This transcript appears in the February 19, 2021 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Who Created the Nuclear War Possibility?
[Print version of this transcript]
This is an edited transcript of the presentation of The LaRouche Organization’s well-known spokesman and daily blogger to a February 13, 2021 roundtable discussion, “Worsening U.S.-Russian Relations—Reverse Them with New Paradigm, Or Face Nuclear War,” sponsored by the Schiller Institute. Links and subheads have been added. Watch the entire program here.
There’ve been a lot of useful ideas presented here this afternoon. I want to go back to the fundamental question: Why is there a possibility of war between the United States and Russia? Are there fundamental principles that put us into conflict, that would lead to such a confrontation? I think the answer to the second question is, No. There is no legitimate, reasonable basis for war, or even increasing tensions. There’s a long history of relations between the U.S. and Russia on common interests, and most important among those common interests is an anti-imperial outlook.
But there is a real possibility of increased tension and even an outbreak of war, as we heard, especially from Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Why is that? What is the issue of contention? I’m going to develop the point that it comes, not from something inherent in the United States, but from British imperial geopolitics, which—in spite of many people’s view that the British Empire is a thing of the past—is not only still present, but is shaping many aspects of U.S. policy.
The ‘Trusts’ and British Geopolitics
Lyndon LaRouche has always emphasized that to understand the conflict that exists in the world, especially between the U.S. and Russia, you have to understand this question of sovereign nations taking on an empire; or I should say, an empire trying to stop sovereign nations from acting in the interest of their populations. We’ve seen this throughout modern history. At the end of World War II, Franklin Roosevelt had an intention of continuing the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, but with his death, that was sabotaged when Harry Truman came in and fell under the influence of UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill. We had the Cold War—as Helga referenced the “Long Telegram” of 1947 which laid out the strategy of containment, the basis for a very long-lasting Cold War.
But, this confrontation goes back before World War II, long before. In fact, as Alex Krainer was talking about just before me, there’s an unbroken continuity going back to the American Revolution, but in particular to the role of British geopolitics, as put forward by Halford Mackinder, actually, in his famous speech in 1904, where he emphasized the importance of making sure there was never an alliance of Eurasian nations and Europe, because that would interfere with British control of the seas, British control of trade, and British control of monetary policy. By the way, that’s what led to World War I—that policy, of pitting France and Russia against Germany, and France and Russia on the side of Britain.
Now, in the 1920s, after the devastation of World War I, they took a slightly different strategy, and that was the emergence of corporate trusts that were formed, in particular between American firms centered in Wall Street, London firms, United Kingdom corporations, and some in Germany. The idea was to keep the United States and Britain as allies, and keep Germany under control. There was a name for this: Before fascism, it was called “corporatism.”
And there was a specific aspect of corporatism called “synarchism,” which was the use of left- and right-wing violent groups to break up societies, to carry out confrontations, and to create the basis for a top-down state to suppress opposition through emergency decrees. This was really the case with the Reichstag Fire emergency decree that gave Hitler the power to completely take over every aspect of the German economy. And it was entrusted to a man named Hjalmar Schacht, who was the agent of these corporate trusts.
Now, the trusts were largely based on London and Wall Street interests, and some of the names involved are very familiar: Rockefeller, Morgan, Du Pont, Harriman; some less so, such as Thomas Lamont of the Morgan banking interests, who was directly responsible for building these trusts.
The role of these trusts was to usurp the power of nation-states, of national governments, to act on behalf of the interests of their people. Instead. to put that power into the hands of multinational institutions, including finance, the steel trusts, the chemical trusts, food production trusts and so on. And in Germany, after the emergency decree was declared, Schacht was given carte blanche to take the German population and put them essentially into slave labor projects, to work on behalf of these trusts.
Now, in the post-war period, this was obviously an abhorrent practice, because we know where these slave labor camps led: to the death camps of the Third Reich. But these were largely the extension of the policy of cheap labor and the ability to grind out extra income from primitive accumulation from a population.
After World War II, that was no longer acceptable, at least on the surface. And so, there were various efforts to try to figure out how to make it work. One was through a Tavistock Institute figure named Kurt Lewin, a brainwasher who tried to set up projects in “participatory democracy,” trust-building, group dynamics, things of that sort, to get people to speed themselves up and to work on behalf of their corporations, against their own interests. Another example, a little more exotic one, was put forward in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: Use drugs to deaden people’s response, so they’ll accept the conditions that otherwise they wouldn’t accept.
Shultz of Britain’s Second Empire
But even with these kinds of deployments, the United States under President John Kennedy experienced a rebirth of optimism, scientific and technological optimism. But undergirding that was Kennedy’s opposition to the idea of empire: He reverted to Franklin Roosevelt’s view of ending colonialism and building a world of free states that could cooperate. And this was especially important after his experience with the Cuban Missile Crisis, and his desire to end the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Kennedy was assassinated.
When Richard Nixon came into the White House, he brought into his administration a figure who was directly related to this trust operation at 120 Broadway, in New York, namely, George P. Shultz, whose father was an operative of these Harriman, Morgan, and Rockefeller interests. By the way, it should be noted that a junior partner in the Harriman interests, was none other than Prescott Bush, the father of a U.S. President, George H.W. Bush, and the grandfather of another—both of whom worked very closely with Shultz.
I’m just going to very briefly identify Shultz’s role because this is crucial to understand how we’re at the point, today, where the Great Reset represents the drive of this British Empire to end the potential of sovereign states to oppose this global policy.
Shultz was there on the scene when Nixon was persuaded to break the Bretton Woods agreement of Franklin Roosevelt—to remove the gold reserve as the basis for the dollar, and to open up floating exchange rates. Again, this was in the interest of speculators on Wall Street, not in the interests of the actual industry and businesses of the United States. When Nixon left, Shultz ended up at Bechtel, which is a part of the military-industrial complex, only to be brought back in as Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan.
Shultz’s role in the Reagan administration is often limited to these comments: that he was a “reasonable man”; that he worked with Reagan to get détente with Russia. The real story is much more nefarious. He was a leading promoter of British free-trade policy, which at the time, meant the formation of the move toward global free trade with the GATT [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade]; deregulation based on UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s “Big Bang” model of October 1986, which did away with regulation in banking and finance; and environmentalism. Another point that should be interesting to people who know about Lyndon LaRouche’s role with Ronald Reagan: Shultz was an opponent of the Strategic Defense Initiative, which was actually Reagan’s most profound attempt to achieve détente with the Soviet Union.
Later on, after he left the Reagan administration, Shultz went back to Bechtel. He became involved in the “Revolution in Military Affairs,” which was very much involved in the privatization of military security and intelligence, and which also incorporated the media and especially Big Tech into the military-industrial complex. This was a policy of permanent war, introduced by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the group from the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), based on the idea of U.S. unilateralism.
Shultz also worked with James A. Baker III to promote Green ideas, and in particular, they supported the 1987 Montreal Protocol, supposedly protecting the ozone layer, but which was very important in systematizing, inside the government, a commitment to Green policy. Many of the people we see today parading around as the leading advocates of the Green New Deal and the so-called “deep state,” go back to the Shultz and James Baker grouping. Hank Paulson, later, under George W. Bush, was a big part of this.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, they were very much committed to the “shock therapy” policy—Shultz in particular—which looted Russia and created a demographic catastrophe for the Russian people.
So, just to summarize: After the Bretton Woods agreement was broken by Nixon, what was the policy? Anti-science environmentalism, the Green idea; floating exchange rate system, the speculative swindle which dominates the collapsing global financial system today; … deregulation; global free trade; outsourcing; deindustrialization; a radical policy for population reduction. It also included attacks on national sovereignty. There’s a famous book written by one of these characters, Walt Wriston, of Citicorp, called The Twilight of Sovereignty, in which he argued that because of the shift to artificial intelligence, information technology, and so on, we no longer need industry. This was something that was championed by Shultz from his perch at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, this “information revolution,” and so on.
So, in this sense, Shultz is a midwife for this policy which we see emerging today as the Great Reset and the global Green Deal.
Four-Power Agreement vs. London
What stands in the way of this policy?—and this will answer the question posed at the beginning: Why is there a potential for confrontation between the U.S. and Russia? If the U.S. is brought in as a partner and a muscleman for the Great Reset, then we will be in confrontation with every sovereign nation that wishes to have full economic development, along the lines laid out by Helga Zepp-LaRouche in her presentation today.
What this means is that Vladimir Putin would be in contradiction with this Great Reset, as he indicated in his speech at Davos. Well, so is Donald Trump! And interestingly, “Russiagate” targeted President Trump and President Vladimir Putin for regime changes! And this is where you see the relationship to the Great Reset, and the reason why I went through the history of British geopolitics against Russia, to make the connection to what we’ve just gone through for the last four years in the United States.
Who is behind “Russiagate”? It was the City of London, its intelligence agencies; it was the intelligence community of both Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush; the so-called permanent bureaucracy in the U.S.; the media, and now we see the role of the social media. All of them came together to bring down Trump and to initiate this Great Reset.
The best way to defeat the Great Reset, is to revive the Russian-American historical tradition. Lyndon LaRouche put it this way: He said we need a four-power agreement, centered around the United States, Russia, China and India as the most powerful nations when it comes to population, economic potential, and military, to take on the globalization push by the City of London and British geopolitics.
That’s the issue today. And that’s why we have to continue this fight to bring the United States into an agreement with these other three powers. The starting point would be for there to be finally an agreement from the United States, to meet with President Putin in a special summit, which would include either the permanent five members of the UN Security Council, as Putin proposed in January 2020, or a coalition of other countries. And use that as a basis for turning back this anti-science, population-reduction war policy, of the war-hawks and the neo-liberals who answer to the dogma of British imperial geopolitics.
