The Lead

Is This the Last Call To Stop World War III?

by Dennis Small (EIRNS) — Aug. 01, 2024

When Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche stated back in mid-June of this year that the next 4-5 months leading into the U.S. Presidential election on November 5, “will be—in my view—absolutely decisive whether or not we go into World War III, or if we can go to a New Paradigm,” many may have considered her forecast exaggerated or overstated.

Then, on July 9-11, NATO heads of state met in Washington, D.C., and announced that no nation or political leader would be allowed to stand in the way of the Anglo-American Establishment’s drive for war against Russia and China.

Then, on July 13, Presidential candidate Donald Trump was nearly assassinated in Butler, Pennsylvania, with the aid of scandalous security-stripping carried out by the Secret Service itself.

Then, on July 24, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke before a Joint Session of the U.S. Congress and got over 50 standing ovations in his call for escalating Israel’s scorched-earth campaign to wipe out Palestine—and all Palestinians—and for expanding the war to Iran, with direct U.S. involvement.

Then, on July 30, Israel carried out a targeted assassination of top Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Lebanon, also threatening a full-scale invasion of that country—to give it the Gaza treatment as well.

And on July 31, Israel—with evident backing from the “Biden” administration—carried out another targeted assassination, this time of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s top political leader and chief negotiator for a ceasefire and hostage release deal, who had attended the presidential swearing in, in Tehran, Iran. The goal of the strike is to produce angry retaliation from Iran and widen the war into a general conflagration. With U.S. warships steaming to the region, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announcing that the U.S. military stands ready to come to Israel’s defense if it is attacked, the strategic pistol has been cocked and is ready to fire at a moment’s notice.

The world, indeed, stands at the very brink of general thermonuclear war between the United States and Russia—exactly as Helga Zepp-LaRouche has been warning.

Another, less noticed but equally decisive front in that same global battle is the financial and economic warfare being waged against countries that are either part of the BRICS, or have stated their intention to join the BRICS—the global alternative being organized to the bankrupt City of London and Wall Street financial system. Argentina, Ethiopia, Egypt, South Africa, Bangladesh, Brazil, and now chaotic Venezuela have been targeted with financial warfare and sanctions, as well as color-revolution destabilization operations, in a desperate effort to ensure that the October 22-24 BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia is sabotaged.

Consider the vulnerability of most of the developing sector to such operations. According to a report published July 31 by Debt Relief International, the average debt-service burden on developing nations’ budgets spending is at an all-time high, at 42.2% of total spending. In other words, these countries have to pay almost half of their entire government budget as tribute to the bankrupt City of London and Wall Street financial system, before they can spend a single penny on health, education, poverty alleviation, infrastructure, and other needed programs. Not to mention the takeover of the entire global financial system by the derivatives cancer, now totaling about $2.1 quadrillion.

Such a situation cannot and will not last. The Global Majority has made it clear that five centuries of colonialism are over, and that a new international security and development architecture is under construction. Will the West allow London and NATO to insist on going to war to try to stop this process and bail out Wall Street; or can we make reason prevail?

Helga Zepp-LaRouche told an international webcast audience on July 31 her concept behind calling for the formation of a Council of Reason:

“People have to have the kind of courage to step forward and say: We are on the brink of the abyss of destruction of everything, and therefore we are offering a different set of policies. And that takes courage…. We have to go back and revive the best traditions of European civilization, which is the ancient Greek tradition of Socrates and Plato, of the great tragedians, some of the great sculptors, the very idea of the Good, the Beautiful, and Truth as One, which was one of the core ideas of that period. And, how that idea was revived in the Italian Renaissance, the Golden Renaissance of the 15th Century, which overcame the Dark Ages of the 14th Century, which was one of the gigantic contributions that really laid the foundations for European civilization for the following 600 years.”