Monday, January 27, 2020
The following is the text of a new LaRouchePAC leaflet.
Jan. 26 — President Donald Trump raised the political temperature of the planet this week by several degrees when he set fire to the hides of the 119 Greenie billionaires and their banker, politician, media and university lackeys assembled at Davos, Switzerland’s 50th World Economic Forum. " This is not a time for pessimism; this is a time for optimism. Fear and doubt is not a good thought process because this is a time for tremendous hope and joy and optimism and action," Trump said.
“…[W]e must reject the perennial prophets of doom and their predictions of the apocalypse. They are the heirs of yesterday’s foolish fortune-tellers…. They predicted an overpopulation crisis in the 1960s, mass starvation in the ’70s, and an end of oil in the 1990s…. In America, we understand what the pessimists refuse to see: that a growing and vibrant market economy focused on the future lifts the human spirit and excites creativity strong enough to overcome any challenge — any challenge by far….”
The Davos conference was most notable for the open association of billionaire bankers with ecologists. The last time such an alliance was so nakedly forged was when British central banker Montagu Norman and German central banker Hjalmar Schacht formed the Bank for International Settlements in Switzerland in 1930 to bring the Austrian “green hippie” Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist Party to power.
The Schiller Institute’s Helga Zepp-LaRouche, who commissioned a book-length study in 1984 to expose the link between modern environmentalism and population reduction titled The Hitler Book, said: “The form it takes is that, for example, there was … a German-Austrian-Swiss TV program, on Davos, where the leadership of Greenpeace said, ‘Well, you know it was really wrong to fight against these elites. We should work with them to establish the Green agenda.’ Also, Micah White, who was one of the founders of the Occupy Wall Street movement, in an interview with BBC, said exactly the same thing: There is no point fighting the elite, one has to make an alliance with them to implement the green agenda.”
Among those in Trump’s audience were outgoing Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney, who called for “financial regime change” in Jackson Hole, Wyoming this past summer, and Mike Bloomberg, whose $2 billion self-financed Presidential campaign is only run to promote the depopulation agenda called the Green New Deal. The “Davos Billionaires Club” believes that the Earth is best served, by serving the “lower 80%” of the human race to the “upper 20%.”
Economist Lyndon LaRouche, from as early as his International Development Bank of 1975, through his LaRouche Four Laws of 2014, proposed that the world has a “carrying capacity” of as many as 100 billion people or more, living at a higher standard and with less crowding than now, and with less damage to the planet as a whole! The reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act, Treasury Department-based issuance of national credit directed solely to physical production, a crash program to build advanced nuclear/thermonuclear electrical power generation capability, and the full adoption and funding of the Artemis space mission to the Moon and Mars, are the first steps to a true national economic recovery.
In Davos, President Trump sought to negate the pessimistic world vision of his audience by observing: "For anyone who doubts what is possible in the future, we need only look at the towering achievements of the past. … Centuries ago, at the time of the Renaissance, skilled craftsmen and laborers looked upwards and built the structures that still touch the human heart. To this day, some of the greatest structures in the world have been built hundreds of years ago.
“In Italy, the citizens once started construction on what would be a 140-year project, the Duomo of Florence. … While the technology did not yet exist to complete their design, city fathers forged ahead anyway, certain that they would figure it out someday. These citizens of Florence did not accept limits to their high aspirations and so the Great Dome was finally built.”
For more than 30 years LaRouche used the Great Dome of Florence as the metaphor expressing the Idea of Progress, why the world needs more people, and why there are no limits to growth. Today’s “Florentine Dome” project-equivalent need not take 140 years. We can build a new culture, capable of simultaneously taking humanity back to the Moon, on to Mars, and away from poverty, even eradicating it worldwide within the next 25 to 30 years. But if President Trump is illegally removed from office, and the United States turned into a British parliamentary democracy, that will become impossible. The United States Presidency as an institution, and the Constitution itself, would be mortally wounded.
Today, there is an illegal, unconstitutional attempt to remove Donald Trump from the Presidency of the United States for his often-stated intent to work with Russia and China’s leadership to end world war and create prosperity wherever possible. President Trump needs to sit down at the earliest possible date with his friends, President Vladimir Putin and President Xi Jinping, for a summit conference on peace through development of the physical economy platform worldwide, in every nation. The United States joining the multi-continental Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and returning the American worker to new, advanced technology manufacturing of small modular nuclear plants, laser machine-tools, agricultural and transportation machinery, and family farm-based food production, is the “New Silk Road” of world cooperation. The billionaire Malthusians want Trump gone before he does this, and that is the only reason that the illegal impeachment is going forward in the United States.
President John Kennedy once said: “I look forward to the day when America is no longer afraid of grace and beauty.” Donald Trump, in his reference to the Great Dome of Florence, at the Davos Conference, indicated his willingness to ask the world, and the United States, to not be afraid. It should fall to this generation of Americans, and world-citizens, in this Presidency, at this time, to now bring JFK’s and Lyndon LaRouche’s visions to fruition, so that the ghost of their aspirations for mankind might finally be freed from the limbo of our inaction.
“People Are the Face of God.” The human vs the Malthusian option, at the center of the summit of major powers. (see slug).
China Adopts New Emergency Measures To Address the Coronavirus Crisis (see slug).
Freeing Africa from Locust Swarms Is All Humanity’s Task! (see slug).
Trump Defense in Senate Launches Strongly (see slug).
Anti-Fa Goons Attack Solidarité & Progres Militants at Paris Demonstration against Retirement Reform (see slug)
Cooperation for Peace Between the U.S.-Russia-China-India raised by Schiller Institute in Denmark at Government Space Conference (see Operations Bulletin).
Iraq Invites Other Nations To Join China in Oil-for- Reconstruction Funding; U.S. Interested (see slug).
World Health Organization Praises China’s Actions To Contain the Coronavirus (see slug).
PRINCE CHARLES SURE EMITTED A LOT OF C02 on his way to join Greta Thunberg in Davos to lecture the world about how man-made global warming will soon kill us all. The Daily Mail reported Jan. 25 that “Prince Charles took three flights on private jets and a helicopter before meeting the activist Greta Thunberg. After an impassioned speech on climate on Wednesday [Jan. 22], he took a fourth private jet from Switzerland to Israel. His flight travel totaled over 16,000 miles in less than a fortnight at an estimated cost of £280,000 to taxpayers.”
CELEBRATE BEETHOVEN’S 250TH ANNIVERSARY BY NOT PLAYING HIS WORKS FOR A YEAR, is the suggestion of a Smith College musicologist, Andrea Moore, in a syndicated op-ed from the Dec. 30, 2019 Chicago Tribune. Moore proposes instead “programming newer, more forward thinking music to honor the composer’s legacy,” the Tribute reported. According to Moore, “Letting Beethoven’s music fall silent for the duration of his 250th anniversary year might give us a new way into hearing it live again.”
Counterproposal: Let the views of musicologists fall silent for the duration (at least).
Grassley Turns Up the Heat on British “ONA” Nest in Pentagon Caught in Coup against President Trump (see slug).
Hanging Your Jury Is Not a Winning Strategy (see slug)
RUSSIAN SENATOR BACKS PUTIN’S CALL FOR A FIVE-POWER SUMMIT. Izvestia reported that Sen. Vladimir Dzhabarov, First Deputy Chairman of the Federation Council’s Committee on Foreign Affairs told the daily: “The initiative of the Russian President is remarkable, since it is not always possible to discuss all complex issues in the Security Council. If a separate summit of ‘the five’ is held, then they could make decisions, for example, on saving Libya, and avoid the final collapse of the state.”
Putin in Jerusalem: The Lessons of World War II for the Preservation of Civilization Today (see Documentation).
Duterte Slams U.S., Supports Russia and China — and Trump (see slug).
Jan. 26 (EIRNS)—Helga Zepp-LaRouche has emphasized that the needed new international security architecture to be discussed at an upcoming summit of world leaders, as proposed by Russian President Vladimir Putin and others, must be based on a common mission to develop the physical economies of all nations. Lyndon LaRouche’s unique contributions in the areas of physical economy and statecraft, are key to the success of creating such a New Paradigm.
Consider the options. There is the human view:
“Man is fundamentally different from the beasts…. Man has the potential of reason, the power to make creative discoveries which advance his scientific knowledge, and to convert such scientific advances into advances in technology…. If, at any point, we halt technological progress, the society foolish enough to do such a thing, condemns itself to die.”
—Lyndon LaRouche, There Are No Limits to Growth, 1983
Or the contrary view:
“We can’t go on like this, with every month another record in temperatures being broken. If we leave it too long, as we have done, just growing things is going to become difficult…. Nature is, in fact, the lifeblood of our financial markets and, as such, we must—rapidly—realign our own economy to mimic nature’s economy and work in harmony with it.”
—Prince Charles, Davos, Jan. 23, 2020
The human view:
“Young people must dare to innovate and create. Innovation is the soul driving a nation’s progress and an inexhaustible source of a country’s prosperity…. Where is the new road? It lies in scientific and technological innovation, and in the accelerated transition from factor-driven and investment-driven growth to innovation-driven growth…. [We have to] unleash to the greatest extent the huge potential of science and technology as the primary productive force.”
—Xi Jinping, June 9, 2014
The contrary view:
“A new, sustainable financial system is being built [bringing] climate risks and resilience into the heart of financial decision-making…. Firms that align their business models to the transition to a net zero [carbon] world will be rewarded handsomely. Those that fail to adapt will cease to exist…. There have been many positive contributions of Greta Thunberg.”
—Mark Carney, Sept. 23, 2019 and Jan. 22, 2020
The human view:
“Today the speed of technological change in the world is increasing manifold, and we must create our own technologies and standards in areas that define our future…. In order to solve difficult technological tasks, we will continue to develop research infrastructure, including megascience-class facilities. I am sure that an opportunity to work with unique equipment and tackle the most ambitious tasks will encourage talented young people to work in science.”
—Vladimir Putin, Address to the Federal Assembly, Jan. 15, 2020
The human view again:
“This is not a time for pessimism; this is a time for optimism. Fear and doubt is not a good thought process because this is a time for tremendous hope and joy and optimism and action. But to embrace the possibilities of tomorrow, we must reject the perennial prophets of doom and their predictions of the apocalypse…. In America, we understand what the pessimists refuse to see: that a growing and vibrant market economy focused on the future lifts the human spirit and excites creativity strong enough to overcome any challenge…. The wonders of the last century will pale in comparison to what today’s young innovators will achieve because they are doing things that nobody thought even feasible to begin. We continue to embrace technology, not to shun it. When people are free to innovate, millions will live longer, happier, healthier lives.”
—Donald Trump, Davos, Jan. 21, 2020
And once more the human view:
“Youth with competence and capabilities can make their own future. We do not have to look back. There is no reason for pessimism, because I can say with conviction, that we will move forward very fast…. 1.2 billion people is a blessing from God. People are the face of God.”
—Narendra Modi, Sept. 28, 2014 [dns]
Jan. 26 (EIRNS)—The Chinese government has announced that a second emergency hospital will be built in Wuhan within two weeks, and will be able to handle 1,300 new patients. Specialist medical teams from the PLA have been sent into Wuhan.
The novel coronavirus has struck at the worst possible time, since it is Chinese New Year, when hundreds of millions of people normally travel. Many New Year celebrations have been cancelled in numerous cities. Overall travel on Saturday, Jan. 25, the first day of the Lunar New Year, dropped 28.8% from a year ago, said Liu Xiaoming, vice minister of transport. Specifically, he noted declines of 41.6% in civil air travel, 41.5% in rail travel, and 25% for road transport. On Sunday, Jan. 26, China Railway Chengdu also announced it would halt several high-speed train routes—including some to Shanghai—for the next few days, into early February. Parts of the Great Wall have been closed, as has Shanghai Disneyland, according to the Guardian.
CNBC reports that Chinese authorities have made wearing face masks mandatory in some areas, but shortages are beginning to be felt, including of virus testing kits and protective suits. “We face a severe shortage of supplies given the demand,” Wang Jiangping, vice minister of industry and information technology, said today, CNBC reported. Wang said about 100,000 protective suits are needed a day, but daily production capacity is at best in the low tens of thousands. In an effort to meet these medical supply needs, Wang said 40% of overall production capacity is now back online, despite the Lunar New Year holiday.
As of Sunday morning U.S. time, there were 1,975 cases with 56 deaths—but this is obviously changing by the hour. A number of countries, including the U.S., France and Russia, are working on evacuating their nationals from Wuhan. Russian scientists are also intensely working on a vaccine for the disease, as is the National Institutes for Health in the U.S. [dns]
Jan. 26 (EIRNS)—The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organiation (FAO) is calling for immediate international action to help the nations of Eastern Africa destroy the worst outbreak of desert locusts in 25 years. “The current Desert Locust situation is extremely alarming and represents an unprecedented threat to food security and livelihoods in the Horn of Africa,” the FAO warned on Jan. 20.
Should massive aerial spraying against the swarms now spreading from Ethiopia and Somalia into Kenya not be carried out before March, when rains pick up, the swarms can increase by some 20-fold in just three months, as they feed on increased vegetation. Planes, spraying equipment, and pesticides are urgently needed. Kenya and Ethiopia, for example, only have four planes each for spraying their large territories, a Kenyan pest control specialist told Associated Press.
Also: “Important locust situations continue to develop along both sides of the Red Sea, in Oman and in southern Iran,” in addition to the signs of initial spread to other East African nations, such as Uganda and South Sudan, the FAO reported.
The FAO categorizes the desert locust as the most devastating of all locust species, because they form swarms that can fly up to 150 km a day. A very small swarm is capable of eating the same amount of food in one day as about 35,000 people!
The key is to act swiftly. The FAO advises that “if infestations are not detected and controlled, devastating plagues can develop that often take several years and hundreds of millions of dollars to bring under control with severe consequences on food security and livelihoods.”
Locust plagues are neither new, nor caused by “climate change,” as some loonies already claim. When the last catastrophic plague was building in the late 1980s, Lyndon LaRouche’s international movement identified the deliberately genocidal policies which create the conditions which foster locust devastations —both economic (IMF austerity) and environmentalist opposition to pesticide spraying—, and campaigned for the development of such new technologies as electromagnetic pulsed waves to be deployed against the swarms. A review of the relevant reports on the locust threat from the late 1980s in LaRouche’s magazine, Executive Intelligence Review, is a recommended step towards mobilizing the needed international action now. [ggs]
Jan. 26 (EIRNS)—President Donald Trump’s lawyers took only two of the four hours allowed on Jan. 25 to open his defense against the House Democrats threadbare impeachment case, presenting a concise, devastating summary of the case which even media hyenas had to admit was to very strong effect.
The defense centered on the facts —“read the transcript!”— and the Democrats’ lack of facts. That President Trump never threatened the Ukrainian President; how the Ukrainians didn’t even know aid had been delayed until a month after the call; a replay of the admission, under oath, by the U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland that he had no evidence of the alleged quid pro quo “other than my presumption.”
Lead counsel Pat Cipollone went after the intent to rig the 2020 elections, by removing President Trump from the ballot nine months before the election. “For all their talk about election interference,” he said of the Democrat impeachers, “they’re here to perpetrate the most massive interference in an election in American history…. They are asking you to do something very, very consequential and, I would submit to you … very, very dangerous…. It would violate our Constitution.”
The presentation (momentarily) threw off the hounds of ABC, NBC, MSNBC, et al., who admitted on air that the defense had presented “a good case,” “facts,” etc. CNN’s legal commentator Jeffrey Toobin spoke of various points where the defense was “persuasive,” or made “a very legitimate” point about the unfairness of the House managers. “I just think, you know, the Republicans are winning here, the President is winning here,” he said in various ways, several times.
Fox’s Jesse Watters pointed out in his tight 10-minute summary of the case and Trump’s position over Day Four of the impeachment trial (which Trump pinned at the top of his Twitter), that polls show 51% of the American people still oppose impeachment after the House Democrats presented their “case.” [ggs]
PARIS, Jan. 26 (Nouvelle Solidarité)—For the very first time since the national movement against the retirement pay reforms began, militants of Solidarité & Progrès were attacked physically by so-called “anti-fa” goons at the Paris demonstration on Jan. 24, and kicked out of the march.
As the demonstration was assembling and before the march started S&P squads deployed themselves with book tables and a sketch inspired by the Casa del Papel Netflix series. A couple of our militants disguised as characters of the Casa del Papel were carrying on their shoulders a cardboard copy of the Bank of France, and were shouting “The Bank of France is ours, we are stealing it in the name of the people!” Others were carrying a banner: “Keep your hands off my retirement pay, give us the Bank of France back.”
As soon as they tried to get the show moving with the demonstrators, a group of goons attacked, destroying the Bank of France, threatening to beat up our militants, and spitting on them. Our militants tried to keep control and continued marching, but were finally kicked out brutally by other individuals claiming they were members of one of the more left-wing radical unions, called Sud Solidaires. There was a total refusal to discuss.
Following the attack, S&P published a very positive video of our sketch, as well as a communiqué stating that “either from stupidity, sectarianism, or provocation, those who carried out the attack are acting like useful idiots for Macron and his ilk.”
The S&P communiqué concludes: “We will continue our fight against this morally bankrupt retirement reform and in favor of monetary sovereignty, because either the people control currency, or the currency controls people.”(cbi)
Jan. 26 (EIRNS)—Mudhar Saleh, a senior financial adviser to Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi, told Iraq’s Alforat News Network that Iraq has invited the United States, Japan and South Korea to sign partnership agreements similar to the agreement with China, under which China will fund post-war reconstruction projects in exchange for oil supply, through a newly-created Iraqi-Chinese Reconstruction Fund.
“The U.S. has welcomed the idea and promised to respond to it,” Saleh reported, and Iraq is awaiting response from the two other countries. U.A.E.-based Zawya news service reported Saleh’s remarks on Jan. 19.
Such multiple arrangements could prove a seed-crystal of exactly the kind of international cooperation needed to “bring the tractors in, and get the soldiers out” to bring peace to Southwest Asia, as Lyndon LaRouche’s movement has proposed.
Zawya then reported the next day that Iraq is expecting to net some $1.75 billion in 2020 from the sale of 100,000 barrels per day of crude oil to China, under the oil-for-construction arrangement, according to Saleh. Saleh said the Chinese funds will be included in the 2020 budget as part of allocations for post-war reconstruction projects, and reported that “Chinese companies have already been awarded two projects to rehabilitate a power thermal plant in Samara north of the capital Baghdad and complete giant oil storage tanks in the Southern Nasiriyah city, adding that only 25% of the tank project has been completed.” [dns/ggs]
Jan. 26 (EIRNS)—China Daily reported on Jan. 24 comments by Gauden Galea, the World Health Organization’s China representative: “China has decided itself what measures it sees to be appropriate, and we hope that these measures of the lockdown will turn out to be effective. We admire the courage of the people and WHO praises government of Wuhan, and we hope that this temporary sacrifice will be a strong contribution to public health and indeed, global health.”
BBC reported that “the respected MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis in the U.K.” also praised China’s actions, “but said transmission of the virus needed to be cut by 60% in order to get on top of the outbreak…. Their calculations estimate each infected person is passing it onto, on average, 2.5 other people…. This is a massive challenge, the scientists suggest, which will require finding and isolating even patients with only mild symptoms that could easily be confused with other diseases.” The BBC article also reported, without citing sources, that “it is believed that only a quarter of infected cases are ‘severe,’ and the dead are mostly—though not exclusively—older people, some of whom have pre-existing conditions.” It is elsewhere reported that, among the Chinese fatalities, are two doctors treating patients in Wuhan. [dns]
Jan. 26 (EIRNS)—Sen. Charles Grassley sent a letter on Jan. 22 to the director of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA), James Baker, requesting written answers by Feb. 5 to 14 carefully-crafted questions, along with the extensive documentation requested. Grassley’s questions cover two areas: (1) ONA’s financing of Cambridge University Prof. Stefan Halper, who played a central in setting up the illegal surveillance operation against Donald Trump; and (2) what the hell is the ONA up to in general? Grassley reminded Baker that ONA had stonewalled Grassley’s series of previous requests going back to July 2019 on the Halper matter, and suggested ONA respond in a timely fashion to this new request from the chair of Senate Finance Committee.
Grassley has picked a key target. The ONA has been at the center of British perversion of traditional U.S. military structure and strategic policy since it was set up in 1973 under Richard Nixon, under the direction of the Rand Corporation’s lunatic utopian strategist Andy Marshall. In his 42 years heading ONA, Marshall trained generations of policymakers to adopt the British imperial outlook. Shutting this nest down would go a long way to freeing the U.S. from the danger of nuclear war.
ONA paid Halper around a million dollars in “research grants.” In his letter to ONA head Baker, Grassley cites a review of Halper’s work by the DOD Inspector General which questioned if Halper had conducted his work “in accordance with applicable laws and regulations.” If the ONA accepted defective work, it may be in “violation of the law,” Grassley states.
He asks also: “Can ONA state for certain that Halper did not use taxpayer money provided by DOD to recruit, or attempt to recruit, sources for the FBI investigation into the now-debunked theory of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia? Are you, or any other ONA official, aware of any other relationships Professor Halper had with foreign intelligence officers?”
Grassley demands a detailed report on just what the ONA has been funding: both all contracts issued for each of the last five years, and just what it spent the “significant amount of money” it allocated to Asia studies over the past 20 years?
Grassley demands ONA answer what U.S. taxpayers paid for two ONA studies, in particular, and how it justifies them under its legal mandate. One was for a paper focused “largely on Vladimir Putin’s neurological development and potential Asperger’s diagnosis.” And even wilder: the ONA funded a workshop “On the Nature of Americans as a Warlike People,” which concluded, Grassley reports, that “American belligerency … [is] the result of the persistence of Scotch-Irish culture in America, with its emphasis on violent responses to challenge … reinforced by slaveholding, and American Protestant religious beliefs”! [ggs] [https://www.grassley.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2020-01-22%20CEG%20to%20ONA%20%28Halper%20Follow%20Up%29.pdf]
Jan. 26 (EIRNS)—“It is the one unbreakable rule in litigation. You can insult the defendant or the opposing attorney and, on occasion, you might even insult the judge. But the one thing you can never do is insult the jury. That is only if you want to win a jury verdict,” constitutional lawyer John Turley pointed out in The Hill, after the House Democrats finished their case.
He was referring to how Rep. Jerry Nadler stood in front of the Senate and accused Republican Senators of “a conspiracy to ‘cover up’ the wrongdoing of the President. It was a moment that produced an audible gasp from the room, along with a note from Sen. Susan Collins complaining to Chief Justice John Roberts, who then promptly declared that ‘those addressing the Senate should remember where they are.’” Sen. Lisa Murkowski was “irate,” Turley reported, and denounced Nadler when she was off the floor.
That, along with Adam Schiff’s much-published assertion that Republican Senators had been told that their heads “will be on a pike” if they voted that the President was guilty, appear to have angered Collins and Murkowski such that they now are turning against voting for new witnesses to be called, as the Democrats are demanding. Those are two of the four Republicans the Democrats thought they could sway to support that demand.
It’s one thing to have a strategy to go for a hung jury, Turley commented, “but you usually do not actually hang the jury in a hung jury strategy.” [ggs]
Jan. 26 (EIRNS)—Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, while threatening to shut down the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) with the U.S. and close their military bases, blasted the U.S., called for closer cooperation with Russia and China, but also defended President Donald Trump.
In an interview with RT on Jan. 23, Trump said that the U.S. treats the Philippines as a “vassal state,” while Russia and China respect Philippine sovereignty. After 46 years as a colony of the U.S., he said, we were declared a republic, and we are able to “dispense justice” on our own. He denounced the law passed in the U.S. placing sanctions on anyone involved in the incarceration of the former Justice Minister de Lima, who, Duterte said, “got money for drugs.” The U.S., he continued, “listens to the communists and the yellows” (the followers of the U.S. puppet Aquino family) who “invented the stories about de Lima.” He also told RT: “Don’t believe the media, especially not Rappler, the voice of the CIA and the Americans.”
But when the RT journalist said something about Trump, he told a story about Obama attacking him for the war on drugs and Duterte calling him a “son of a bitch,” then asserted: “I would never say that about President Trump. Trump is a nice person — it’s just his style of doing things. I do not believe he really wants war. Maybe he wants to teach some leaders a lesson.”
Asked if he was getting too old to be the President, he acknowledged that he was more tired than before, but concluded: “I fight the wars. I want to end it now — end communism, end drugs, or reduce them to a bare minimum — so the next generation will not have so many problems to solve.” [mob]
Putin in Jerusalem: The Lessons of World War II for the Preservation of Civilization Today
On this day, January 27, the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, we offer the speech given by Russian President Vladimir Putin to the “Remembering the Holocaust: Anti-Semitism Forum” in Jerusalem on Jan. 23, in which he links the memory of the horror of Auschwitz, to the urgency of holding a summit of the five leading Allied Powers which defeated Nazism and founded the United Nations in 1945. It is slightly shortened for reasons of space.
…Today we are brought together at the international forum to honor the victims of the Holocaust by a shared responsibility, our duty to the past and the future.
We mourn all the victims of the Nazis, including the six million Jews tortured in ghettos and death camps and killed cruelly during raids. Forty percent of them were citizens of the Soviet Union, so the Holocaust has always been a deep wound for us, a tragedy we will always remember.
Before visiting Jerusalem, I looked through original documents, reports by Red Army officers after the liberation of Auschwitz. I must tell you, colleagues, it is very difficult, unbearable to read these military reports, documents describing in detail how the camp was set up, how the cold-blooded killing machine worked.
Many of them were hand-written by soldiers and officers of the Red Army on the second or third day after the liberation of the prisoners and convey the shock that the Red Army soldiers and officers experienced from what they saw there, from testimonies that caused pain, indignation and compassion.
Red Army Field Marshal Konev, who then led the military operation to capture the densely populated Silesian industrial region of Germany, used tactics to spare as many civilians as possible and, having received a report about the atrocities committed at Auschwitz, forbade himself from even seeing this camp. Later he wrote in his memoirs that he had no right to lose his moral strength, so that a fair sense of revenge would not have blinded him during military operations and would not have caused additional suffering and casualties among the civilian population of Germany.
January 27 marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. In this hell, where people from different countries were brought for torture, monstrous experiments and mass killing, hundreds of thousands of people of different ethnicities died. More than half of them were Jews.
The crimes committed by the Nazis, their deliberate, planned, and as they said, final solution to the Jewish issue, is one of the darkest and most shameful pages of modern world history.
But we should not forget that this crime also had accomplices. They were often crueler than their masters. Death factories and concentration camps were served not only by the Nazis, but also by their accomplices in many European countries.
In the occupied territories of the Soviet Union, where these criminals were operating, the largest number of Jews were killed. Thus, about 1.4 million Jews were killed in Ukraine, and 220,000 people were killed in Lithuania. I draw your attention, friends, to the fact that this is 95 percent of the pre-war Jewish population of this country. In Latvia, 77,000 Jewish people were killed. Only a few hundred Latvian Jews survived the Holocaust.
The Holocaust was deliberate annihilation of people. But we must remember that the Nazis intended the same fate for many other peoples. Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Poles and many other peoples were declared Untermensch. Their land was meant to serve as living space for the Nazis, providing for their prosperous existence, while the Slavs and other peoples were meant either to be exterminated or to become slaves without rights, culture, historical memory and language.
Back in 1945, it was first of all the Soviet people who put an end to these barbaric plans. As it has just been said, they protected their Fatherland and liberated Europe from Nazism. We paid a price no nation could even imagine in their worst dreams: a toll of 27 million deaths.
We will never forget this. The memory of the Holocaust will serve as a lesson and a warning only if it remains fully intact, without any omissions. Unfortunately, today the memory of war and its lessons and legacy often fall subject to the immediate political situation. This is completely unacceptable. It is the duty of current and future politicians, state and public figures to protect the good name of the living and fallen heroes, civilians and victims of the Nazis and their allies.
We must use everything we have—our informational, political and cultural capabilities as well as the reputation and influence our countries have in the world—to this end. I am sure that everyone present here today, in this audience, shares these concerns and is ready to protect truth and justice together with us.
We are all responsible for making sure that the terrible tragedies of this war will not happen again, that the generations to come will remember the horrors of the Holocaust, the death camps and the siege of Leningrad….
Destruction of the past and lack of unity in the face of threats can lead to terrible consequences. We must have the courage to be straight about this and do everything to defend peace.
I think an example could and should be set by the founding countries of the United Nations, the five powers that bear special responsibility for the preservation of civilization.
We have discussed this with several of our colleagues and, as far as I know, have received a generally positive response to holding a meeting of the heads of state of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council: Russia, China, the United States, France and Britain. We can hold it in any country, in any place that our colleagues would find convenient. Russia is ready for such a serious discussion. We intend to send this proposal to the leaders of the Five without delay.
A summit of the states that made the main contribution to the routing of the aggressor and the formation of the postwar world order can play a big role in searching for collective ways of responding to current challenges and threats and would demonstrate our common commitment to the spirit of allied relations, historical memory and the lofty ideals and values for which our predecessors, our grandfathers and fathers fought shoulder to shoulder.
SCHILLER INSTITUTE WEEKLY WEBCAST FEATURING HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE: https://schillerinstitute.com
DETROIT INITIATES COMMUNITY CHORUS
Schiller Institute Detroit Community Chorus Tuesdays 7:30pm, Cherry Hill Presbyterian Church, 24110 Cherry Hill St., Dearborn, MI 48124
New Jersey: Tuesdays 6-7:30 pm, Bogart Memorial Church, 263 Larch Ave., Bogotà NJ 07603.
Brooklyn: Wednesdays 6:30-8pm, St. Joseph Co-Cathedral, 717 Dean St., Brooklyn NY 11238.
Flushing: Wednesdays 6:30-8:30pm, Finest Adult Day Care, 132-38 41st Ave., 2nd Fl., Room 2B, Flushing NY 11355.
Manhattan: Thursdays 6:30-8pm, Good Shepherd-Faith Presbyterian Church, 152 W. 66th St., New York NY 10023.
Sectionals for all NYC area choruses: Mondays 7-8pm (one voice type per week), Epic Security Bldg., 2067 Broadway (at 72nd St.), New York NY 10023.
BOSTON: Tuesdays 7-8:15pm Christ Church (12 Quincy Ave), Quincy MA 02169.
HOUSTON: Tuesdays, 6-7:30 PM, Bayland Community Center, 6400 Bissonnet St, Houston, 77074.
NORTHERN VIRGINIA: Saturdays at 4:45-6pm, Leesburg, VA.
SEATTLE: Saturdays 5:30-7pm, Shoreline Senior Center, Bldg. G, 18560 1st Ave. NE, Shoreline WA 98155. Contact Anastasia: anastasiammares[at]gmail.com