Category: Aggregated

Gerhard Schroeder, former German Chancellor, said on May 5, “NATO and the EU, on the one hand, and Russia, on the other, are not enemies. They should become partners again.” Speaking at a conference in Germany, Schroeder said that both the Bush and Obama approaches to Russia have a “wrong and dangerous tone,” pointing to Obama’s statement that Russia is only a “regional power.” He said the EU-Russia relationship must be built on dialogue and cooperation, “otherwise Europe will not be a safe home for us and future generations.”

While there is a deafening silence from American leaders other than Lyndon LaRouche on the celebrations in Moscow, one old World War II soldier, former Senator and Presidential candidate Bob Dole, spoke out on U.S.-Russia relations on May 8 to Sputnik, no doubt to the horror of the current crop of psychotic Republican leaders: “We have got to get back together again. We are both good people in each country. We just have to somehow get Putin and Obama or the next president maybe to have another reset. We would not have made it without each other in World War II. You lost millions of people and you made the greatest sacrifice. Huge losses—generations of young men.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, while giving in to Obama and the British by boycotting the Victory Day Parade on Red Square on May 9, did go to Moscow today to lay a wreath on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Moscow, to honor the dead from World War II. Merkel said to Putin: “With today’s visit I would like to show that we are working with Russia and not against it.”

Lyndon LaRouche noted in this regard that Merkel is at best a conflicted figure who can not be trusted, representing not only Germany’s real economic and political interests, but also the financial interests within Germany who serve London and Wall Street. It is those imperial interests that are driving for war with Russia, precisely to break up the BRICS alliance so massively displayed this weekend in Moscow, with both economic deals and a powerful display of military power involving forces from Russia, China, and India, among others.

Putin, in his press conference after their meeting, reflected this recognition of the different interests within Germany, appealing directly to the industrial forces. Putin said:

Putin went on to discuss the relative calm in Ukraine since the Minsk agreements, noting that “we differ considerably in our assessment of the events that led to the anti-constitutional coup in the Ukrainian capital in February 2014,” but praising the “Normandy format” of meetings between Russia, Germany, France, and Ukraine as the necessary approach to peace. He insisted, however, that the only guarantee of peace would be “direct dialogue between Kiev, Donetsk, and Lugansk.”

The May 9 conference of the Zürich-based citizens’ initiative, Impulswelle (Impulse Wave), “Does the Future of Switzerland Lie in Eurasia?” has raised the challenge for Switzerland, as the only sovereign country in Western Europe, to become a model for others by combining cooperation with the BRICS, with the simultaneous introduction of a credit system on the model of Alexander Hamilton with a true National Bank and Glass-Steagall.

Schiller Institute founder and chairwoman Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the lead guest speaker, addressed the attentive audience of 80 with a strategic overview of the New Silk Road paradigm of the BRICS and how it has now drawn in the majority of nations on the planet as an alternative to the dying and dangerous trans-Atlantic system. She pointed out that “all the roosters on the rooftops are predicting the next crash, and even the old chicken Christine Lagarde of the IMF too.”

Social and economic chaos and thermonuclear war are unavoidable unless the BRICS option is taken up. The wars of George W. Bush and Obama have created a wave of refugees totaling up to 57 million desperate human beings—a polarizing issue in Switzerland—who must be helped with the New Silk Road development plans of the BRICS. Zepp-LaRouche then brought up the oft-ignored challenge that there is no way around the need to immediately alter the course of the United States itself, drawing upon its best traditions, as with Alexander Hamilton and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

She concluded by illustrating how the California water crisis, and desertification throughout the world prove that our weather system is actually a galactic system, as easily seen with the role of cosmic rays in generating the precipitation of water, but also the long-term galactic and solar cycles. Humanity must expand its mastery of such processes, as the 15th-Century genius Nicholas of Cusa began to do for modern European culture: Imago Viva Dei—the living image of God—Man, not merely as a passive image of God, but as an active co-participant in the ongoing Creation. For Chinese culture, Confucius defined the same standard in terms of having, or, losing, the Mandate of Heaven.

She was followed by guest speaker Dr. Karl Eckstein, the Honorary Consul of the Russian Federation in Zürich, who spoke in his capacity as a long-time business consultant with the countries of the former Soviet Union. He stressed that the Anglo-Saxon world is using the criminal geopolitics of imperial Britain’s Halford Mackinder against Eurasia. Russia has proposed numerous options for cooperation, as with a joint missile defense system in the Caucasus, but these have been systematically rejected due to the geopolitical dictates against Russia and Eurasia.

Prof. Marc Chesney of the Zürich University Institute of Banking and Finance, a well-known Glass-Steagall advocate, spoke of the strategic parallels of World War I with its senseless death and destruction via trench warfare, and the ongoing financial war against humanity which is decimating lives and the real economy by means of financial derivatives, systemic instruments of mass destruction.

The presentation of Zürich Gymnasium teacher René Machu, a founding member of Impulswelle, “A Swiss National Bank in Service of the Real Economy and the Citizenry,” opened with a description of the national bank, the First Bank of the United States, founded by Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, as the anti-monetarist credit system anchor against the British imperial financial system. They say a central bank must be “independent, but from whom, from government influence or, in fact, from control of the citizens?” The Swiss National Bank “is a hybrid between a central bank in private hands, and the First Bank of the United States of Hamilton.” A true National Bank for Switzerland must be dedicated to the Common Good, control a sovereign currency, generate credit for infrastructure into a Glass-Steagall banking system, be under control of the citizenry, and act in the present based on what the nation wants to achieve for the future: that is what defines a credit system.

The opening presentation of leading Impulswelle member, biologist Ruth Frei, and the concluding presentation of Linz- based Wilhelm Augustat, head of Peace Through Culture—Europe, both emphasized that the causes of conflicts, and also the solutions, lie in the realm of culture. Augustat provoked the audience that there is no “Europe” as such, but that there has only been Eurasia, with its history with all the complex interactions of different peoples and cultures, who now need to establish concrete collaboration at the spiritual level of culture and ethics. To avoid having Western Europeans see the BRICS as a mere abstraction, that history must be understood, going back to even pre-Roman Imperial times, up through the role of the church after Rome’s collapse, including the Mongol presence in Russia, which had been mentioned earlier in Karl Eckstein’s presentation.

The BRICS and the New Silk Road offer that opportunity, and he hopes that a free Switzerland—free through its own indigenous spirit, unlike Austria with its imposed neutrality—can lead the way in Europe to the BRICS. The BRICS comes to Switzerland, not for some money in its banks, but to partake of that spirit.