Sept. 22—The following is the speech, as prepared, presented by Harley Schlanger to the Second World Public Assembly in Moscow, Sept. 18-19, 2026, titled, “New World: Values that Unite,” sponsored by the World Peoples Assembly. Schlanger, a member of the Schiller Institute–U.S.A. board of directors and EIR director of U.S. intelligence, was a featured speaker on the panel, “The Spirit of the Elbe Today: Historical Experience and Challenges of the 21st Century.” He spoke by video.
In his welcome and greetings to the event, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov expressed gratification that the conference “format is establishing itself as a sought-after platform for public diplomacy, fostering mutually respectful interstate dialogue and maintaining an atmosphere of trust and understanding between people. The key to success is the participation of numerous international guests…. The theme of this meeting is highly relevant. We represent different countries and continents, civilizations, cultures, and religions. Yet, we are firmly committed to enduring spiritual and moral values. These were bequeathed by our ancestors and continue to serve as the most important moral compass in today’s turbulent world. Among them are love for one’s homeland and loved ones, caring for children and their future, justice, and dignity.”
“The Truth never dies, but lives a wretched life.” [Yiddish proverb.]
As the wars underway in Ukraine and Southwest Asia are following the trajectory of becoming “permanent wars,” a new danger has emerged, one which represents a threat to human life on the planet. Officials in the United States and Europe are including in their plans the possibility of using tactical nuclear weapons in these conflicts. The Under Secretary for Policy in the U.S. Department of War, Elbridge Colby, suggested that the use of tactical nuclear weapons would provide an “option” for President Donald Trump which is “not out of the question,” to break the “stalemate” with Iran, while the French have offered a nuclear umbrella to Germany and eight other EU countries to deter a Russian attack, which Western leaders insist is virtually inevitable within the next two to three years.
These two conflicts [in Ukraine and in Southwest Asia] share a common ruse, in which military action is justified by Western leaders through the promotion of false narratives, which assert that they are responding to illegitimate actions by the other side. These “narratives” are examples of “soft power,” and are concocted outside of the historical context which generated the conflict.
A similar method of persistent dishonesty has been promoted for Ukraine, in which the launching of the Special Military Operation (SMO) by Russia on February 24, 2022 is presented as an unjustified attack on Ukrainian “democracy” by President Vladimir Putin. This false narrative ignores the meticulous effort by Putin to detail the actual historical events which convinced him that the SMO was necessary to defend Russia’s sovereignty. These included the breaking of the promise made to President of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachov, that there would be “not one inch” of eastward expansion of NATO; the admission that the promises made by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President François Hollande, and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in drafting the Minsk Accords were never intended to be acted upon, but were a means to buy time to arm Ukraine; and the repeated denial that Nazi militias were involved in the killings in the U.S.-funded Maidan uprising, and in the attacks on the Russian-speaking populations in eastern Ukraine, which resulted in more than 14,000 deaths.
This was exacerbated by the ridicule directed against Putin’s arguments for legitimate security guarantees for Russia, especially regarding the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine. Any honest appraisal of Ukraine’s history of “ultra-right nationalism” would confirm that the collective West was denying the history of Ukrainians who joined the Nazi SS in the 1940s, and participated in Nazi genocide against Ukraine’s Jewish, Polish, and Romanian populations. The embrace of the Nazi racial outlook expressed in public marches honoring Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera was ignored, and the existence of neo-Nazi militia members in the Azov Battalion was whitewashed, as this unit and others were incorporated into the armed forces and security forces of Ukraine.
The denial of the support for Nazi genocidalists was exposed again recently when Acting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky honored members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, highlighted by the reburial this year, with full honors, of Nazi ideologue Andriy Melnyk on May 25. Melnyk was responsible for the mass murder of Poles and Jews in Volhynia during the war, and his reburial in Ukraine was denounced by leaders of Poland’s government, but was largely ignored by the pro-Zelensky Western media apologists.
The British Role
Of special importance in a review of the West’s promotion of a fraudulent history is the role of the British. The imperial forces run by the City of London have a long history of identifying Russia as its leading adversary. Russia was the target in the 19th Century in the Great Game struggle for supremacy in Eurasia, and in the Crimean War; this strategic assessment was formalized by Halford Mackinder’s geopolitical doctrine, and intensified at the end of the Second World War, with Russia identified as the greatest threat to “Western democracy” during the Cold War.
Within two weeks of the German surrender, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill deployed his chief military aide during the war, Lord Hastings Ismay, to draft a plan named Operation Unthinkable for an invasion of the Soviet Union. Though this plan was rejected by U.S. President Harry Truman, Churchill later appointed Lord Ismay as the first Secretary General of NATO. It was Ismay who defined the mission of NATO as “keeping the Americans in, the Soviet Union out, and the Germans down.”
Churchill’s hostility to the USSR was not shared by President Franklin Roosevelt, who insisted on including the Soviets in post-war planning. This followed a tradition from the American Revolution, of maintaining a principled alliance with Russia, which had been an ally during the American Revolutionary War. During the U.S. Civil War, Tsar Alexander II sent Russian ships to the United States to counter the attempted blockade of northern and western ports by the British, whose Foreign Minister Lord Palmerston wrote to Queen Victoria that support for the Confederacy was in London’s interests, to break apart the Union.
Lyndon LaRouche Promoted a New Strategic Architecture
After the peaceful dissolution of the USSR in 1991, when the financial predators based in the City of London and Wall Street insisted that the United States should enforce tough “shock therapy” measures against Moscow, to break apart Russia—as intended by the London–Wall Street networks associated with the swindler Bill Browder—American statesman and economist Lyndon LaRouche visited Moscow to promote a “Four Power” alliance of the United States, Russia, China, and India to create a new strategic and development architecture, with features which were later included in the emergence of the BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), and other institutions representing nations of the Global South.
This new architecture is based on sovereign nations aligning for mutual benefit. As such, instead of being subservient to a unipolar hegemon which imposes an arbitrary set of rules (the “rules-based order”) backed by military power, a multipolar or multinodal harmonic order is now emerging. The corrupt global financial and corporate establishment is threatened by the transition to this new order which is underway, and is advancing, as can be seen at the SCO conference in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. The most important tool of the declining unipolar order, besides control of the petrodollar system, which it is losing, and war, is its ability to substitute fake narratives to blot out truthful historic memories, which could provide examples for those seeking a future freed from the tyranny of the economic hitmen of the Empire.
And that is why the global oligarchy demeans and suppresses events which are symbolic of earlier periods of cooperation, such as the annual commemoration on April 25 of the handshake along the Elbe and the Victory in Europe parade in Moscow on May 9. Their fear is not just that accurate reporting of such events exposes the lies they peddle, but that the re-enactment of such moments carries with it a deep emotional power, including commitment to search for truth. The photos of American and Russian soldiers embracing and shaking hands near Torgau, and of the Immortal Regiment march through Moscow, strike deep chords of memory, reminding us of the sacrifices of family members and fellow citizens, inspiring a love for those who made the sacrifices so that we may live in peace.
And such moments rekindle in us a passion for truth and love that imperial predators cannot erase by a rewriting of history. It keeps truth alive. In an era dominated by the Epstein Class, the commitment to rescue the truth from its wretched life is a powerful force. Thank you.
