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It All Comes Down to the Rule of Law
and the Right to a Future

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Helga Zepp-LaRouche.

February 8, 2013 —Most of our contemporaries try to somehow repress the secret suspicion that there might be a connection between the simultaneous intensification of the trans-Atlantic financial crisis and the various military conflicts. The implications of this association are too unpleasant for a society that places a greater value on meaningless recreation and “wellness” than on trying to understand reality.

But the truth is that there is a direct connection between the state of the trans-Atlantic financial sector and the worsening global strategic situation. The former is more tense than it was on the eve of the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in 2008, and massive injections of liquidity have already led to “galloping” inflation, according to Heinrich Haasis, president of the World Institute of Savings Banks. And in the strategic domain—from the Israeli attack on Syrian military installations; to the externally controlled “civil war” against the Assad government; the threatened military operation against Iran; the mooting of a military strike against North Korea; and a dangerous aggravation of the situation around the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands between China and Russia on the one hand, and Japan on the other (China accuses Japan of allowing itself to be driven by the United States into a provocation against China)—all these seemingly disparate conflicts are burning fuses in the context of an undeniable NATO forward strategy that makes Russia and China feel increasingly encircled.

The Policy of Empire

To understand the relationship between the end-phase of the financial system and the threat of a global (this time, thermonuclear) war, one must go back to the decisions with which the U.K., the U.S., and France reacted to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact during 1989-91. Instead of taking the collapse of the strategic enemy of the Cold War as an opportunity for a peaceful world order in the 21st Century, Margaret Thatcher, George Bush, Sr., and François Mitterrand opted for the establishment of an Anglo-American empire (with France as an ally).

All former Soviet allies that refused to voluntarily accommodate themselves to the new arrangements were to be subjected to regime change—a policy that began with Bush, Sr., was interrupted by the eight years of the Clinton Administration, and resumed with eight years of Bush, Jr. and four years of Obama. The targets included the states that have been dubbed the “axis of evil” or “rogue states” (Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, China, and Russia), as well as the countries against which the so-called color revolutions have been staged (Ukraine, Georgia, Russia, China, etc.).

This growing Anglo-American empire gradually eliminated all regulation of the banking sector. The conglomerate of the IMF, World Bank, WTO, central banks, universal and investment banks, hedge funds, investment companies, and insurance companies, spread unbridled globalization. The enforcement of Germany’s renunciation of the deutschemark and the acceptance of the euro as the price for German reunification, as well as the EU treaties from Maastricht to Lisbon, transformed the EU into the junior partner of this empire. Member states lost their sovereignty to the supranational Brussels dictatorship, as decided in London and Washington, in the same manner that it is decided which government should come to power in the “rogue states.” Regime change by military operation here, “Orange Revolution” or “More Europe” there—the methods vary depending on the specific situation, but the result is ultimately the same: the dominance of globalization, which is to say, the Anglo-American empire.

The End of the Line

Now we are at the end of the line. The system of total deregulation is on life support, sustained artificially by hyperinflationary money printing in the short term. The shock which had everyone shaking in their boots immediately following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and which led to frightened calls for a New Bretton Woods system, has finally been suppressed. Lobbyists from the banking sector are trying to convince parliamentarians that it is a positive development that the derivatives market is 40% bigger today than before the Lehman disaster, and that therefore a two-tier banking system is unnecessary. They are depending upon the economic cluelessness of the parliamentarians when they assert that separation of the banking system would not have prevented the Lehman collapse, because Lehman Brothers was exclusively an investment bank, whereas Deutsche Bank, a “universal bank” (and therefore encompassing both commercial and investment banking) got through the crisis all in one “solid“ piece. Libor manipulation, tax fraud, CO2 certificate swindles, etc.—all very solid!

Signs of the times: Deutsche Bank went from being a commercial bank financing industry, under Alfred Herrhausen (right); he was assassinated in 1989, supposedly by the RAF; today the company is involved in every type of “investment bank” speculation and financial scandal (below: press coverage of police raids on the bank in April 2010 and December 2012).

The truth is that the murder of Alfred Herrhausen on Nov. 30, 1989, by an imaginary “third generation” of the RAF (Red Army Faction), made possible a paradigm shift at Deutsche Bank, going from Herrhausen—an industrial banker who had a conscience, and worked for debt relief for the Third World, and for the development of Poland in 1989, using the methods of Germany’s Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (Reconstruction Finance Agency)—to a bank which is involved in almost every international financial scandal and was raided by up to 500 armed officers. These can no longer be considered isolated cases. It just doesn’t get any more “solid”!

The danger of war is rooted fundamentally in the Anglo-American decision to dominate the world as an empire. The acute risk of war is driven by a part of the establishment that is willing to accept the destruction of mankind in a thermonuclear war, rather than lose its empire.

Resistance, Four Years Late

The extremes to which the policy of the empire has already led were to a certain extent dragged into the limelight at the hearing in the U.S. Senate on the nomination of John Brennan, the architect of Obama’s policy of illegitimate killing of Americans and others by drones, to become CIA Director. What hypocrisy! The same Obama, who, during the 2008 campaign, polemically attacked George W. Bush’s torture policy, has now been transformed, according to secret Justice Department memos leaked to the media, into a man who has long had a license to kill.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Me.) pointed to a study showing that in his first two years in office, Obama perpetrated four times as many targeted killings as the Bush/Cheney Administration did in eight years. Suddenly, but with the incredible delay of the four years of the first Obama Administration, articles are appearing, saying that with this policy of unilateral executive power, Obama has become “judge, jury, and executioner,” all rolled into one. At least Ron Wyden and other Senators have made the confirmation of Brennan contingent upon the release of previously undisclosed memos.

Lyndon LaRouche has called for a new Congressional investigation of Obama’s drone policy and the scandalous circumstances of the assassination of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens in Benghazi. During the questioning of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey, Obama’s complete lack of interest, following the attack on Benghazi, was made clear.

Very late, four years late, some institutional forces have finally woken up in the United States and realized that Obama has nullified the U.S. Constitution, abandoned all the principles of its Framers, trashed the “checks and balances” and the separation of powers, and installed himself as the sole arbiter of war and peace, life and death. But, as Bruce Fein, former Associate Deputy Attorney General in the Reagan Administration, noted at the recent conference of the Schiller Institute in New York, killing people without the justification of a legitimate war is murder. (See EIR, Feb. 8, 2013.)

Le Figaro commented on these hearings (also four years late), startled that the White House policy of targeted killings without due process had created a dangerous precedent that could equally well be used by Russia, China, or Iran in the future, in order to rid themselves of their enemies. Why, complains Le Figaro, have the allies been so quiet, after they had so thunderously denounced Bush?

Obviously some institutional forces in the U.S. and Europe have realized—four years late—that the trend of recent years has led the world to the brink of absolute barbarity, in which international law, the rule of law and constitutions, in short, all we have achieved during centuries of struggle, is threatened to be flushed into the underworld.

The only way that a crash into the catastrophe of global hyperinflation or a third world war can be prevented, is by the rejection of the paradigm of wanting to dominate the world as an empire. The introduction of the two-tier banking system in exactly the same form as President Franklin Roosevelt did it in 1933, i.e., the Glass-Steagall Act, is the absolutely necessary first step.

The only way to prevent a third world war is to return to the policy of another man who appears, from today’s perspective, as a leftist revolutionary: Ronald Reagan (provocation intended)! Because when President Reagan, in 1983, adopted the Strategic Defense Initiative, designed by LaRouche, and elevated it to official American policy—proposing to develop a global missile defense system based on new physical principles, to make nuclear weapons obsolete—he wanted to carry out this policy in cooperation with the Soviet Union.

If we want to have a future as a human species, we must learn to think in terms of the common aims of mankind.

Translated from German by Daniel Platt