince people that we need a moral resistance against this kind of decadence which could very well be the beginning of the hours and days before World War III.

So, I think we really need a mobilization: I know people have all reasons why we are overworked, and this and that, but I think in light of what I said in the beginning, it is really horrifying. And people have to wake up, because it doesn’t register! It does not register! People have been numbed, and become so indifferent, that if we don’t break through that, I think the outcome will be a disaster.

So I can only say that we have already some very interesting speakers: I hope to be able in a day or two, to put together a preliminary list of speakers and titles, which we will put out as soon as it is together. But it shapes up already as very interesting, both on the strategic crisis, and also on the continuation of the work of the Committee of the Coincidence of Opposites. So we should really go in all out effort to build this conference as a platform for anybody who wants to have a voice of reason and discuss solutions.