EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR THURSDAY JULY 21, 2022

Cut the Gordian Knot: Lift The Sanctions Against Russia Immediately!

July 20, 2022 (EIRNS)—The nations of Europe are rapidly plunging into economic collapse and social chaos, as the insane London-dictated sanctions against Russia are succeeding in boomeranging against the very countries that have unleashed them.

• The CEO of SKW, Germany’s largest ammonia producer and a key European fertilizer supplier, warned that if Russian natural gas supplies are cut off, “we have to stop [production] immediately, from 100 to zero.”

• Germany’s largest steelmaker ThyssenKrupp and the world’s largest chemicals company BASF have both warned that without sufficient natural gas supply, their factories could be forced to idle or shut down completely, and could even suffer technical damage.

• Europe’s energy companies have taken on a whopping $1.7 trillion in debt, a 50% increase since the beginning of 2020, and are pleading for government bailouts to avoid bankruptcy.

• Swiss bank UBS analysts foresee a “severe fall in industrial output” in Germany, which will trigger a “deep recession.”

Yesterday, Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche issued an urgent call, “Lift Sanctions Against Russia Immediately!” which began:

“Only a fool can’t see it: The sanctions against Russia only harm Russia marginally, but they threaten to permanently destroy entire key areas of industry and agriculture in Germany and all of Europe! Farmers in many countries are therefore taking to the streets with their tractors, supported by taxi and truck drivers, because they know that very soon we will not have enough to eat in Europe, either. Our life savings are being eaten up by inflation, which has also been exacerbated by the sanctions. The collapse into social chaos is imminent! And for developing countries, the sanctions mean starvation for hundreds of millions of people!”

Today, World Food Program Executive Director David Beasley issued a similar warning: “We face unprecedented crisis right now, and if we do not deal with it strategically and effectively, you are going to have mass famine, you are going to have destabilization of dozens of nations, and you are going to have mass migration.”

Zepp-LaRouche today insisted that individuals and governments around the world must act to “cut the Gordian knot and stop the sanctions immediately. They are immoral, they are illegal, they are a form of economic warfare, and they should never have happened. Then serious peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia can begin.”

In her July 19 call, which is now circulating internationally in multiple languages, Zepp-LaRouche argued:

“Our industry and agriculture are in danger of being irrevocably destroyed, while Russia, China and most of the countries of the Global South have no choice but to band together and create a new financial, economic, and monetary system that will defend their interests. This new system is emerging, explicitly excluding speculation and promoting the real economy, growth, and poverty alleviation through investment in scientific and technological progress.”

The United States and the nations of Europe must lift the sanctions, reverse their current suicidal trajectory, and join that emerging new system, a New Bretton Woods built around the physical-economic policies elaborated by Lyndon LaRouche.

Take heed. In a November 29, 2004 essay “Toward a Second Treaty of Westphalia: The Coming Eurasian World,” Lyndon LaRouche warned bluntly of the coming crisis which is now upon us:

“In point of fact, all parts of the world today, are, for the moment, at least, subsidiaries of a single global monetary-financial system, to the included effect that the relative prices of both real and fictitious objects in trade are an integral, subsidiary part of that monetary-financial system. In the case of the actualization of the presently onrushing general monetary-financial blow-out, all of the sundry elements of a complexly integrated world system, including the most notable nations of Asia, would be plunged into chaos in a way most nearly resembling the plunge of Fourteenth-Century Europe into its notorious New Dark Age.

“What prevents most among what were presumably well-informed circles of finance and government, from seeing this fact, is that they are gripped, hysterically, by the fearful delusion that a crash of the type which is now onrushing simply would never happen. In fact, unless certain radical changes of the type I would propose were taken, the crash deemed unthinkable by most today will happen, very soon.”