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How Can Anyone Be So Crazy As To Start a Nuclear War?

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

November 2011

This article appears in the November 18, 2011 issue of Executive Intelligence Review and is reprinted with permission.

[PDF version of this article]

Dear Fellow Citizens,

Julien LeMaître
Helga Zepp-LaRouche addresses the General Assembly of the Solidarity and Progress political party in France, October 15, 2011.

November 12, 2011 —The strategic agreement signed between the representatives of the National Security Councils of Russia and Iran, Yevgeniy Lukyanov and Ali Bageri, on cooperation in security, economic policy, political affairs, and intelligence was an unmistakable message to the entire world. The conclusion of this agreement, just days after the announcement of a highly controversial new report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), alleging that Iran is constructing and will soon have nuclear weapons, marks the red line that Russia has clearly drawn: Any attack by the United States, Britain, or Israel on Iran must reckon with the escalation of a countdown to a global thermonuclear war.

The Turkish newspaper Hürrijet reported that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, at the Nov. 7 conference of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), in discussions with his Chinese counterpart Wen Jiabao, welcomed the idea of full membership in this organization for Iran and Pakistan, which previously only had observer status.

That was also a signal that Russia has understood the intention of the potential war coalition; that the issue is not the alleged nuclear weapons program in Iran, whose alleged existence is based only on intelligence sources from members of that coalition that gave information to the IAEA; but that the Middle East today is playing the role that the Balkans did in World War I: namely, to trigger a world war that would be aimed in reality against Russia, China, and secondarily India.

Geopolitics and Malthusianism

It has been obviously been understood, that today the same geopolitical logic is operating as that with which the British Empire, at the end of the 19th Century, responded to the infrastructural development of the "Eurasian Heartland": manipulation of the chessboard of the European countries before the First World War, so that the shots fired at Sarajevo were only the trigger for war, but not the cause [see accompanying article]. However this time it is the considerable growth rate of China and other Asian countries, as well as the cooperation of Russia and China in the high-technology sector, which are regarded as unacceptable by the trans-Atlantic financial oligarchy, the modern British Empire.

Their intention is quite the contrary, to achieve a "Great Transformation" back to feudal society, or to "decarbonization" of the world economy, i.e., exclusively to the use of renewable energy, whose energy flux-density would, however, allow only 1 or 2 billion people to live on the Earth, as propagandized, among others, by Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber of the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU).[1]

The growth in Asia is diametrically opposed to the British Empire's intention of reducing the world's population to 1 to 2 billion, as Prince Philip has advocated.

Let us hear what Sir David Attenborough said in March at a meeting of the Royal Society of Arts, London:

"It remains an obvious and brutal fact that on a finite planet, human population will quite definitely stop at some point. And that can only happen in one of two ways. It can happen sooner, by fewer human births—in a word, by contraception.... The alternative is an increased death rate, the way which all other creatures must suffer, through famine or disease or predation. That translated into human terms means famine or disease or war—over oil or water or food or minerals or grazing rights or just living space. There is, alas, no third alternative of indefinite growth."

There certainly is no alternative in the malicious mindset of the oligarchs—and we also recognize the argument about "living space," Lebensraum, from somewhere—but there is one for creative people, who see man's cognitive identity as in harmony with an anti-entropically developing universe!

Bankruptcy of the System

The tempo of the countdown to World War III will be accelerated significantly by the speed with which the trans-Atlantic financial system heads to its imminent disintegration. Just a few weeks ago, the supporters of the endless bailouts threatened that a "haircut" for Greece's debt would mean an existential threat to the world financial system. Since then, there has been a 50% "debt haircut," the most brutal austerity measures have been implemented, and Greece has plunged into a state of permanent destabilization.

The tsunami of insolvency has long since spilled over into Italy, and in the absence of confidence on the part of international investors, the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), which is supposed to be the rescue umbrella, has proved to be totally incapable of coming up with even the "leverage" agreed upon at the G20 summit, from € 440 billion to € 1 trillion.

And Le Monde's headline of Nov. 11 was: "After Greece and Italy—France?" This refers to the debts of these three countries, namely Greece €366 billion, Italy €1.924 billion, and France €1.727 billion, for a total of about €4 trillion, for which the €1 trillion leveraged by the EFSF would not be even close to enough.

If Greece, Italy, and France now also can no longer afford the rising interest on their debts, and the EFSF is just a tiny umbrella in view of the enormous sums owed, then where will the solution come from? An entire phalanx of supporters of hyperinflationary monetary growth, absolutely determined to maintain the hopelessly bankrupt system at literally any cost, keeps coming to the public at shorter and shorter intervals with the grandiose idea that only the European Central Bank (ECB) is left as the lender of last resort.

But since the Lehman Brothers crisis in 2008, the ECB has been largely violating its own statutes—according to which its sole purpose is to ensure the stability of the currency—by purchasing toxic government bonds and accepting toxic structured securities as collateral for bank loans, and has thus long been the largest "bad bank" in the world.

President Obama and British Prime Minister Cameron have both jumped onto this bandwagon, along with Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman, who has belatedly recognized that "the Euro project was a terrible mistake," but instead of proposing that this failed experiment should finally be terminated, he says that in the end, the European Central Bank will have to look into the abyss and say,

" 'Forget all the rules. We need to buy the bonds.' The rush to Italy must be stopped. Otherwise the entire Euro project will fail."

But even spokesmen of the Social Democratic Party's so-called left wing, such as Carsten Sieling, are calling for unlimited money printing. The ECB, Sieling says, must abandon its belief in the "primacy of price stability" and must "take new paths"; its "ideological fixation on price stability" is no longer appropriate, and so we need new concepts. But also others, such as Gregor Gysi [Left Party], Martin Schulz [Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats], and Jürgen Trittin [former environment minister, Green party], are all basically mouthing the same propaganda, which the Empire faction has been preaching from the very outset, namely the purported necessity of having the euro as a bastion for defending Europe's interests.

What these people are proposing—whether out of greed, because of toxic paper that they themselves own, or because they are simply clueless—is in peril of extremely quickly turning into trans-Atlantic hyperinflation—a kind of time-lapsed Weimar 1923. Any attempt to use money printing to further sustain the immense backlog of private debt will mean rampant hyperinflation in no time; this debt, through bailout schemes, has been transformed into state debt, coming on top of the ever-present sums in the derivatives market and banks' un-depreciated toxic investments, while the real economy and the population's standard of living are being massacred by draconian budget cuts,

Resistance, Now!

EIRNS/James Rea
The Civil Rights Solidarity Movement (BüSo) organizes in Berlin for a referendum on returning Germany to the deutschemark, Oct. 1, 2011. The euro system is bankrupt, as the LaRouche movement said it would be.

My dear fellow citizens: Wake up! The last remaining proposal, to make the ECB into a creditor of last resort, represents a threat that Europe will very soon break apart and split up into micro-entities—even without the global nuclear war which would follow a military strike against Iran.

Ever since these plans for a possible Israeli military strike against Iran were leaked out by Israeli intelligence sources, an enormous debate—and also a potential for resistance—has broken out in virtually every country. Military and security professionals especially understand full well how extremely dangerous this countdown to World War III is, and how quickly it could careen out of control.

The only way the causes of war can be eliminated, is by overcoming the systemic crisis of our financial system. And the very first, indispensable step toward this, is the immediate implementation of a two-tier banking system in the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt (Glass-Steagall). Commercial banks must be put under state protection, so that they can once again issue credit to the real economy for industry, agriculture, and trade. All claims stemming from the monetary sector's virtual speculation must be written off, because any attempt to honor them would lead to the aforesaid hyperinflation, and would wipe out the entire population's savings.

Feeding into this must be the reestablishment of Germany's sovereignty over our own economic policy and currency—i.e., the introduction of a new D-mark, and the cancellation of all EU treaties since the Maastricht Treaty, an action which Germany is entitled to take in accordance with international law, because it has been proven that remaining within the current construct violates Germany's fundamental interests.

Once it has reattained its sovereignty over its national budget and economic policy, the state can then prioritize all domains of its national interest, of the general welfare and the physical economy. The argument that this would result in a huge revaluation of the D-mark, thereby threatening our exports, has no validity, since a hyperinflationary collapse and a world war show this question to be absurd.

If, on the other hand, Germany stimulates its domestic market on a high technological level, and if it joins Europe's other nations—and, soon, the United States—in agreeing upon a New Bretton Woods System, then Germany's exports will be saleable at almost any price, because we will be able to produce at a quality which will be sought after worldwide.

The Civil Rights Solidarity Movement (BüSo) is provably the only organization which, long before the outbreak of the current crisis, pointed out the systemic errors of monetarism. And today we are the only ones with a concept for how to overcome the global crisis.

This article was translated from German.

[1] See Helga Zepp-LaRouche, "No to Global Gleichschaltung: Make June 17 the Day of German Resistance," EIR, May 6, 2011; and five articles in the leading section of EIR, May 13, 2011.