The Schiller Institute today sponsored a critical forum under the title: “A Difference In Leadership: Can War with Russia Still Be Averted?” Speaking from the Russian Mission to the United Nations, Ambassador Dmitry Polyanskiy, First Deputy Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the UN, presented the stark reality of the current rush to war by Western leaders. “It seems,” he said, “that our Western colleagues are blinded by the so-called ‘victory’ in the Cold War, and continue to live these memories and try to talk from the position of superiority, and impose double standards. They blame us for the presence and movement of our troops on our own sovereign territory, while claiming that everything they do on NATO territory is nobody’s business. This will no longer work.”

Helga Zepp-LaRouche posed the higher order approach to the crisis: “I suggest very strongly that we need a new security architecture, which has to reflect on the basic lessons of history. You have to look at treaties which did lead to peace, and those which didn’t. A good example for the first is the Peace of Westphalia, where after 150 years of religious war, especially the Thirty Years’ War, people realized that nobody would be the winner of the continuation of the war. So, they agreed on the famous principles of the Peace of Westphalia, the most important being that you have to take into account the interest of the other if you want to have peace. Every time that was done—and this Peace of Westphalia, by the way, was the beginning of international law and what constitutes the UN Charter today—that leads to peace. The other example is the Versailles Treaty, which proclaimed that Germany was the only guilty party in World War I, which was not true. For sure, it was not just. It put burdens on Germany to pay not only the cost of war, but reparations, which was completely overburdening the German economy. So, the Reichsbank started to print money; that led to the hyperinflation; that contributed to the Depression. Naturally, the deep sense of injustice which the people coming out of this had, led to the rise of the Nazis and the actual takeover by the National Socialists which led to World War II.”

Harley Schlanger, a spokesman for The LaRouche Organization, reviewed the arrogance of the neoconservatives and the neoliberals who believed that the West had “won” the Cold War, and that this gave them license to impose their imagined superior system of “democracy and free market economies” on all nations, by military means if necessary. He posted a chart of the illegal and genocidal wars waged against nations—Afghanistan, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Libya, Syria, and then the coup against Ukraine in 2014—against nations which were no threat to anyone, wars based on fraudulent charges which are acknowledged now to have been manufactured to justify the wars. This included the “shock therapy” imposed on Russia itself, in an attempt to reduce a great scientific and industrial nation into a “raw material exporter” with impoverished and declining populations. When Vladimir Putin reversed that destruction, he was labeled an “autocrat,” while both parties in the U.S. united behind the war policy. The era of unilateralism and a unipolar world is now finished, Schlanger asserted, as the China-Russia cooperation in nation building, for themselves and the 140 nations which have joined the Belt and Road Initiative, are no longer taking orders, and will no longer allow color revolutions or neo-colonial wars and oppression.

Paul Gallagher, EIR Economics Editor, then dissected the destruction of the “American System,” which had been restored by Franklin Roosevelt through Glass-Steagall bank regulation and the post-war Bretton Woods system. The destruction began with the 1971 decoupling of the dollar from gold by the Nixon Administration, turning the banking system into one based on speculation rather than production. With the collapse of the speculative bubble in 2008, Lyndon LaRouche’s proposal to restore American System policies was rejected in favor of mass money printing to save the banks, creating the greatest “everything bubble” in history. The effort to sustain the $275 trillion bubble through the Green New Deal, run by the same bankers responsible for the bubble itself, by shutting down fossil fuels, many industries and farms, would result in mass depopulation of the world, already evident globally, and even within the United States. Here again, the emergence of Russia, China and the Belt and Road Initiative demonstrates that the unipolar world run by the City of London and Wall Street no longer can dictate this destruction on the rest of the world, with the danger that they may choose to launch a nuclear war rather than joining as an equal partner in a new world order.

Richard Black, the Schiller Institute representative to the UN, followed up Ambassador Polyanskiy’s call for ending the forced division of the world into warring blocs, to seek those things which unite us rather than divide us. He reviewed LaRouche’s work with the scientific community in Russia, in the tradition of that nation’s great scientific geniuses, calling on the citizens of the Western nations to organize their political leaders and candidates to force their governments to give up their phobias, and cooperate in the great tasks facing mankind as a whole.

A rich discussion and Q&A followed. You are encouraged to watch this crucial and productive forum, and to act on the ideas there presented.