Schiller Institute conference: "Another step towards nuclear Armageddon"

...and 7 OCTOBER IN THE SACRED CALENDAR OF THE KLEPTOCRATIC CULT TOO

Today I am providing my English translation of two articles, originally in Italian. (Emphasis mine in both).

The first one is an article first published on Movisol.org on 10th October 2024:

Schiller Institute conference: "Another step towards nuclear Armageddon"

On 2nd October [2024], the Schiller Institute sponsored an online conference entitled “Another Step Towards Nuclear Armageddon”, focusing on Germany's role in the current strategic situation. In opening the proceedings, Helga Zepp-LaRouche reviewed the “cascading events that are spiralling out of control”, in particular the recent horrific developments in Israel's attacks on its neighbours. If it comes to escalation against Iran, the whole region could explode, and not only that, since Russia has a military agreement with Iran and China has key interests in that region.

The second area of acute danger is the war in Ukraine, which has prompted Russia to announce possible changes to its nuclear doctrine, so that if there were a significant air attack supported by a nuclear power, Russia could resort to the first use of nuclear weapons.

A prominent guest at the conference was Jack Matlock (photo), the former US ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991, who witnessed and participated in the dramatic events at the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. Matlock dealt with the failures of Western policy after the fall of the Soviet Union. At the end of the Cold War, he said, “we should have insisted on building a European structure that would provide security for all newly independent countries, including Russia. Instead, we simply started to expand NATO”. He called this “a huge mistake” because “there was no threat from the East”. Today we know from historical documents that the USSR never intended to invade Western Europe. Then, in this century, the US began to pull out of all arms reduction agreements.

Regarding Ukraine, Matlock noted that “war is everywhere and always a horrible thing. And the war in Ukraine is hurting Ukraine far more than any other country. But one of the things we are hearing now I don't agree with, when people say, ‘If you don't stop it now, Russia will go and take the Baltic states, Poland or Eastern Europe’. That is nonsense. There is no proof. And anyone who really, intimately knows the history of that area knows that Russia's relations with Ukraine and Belarus are very special”.

Ambassador Matlock was followed by Ted Postol, professor emeritus at MIT and a leading expert on nuclear weapons, who said that the US proposal to introduce missiles into Germany would be a detonator for nuclear war, because those missiles would necessarily carry nuclear warheads and because the warning time would be extremely short for Russian detection. Other speakers included VIPS [Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity] co-founder Ray McGovern, German intelligence expert Rainer Rupp, French strategic advisor Col Alain Corvez and German author Wolfgang Effenberger. The papers are available as videos on the Schiller Institute's YouTube channel [link] and a selection of the talks will be published in the EIR magazine (http://larouchepub.com).

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The second article that follows was published on Comidad.org on 10th October 2024.

7 OCTOBER IN THE SACRED CALENDAR OF THE KLEPTOCRATIC CULT TOO

The date of 7th October [2023] has risen to the pomp of official religion with a new meaning, displacing the celebration of the obsolete Our Lady of the Rosary; this is yet another refutation of the cliché that we live in a secularised society that has lost its sense of the sacred. By passing off Israelis as Jews, an event of war has been transformed into an object of sacrificial worship, extorting from public opinion submission to the painful but also glorious mystery of the Chosen People clashing with Absolute Evil. It is a veritable warning, a brazen intimidation of those who wish to ask too many questions, cautioning them not to incur blasphemy. A year after the attack by Hamas and other Palestinian formations, the Israeli Defence Force has still not published the results of the investigation that was supposed to explain the reasons for the debacle of the sophisticated and expensive electronic military protection system at the Gaza border. The BBC has published a partial reconstruction of the events of 7th October based on alleged testimonies of Israeli soldiers, who allegedly conditioned their statements on the guarantee of anonymity. From what little is understood, it appears that an attack from Gaza was expected but that, despite numerous reports in the preceding days, its scale had been grossly underestimated by the high command; while, on the contrary, the capabilities of the protective barrier had been totally overestimated. The 7th October affair therefore goes beyond the question of the lies about rapes and throat-cuttings, and even beyond the infamous Hannibal Protocol that requires the Israeli military to prevent hostage-taking even at the cost of killing fellow soldiers and fellow citizens.

In this welter of questions still without official answers, there is in fact one certainty, namely the $1.1 billion that the Israeli protection wall has cost. Sixty-five kilometres long, the wall was completed in December 2021 and was equipped with state-of-the-art sensors and anti-tunnel systems. Another certainty is that the question of the failure of the anti-Gaza wall and its cost has disappeared from the debate; and this is precisely thanks to the consecration of the events of 7th October, in their transformation into a “pogrom” or even an appendix of the Holocaust. In other words, the more sacred and the more mystery cults you put in, the less you have to account for how much you have spent and how much you have “eaten” to sell the public a dangerous illusion of invulnerability.

There is also another aspect to be overshadowed by the mists of the sacred. Last year Israel managed to sell Germany its Arrow 3 anti-missile system, built in collaboration with the American multinational Boeing, a name that alone guaranteed that it was a dud. The system should be delivered to Germany by 2025. At the same time, Israel signed an agreement for the sale of another of its anti-missile systems, the David's Sling, built in collaboration with the American multinational Raytheon. This time the chicken [to pluck] (pardon, the buyer) was Finland, which thus celebrated its entry into NATO in a big way. The Iron Dome anti-missile system, financed by the USA but built entirely by the Israeli company Rafael, was less fortunate, in fact at present the only buyer seems to be the government of Cyprus. But, as a backer from the beginning of the project, the US should also equip itself with the Iron Dome system.

To “protect” Israel, there was also a fourth system, the famous Patriot of the multinational Raytheon, whose failures have been on the record of the US Congress since 1992; something that has never prevented them from continuing to spend public money on it. One can lash out at that infamous Supreme Leader Khamenei, and maybe take him out too, but that does not shift the terms of the problem of the poor performance of Israeli-American anti-missile systems in relation to their exorbitant costs.

Last week, the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] admitted that on the evening of 1st October, twenty-three Iranian missiles hit Israeli air bases, specifically the Nevatim base. According to the IDF, only administrative buildings were hit and the damage would be insignificant. Even if the Israeli account of the damage were true, the fact remains that the missiles passed and one can guess what would have happened if they had targeted residential areas or power plants, or carried chemical warheads. The bottom line is always that, despite their stratospheric costs, anti-missile systems are not effective. Just as was the case with the Iron Wall on the Gaza border, the arrows, slingshots, and domes have been exclusively functional for the system of military kleptocracy. We are also witnessing a further paradox for logic but not for business: today, the multinational arms companies can make even more money precisely because the weapons they produced in the past did not work.

The Israeli lobby, AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee], organises “educational trips” to Israel for American parliamentarians, Republicans and Democrats alike; and we then see these “lawmakers”, lined up like schoolchildren, accepting the state of psychological subservience and subsequent humiliation. Sure, the “lawmakers” line up to collect their bribe on the public funding the US sends to Israel but, to fully understand this, one must take into account that the power of lobbying is not only in buying politicians; it is also in becoming their existential model. Israel fully realises the oxymoron of permanent emergency and thus automatically catalyses lobbying, which is not a neutral instrument. Lobbying cannot promote in the same way belligerent business or business that requires a peaceful environment, completely legal business or shady business that needs a margin of illegality. Lobbying always trumps politics and dominates it because politics would require a reasoned assessment of the options on the field; whereas lobbying follows by conditioned reflex everything that gives more mass, more speed and less transparency to the flow of public money, hence wars and health emergencies; which allow business to be done quickly and criminalise anyone who dares to ask for explanations. The lobbyist is more direct, he has no uncertainties or second thoughts, he always knows what he has to do, so in the end it is the politician who will admire the lobbyist, be seduced by him and imitate him. If one puts it in terms of social physics, one can say that it is not Israel that has its own lobby, but it is lobbying that has created Israel.

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