The Lead

Days of Decision: Will the Next Desperate Gambit Be the World’s Last?

by Stewart Battle (EIRNS) — Aug. 17, 2024

Friday’s meeting of the International Peace Coalition featured an appearance by former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who joined Helga Zepp-LaRouche and others to address the increasingly brazen crackdown on dissenting opinion in the United States. Ritter’s house was raided Aug. 7 by the FBI and law enforcement officials, whereupon over two dozen of his documents and other property were seized. Ritter wrote of the event: “The FBI agents did more than seize my personal electronics when they searched my home on Aug. 7. They stole the truth.”

Truth is becoming an increasingly difficult thing to allow in the Anglo-American garden of “democracy.” Also, on Tuesday, Aug. 13, the Virginia home of Russian-American author, expert, and foreign policy advisor Dimitri Simes was raided by the FBI in another brazen assault on those with opposing opinions. Simes has been an outspoken advocate of better Russian-American relations, and is today a critic of the Biden Administration’s openly aggressive policies toward Russia. There is “no question” that the government wants to intimidate me, Simes said. “But they want to intimidate other people too, not just me.” Simes, who currently lives in Russia, where he anchors a major TV program, said this action is not aimed to drag him to the U.S. to arrest him, but rather: “They want to make sure that I would not come to the United States, and they want to block any attempt to have a Russian-American dialogue.”

In describing the current situation, Zepp-LaRouche said we are in an escalation, and step by step by step are coming closer to a point of no return. Ukraine’s invasion into Russia’s Kursk region is only the latest desperate gambit on the part of Kiev’s regime—it will not work to avoid the inevitable collapse of Ukraine’s army, but it may just trigger an even deadlier escalation. Add to this the reports coming out of Russian military analysts, and echoed today by Russia’s Defense Ministry, that Ukraine may be planning to make some sort of nuclear “dirty bomb” attack at one of the nuclear power plants in the region, to blamed it on Russia and be used to draw the U.S. into the conflict more directly.

Whether or not these reports are true is not known. But what is known is that there are some who see these kinds of desperate gambits as increasingly realistic options in the face of the rapid collapse of their unipolar world order. Citizens in Western countries must give up their commitment to “business as usual” and unite around the agreement that a nuclear war between superpowers is not a viable option for humanity—a different approach is required.

In a tragic culture, the method which brings about a real change does not come from within that tragic culture. It must come from somewhere else. Mohandas Gandhi took up that question in his work to create a truly free India—not just physically free from the British Empire, but mentally free. In his famous pamphlet, “Indian Home Rule” (Hind Swaraj), Gandhi wrote: “Some Englishmen state that they took, and they hold, India by the sword. Both these statements are wrong. The sword is entirely useless for holding India. We alone keep them. ... We like their commerce, they please us by their subtle methods, and get what they want from us. ... We further strengthen their hold by quarrelling amongst ourselves.” Self-government is created, not bestowed, he insisted, and “if we act justly India will be sooner free.”

Zepp-LaRouche concluded her remarks to Friday’s IPC meeting by saying: “And if we could convince enough people in the United States to stop this geopolitical confrontation and the effort to keep hegemony—which is not possible anyway anymore because a multipolar world has already developed—it would be very easy to go in the direction of forming a New Paradigm. And I want to say that the BRICS+ offers cooperation with anybody, and I think we need to explore a real solution to the crisis, which would mean a solution to the financial crisis; it would mean giving up geopolitics and replacing it with cooperation among sovereign nations.” This is urgently required, she said, because there is “only a very short period of time to avoid a course which is extremely, extremely far advanced on the road to disaster.”