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LaRouche Warns of British Moves
for a New Cuban Missile
Crisis in Reverse

Transcript of The LaRouche Show,
Aug. 23, 2008

Harley Schlanger Good afternoon, and welcome to The LaRouche Show. It’s Saturday, August 23rd, 2008. I’m Harley Schlanger, and I will be your host.

As we’re coming into the week of the Democratic Convention and we’re moving into the 2008 general election, we actually have events that are—that should be—at the forefront of our thinking, much more so than the idiotic little striptease that Obama did yesterday, on the choice of the vice presidential candidate.

In a statement issued on Thursday, Lyndon LaRouche warned, we’re actually closer to World War III than to the November elections, and we’re facing what he called "a Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse." In addition to the danger which still exists of a provocation by Vice President Dick Cheney and his British controllers, to use an excuse to attack Iran, or the spin-off of the destabilization of Pakistan into broader war in Asia, LaRouche identified what he called "the provocations against Russia, via George Soros and British intelligence’s Saakashvili government in Georgia" as the leading edge of this danger of nuclear World War III. While most Americans are victims of psychological warfare, run through the propaganda mills known as the mass media, which would have you believe that the confrontation in the Caucasus region is one of Russian brutality against the "brave fighters for democracy’ of the so-called Rose Revolution in Georgia, in reality, you could call what we’ve seen unfolding, a British imperial gameplan to destroy Russia.

On our program today, to provide the history of this war danger, and to give you, our listeners, what you need to know to act to prevent the outbreak of World War III, we have with us Rachel Douglas from the Russia bureau of Executive Intelligence Review, a scholar of Russian history, and someone who’s very much involved in working with Lyndon LaRouche, to get out his ideas, both in Russia, and also to get out to the American people the reality of what’s going on there. We’ll also be joined by LaRouche Youth Movement member Leandra Bernstein from the LaRouchePAC editorial staff.

So, Rachel, welcome to the program.

Rachel Douglas: Hi Harley.

Schlanger: Now, there’s a myth which you and I talked about before the program, which has been perpetrated, that what we’re seeing is the courageous people of the small democratic nation of Georgia, standing up for the freedom against the bullies in the Kremlin. What’s the truth to this?

Douglas: Well, I think the truth was summarized very succinctly by Lyndon LaRouche in an interview with Russian television, this week, where he said, what we’re seeing here is "part of a British-led operation with American support, which was intended to crush Russia by a series of encirclement actions." And he cited not only the attack on Russian peacekeepers and the civilian population of South Ossetian—and I think we can take some steps in this discussion to demystify what that was about—he also cited the accelerated conclusion this week, of the deal between the United States and Poland, for the stationing of anti-missile systems, components of an anti-missile defense program in Poland, which Moscow has repeatedly stated it perceives, correctly, as a strategic threat, a threat to its strategic nuclear deterrent under current doctrine.

And thus, LaRouche continued, in his discussion with the Russian TV interviewers, saying, (quote): " I think we’re headed for the potential of a new missile crisis, comparable to what happened in 1962—but worse." That’s the Cuban Missile Crisis. And he said: "This is the danger: We are on the verge, both of a general breakdown of the world’s monetary-financial system, and in such a period, we are again looking at the ’Guns of August.’... the threat of World War III."

Now, I know that is not what people have heard on the radio and TV, and on the internet this week. And I want to shed light on what you’ve been told, and why, both from the standpoint of this larger strategic context, the strategic reason for what happened: That’s what we’ll focus on, I think, in this discussion. But also—

Schlanger: And in that light, I think that it’s important to make the point, right at the outset, that the American people are being lied to, both in terms of the day-to-day local situation, but also having been denied this broader picture.

Douglas: Yes. I think it’s dramatized, even if we look even at the, if you will, small-scale, day-to-day lies. And I just pulled from our ample files of the last two weeks, two examples: One is the first day of the fighting, on Friday, Aug. 8th. I happened to be travelling; on that day, I was in rural Kentucky, actually travelling with a friend from Moscow. And as soon as we checked into a hotel and found out what was going on, we contacted her family in Moscow to find out what the coverage was, there. It so happened that her husband monitors television from all over the world, and he reported the following: That first day, Aug. 8th, he had seen grabs from Georgian television, of their own artillery batteries shelling the capital city of the region in Georgia, called South Ossetia. The shelling took place at night; as many as 2,000, perhaps many more, people were killed, as they slept in their homes, by this shelling.

Schlanger: Now, Rachel, let’s just take a little bit of time, so people really get this picture. Most people don’t know what South Ossetia is. Can you shed a little light on that?

Douglas: I can, and I would like to go into more depth in that later on the program, but I’ll just say now, that, within Russia, as within other countries which, until 1991 had been for various periods of time—either since World War II or since World War I, or in the case of Georgia, much longer, since 1801, parts of the Soviet Union, or earlier, the Russian Empire; within these nations, Georgia, Russian, Azerbaijan has this phenomenon, others do, there are what are called "autonomous districts," or "autonomous republics" even. People may have heard the name of one of them: Chechnya. That one’s inside Russia.

South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and Ajaria, are three so-called "autonomous regions" within Georgia. They were carved out, as such, during the Soviet period on somewhat ethnic lines, and they had very amply autonomy for managing their affairs, within the Republic of Georgia, within the Soviet Union. Now, I want to get, later, to what happened with them in the 1990s, when the Soviet Union broke up, but that identifies what they are.

And there had been fighting in South Ossetia—civil war, actually—in Georgia, in the early 1990s. It ended with a truce, policed by peacekeepers from both Georgia and Russia. And what happened on Aug. 8th, is the Georgian peacekeepers opened fire on the Russian peacekeepers, backed up by shelling, as I just mentioned, of the whole capital of the South Ossetian region, from within the rest of Georgia.

And what I was going to say, is that what our observer in Moscow reported, was that this footage of the Georgian shelling of Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, he saw first as a grab from Georgian TV; and an hour later, he was watching CNN and the BBC, and he saw the same footage, except the voiceover that was illustrated by this footage said, "Today, Russia invaded South Ossetia and the rest of Georgia"—and it was illustrated by the film of the Georgian shelling of Tskhinvali. That’s number one.

Number two, is something that many people may have heard the other day, and I’m just going to read you an Associated Press wire, which was at the top of news roundups all day on 15th Aug. And it said—headline—"Georgia Can ’Forget’ Regaining Provinces," close quote. The lead sentence said: "The Foreign Minister of Russia said Thursday, that Georgia could ’forget about’ getting back its two breakaway provinces." Now, that sounded to me, not like the language that the Foreign Minister of Russia, Sergei Lavrov, customarily uses. He’s a very skilled, experienced diplomat. So, I looked it up: I read the transcript, I listened to the audio, so there could be no mistake. And what had happened in the interview that he gave that day, in Russian radio, was that the questioner asked kind of a "leading" question, and said, "Minister Lavrov, there have been three Presidents of Georgia, since the Soviet Union. All three of them, with very different political backgrounds, ended up attempting a solution of the situation with South Ossetia by force. So maybe, this is somehow genetic? Maybe all Georgian Presidents will always attack South Ossetia."

And Lavrov replied (quote): "If that is the case, then I think that talk about the territorial integrity of Georgia can be forgotten. Because forcing Ossetia or Abkhazia to agree that they can be returned to the Georgian state by force, will be impossible."

So you see the difference, right?

Schlanger: Well, it’s totally clear.

Douglas: Yeah.

So, the bigger picture is, who wants—who in the West, who in Georgia, who amongst Georgia’s backers wants a conflict with Russia, and why? And a conflict of the dimensions that Mr. LaRouche referred to, in his interview with Russia Today this week?

And I want to tell people that a very good reason to be a subscriber to EIR, is that we tell you this. We actually warned, back in June, in an article that I wrote for the 20th June issue of EIR, that there was a move in preparation, coming particularly from the British Foreign Office and those in the European Union, who have a vision of the European Union as an empire, to—as it was put by one source, "unfreeze the frozen conflicts" in this area, around Russia’s perimeter, and get a higher level of tension going in which the European Union would come in, and shows stuff, "strut its stuff" as the big guy on the block, and as a new "post-modern empire," as one of the British-based think-tankers put it. So we warned that this provocation was coming.

But the roots of it, Harley, you can look back to 1992: Just after the Soviet Union, as such, broken in August 1991, the August-December period, the U.S. State Department adopted a policy memorandum, and it was widely understood that it was then-Vice President—

Schlanger: It was under Bush 41.

Douglas: Yeah, yeah, but under Cheney’s guidance, in Defense.

Schlanger: He was Defense Secretary.

Douglas: Yes, and this was his department. So, that memo declared that the reconstitution of the U.S.S.R., or any reemergence of Russia as a strong nation, could be not tolerated. And I’ll just read you this one sentence, because it’s so striking. The DOD memo of 1992 said: "Our first objective is to prevent the reemergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union, or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that formerly posed by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying our regional defense strategy, and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia."

Now, of course, the rub is, what’s your definition of "hostile"? Hostile to what? Huh? And so, you can see, if you look really, at what happened in Russia during the ’90s, that the thinking, and again what’s in that Cheney-era DOD memo, is absolutely typical of British geopolitics going back for 200 years, and it says, that the threat is strong Russia. Not that Russia’s going to up and be a superpower and start bullying and attacking people. But rather, the potential that Russia, because of its own unique history, could represent an obstacle or a counterpole to the imperial tyranny, known as "globalization."

Schlanger: Okay, we want to take that up in just a second, Rachel. I just want to identify for our listeners: This is the LaRouche Show... [station id]

Now, when was this article printed that you covered this? Douglas: Well, I just referred to two articles, in the June 20th issue of Executive Intelligence Review from this year, I have an article called, "European Union Presses Offensive against Russian Interests." And in that article, we wrote that, "Even though the Lisbon Treaty"—and I know you’ve discussed that on a number of programs—"had been defeated by the ’No’ vote in Ireland on June 12th, nonetheless, those who advocate the European Union as an empire, which would be the arbiter of relations throughout East Central Europe, were escalating their efforts to achieve that."

Schlanger: So, this is another example of LaRouche and his publications, being well ahead of everyone else, and I think that’s important to point out. Because, our listeners, as you said, can get subscriptions to Executive Intelligence Weekly, it’s available. And this is a track record, now, as Rachel’s quoting from Cheney shows, we have a track record going back 30-something years on these things.

Douglas: That’s right.

Schlanger: Now, Rachel, I want to just pick up this thread, then, on this idea of an empire, a fight to, you might say, contain or break up Russia, that goes back, you said, 200 years! What’s the start of that—that’s about the same time as the American Revolution overturning the British Empire.

Douglas: Yes. I probably should say 300 years—

Schlanger: Yes!

Douglas: [laughs] Because it was in the first 25 years of the 18th century, around 1700-1725, that America and Russia shared a mentor, and that mentor was Gottfried Leibniz. As I know you’ve discussed in previous programs on the history of the American System of economy, and the American intellectual tradition, Leibniz inspired, and was a correspondent with many of the people who were the fathers and grandfathers of the generation of the American War of Independence against the British Empire. But in that same period, Leibniz was an advisor to Peter the Great, the Tsar of Russia, and designed for Peter, the government structure that Russia implemented, designed the Academy of Sciences that Peter founded in 1725, just nine years after Leibniz had died. And those processes launched the industrialization of Russia, at such a pace that by the late 18th century, Russia’s pig-iron output was greater than that of Britain. There was a specter of Russia becoming a strategic obstacle to "the sun never sets on the British Empire" ideology and practice, which got consolidated in 1763 with the end of the Seven Years War in Europe and the ascendancy of the British East India Company over British policy.

But—

Schlanger: While you’re mentioning that, I just want to—Russians know this history, right?

Douglas: Many of Russians do. Aspects of it are lost. One of the things that is so exciting, and beautiful, about Lyndon LaRouche’s direct dialogue with leading intellectuals in Russia, is that he has made a commitment to saving the historical memory of these important relations. So that things which were eclipsed during the Soviet period, because what really happened in the 18th and 19th century didn’t necessarily fit with the Marxist, or the Soviet Marxist version of how history worked, and so they were swept under the rug; or you could have an academic specialist in some area write extraordinarily insightful works on the relations between President John Quincy Adams and Count Rumiantsev in the early 19th century, but you couldn’t really elevate that to say it was critical to what was happening.

So, we’ve tried very hard to revive the memory of this history, both here and there. But you know what the 18th-century history brings to mind, is exactly the point, today: Because, the drive from the British Foreign Office, from Cheney’s circles, from the thugs that work in the service of both—people like George Soros—the drive to provoke Russia, to block Russia, to keep Russia down, doesn’t have just to do with things that Russia may have done. It has to do with what Russia could do, with the potential, in particular, since 1998, because during the 1990s, Russia was down. Russia, like Georgia today, had what you would call a "George Soros" government up to 1996-98 period; its economy was being wrecked; it was really on the verge of disintegrating as a great power.

Schlanger: This was the "shock therapy" policy?

Douglas: Yes, and we can go through where that came from.

And after 1998, ironically after Russia experienced complete financial collapse, the default on its government bonds, after waves of hot money had poured into the country from the international markets, after the George Soros hedge fund-associated assault on currencies in Southeast Asia in 1997. Aug. 17th, 1998, Russia defaulted, or suspended payment on its government bonds. And in the years after that, first through the Yevgeni Primakov government, and then, gradually—not all at once—through aspects of the policy of Putin, began to come back. And, there was a famous speech that Putin gave as President, in Munich, early in 2007—which again, you were lied to about that, people: You were told, if you heard the news that day, that Putin had gotten up and given a Cold War speech in Munich, to an audience that included John McCain, by the way, and other leading Americans.

Putin had given a speech, in which he began, by quoting Franklin Roosevelt, on how to avoid a world war, and he asserted that Russia is back, and is not going to allow itself to be wiped off the map as a power. And that defined a potential, beyond even what Putin might have achieved at that point. That potential intersects something that Mr. LaRouche has talked about so often over the last year: And that is, the potential for four nations—the United States, Russia, China, India—to initiate, to become an initiating committee for a new monetary system, and an economic recovery, based on the collaboration of sovereign nations, and growth, rather than the destruction of nations through globalization.

And I want to give you give you one more quote from the enemy’s side. This came in the London Economist, which just shows you how much this potential is on the minds of those who try to gain through globalization, impoverishment of the whole world, and massive population reduction, be in through looting and starvation, or through war. There was an article in the London Economist—this is the flagship weekly publication of the City of London financial center. Their editorial, their feature package, in March 17th, 2007 issue, was on the 50th anniversary of the European Union. They included an article from the genre called "futurology," called: "The European Union at 100." So, projecting to the year 2057—

Schlanger: In the great tradition of H.G. Wells.

Douglas: Exactly! Right, The Shape of Things To Come.

They depicted the European Union vanquishing both the United States and Russia, after a U.S. financial collapse, and a EU-instigated, Russian-American nuclear showdown over Ukraine. And I just want to read it to you. Here’s how they wrote it; they said: In 2057, "The EU is celebrating its 100th birthday with quiet satisfaction. Predictions when it turned 50"—that is, back in 2007—"that the EU was doomed to irrelevance, in a world dominated by America, China, and India, proved wide of the mark. A turning point was the bursting of America’s housing bubble and the collapse of the dollar early in the Presidency of Barack Obama in 2010." (They got the timing off a little, no?) "In the dangerous second decade of the century, when Vladimir Putin returned for a third term as Russian President, and stood poised to invade Ukraine, it was the European Union, that pushed the Obama Administration to threaten massive nuclear retaliation. The Ukraine crisis became a triumph for the EU..." etc. and it ends up with Russia crawling to join—the EU!

So, what are they afraid of there, the London Economist? The potential combination of America, China, India, Russia. And for those in the U.S. who think, "Oh, well, that would never happen," or for those in Russia—and we do that this problem—who think, "Well, that won’t work because the United States, will never get there," hmm?—you have to remember how fast policy changes can be made in a time of crisis.

Leandra and others on the editorial staff recently produced a magnificent historical video 1932, and it focused on the ascendancy of Roosevelt, the tremendous fights involved in that in 1932, after a 32-year period after the assassination of President McKinley, in which one would have thought, looking at the U.S. from around the world, that our American intellectual tradition, and political traditions, had been eclipsed totally.

So last spring, or two springs ago, the spring of 2007, when I had the privilege of accompanying Lyndon LaRouche to Moscow, what struck him and what he talked about to the Russian interviewers who put him on TV and so forth, was the fact, that from Putin, from others in the Kremlin, from people in the Academy of Sciences we were hearing a refrain: "Roosevelt, Roosevelt, Roosevelt." Expressing that, if the United States were to come to Russia with a Rooseveltian initiative, for an anti-imperial world order, for collaboration for growth, the Russians would respond positively. And that’s the potential, that British geostrategists fear. That’s why we see the Georgian government of George Soros and the British Empire, deployed against Russian at this time.

Schlanger: Now, let me bring in Leandra at this point, because this is actually a very good branch point, this question of potential. And I’d like to say to our listeners, if you have questions that are relevant to this topic, please send them in. You can them email to us, at radio@larouchepub.com. And www.larouchepub.com is also where you can go to get some of the coverage in the upcoming EIR, but to get the full coverage you have to get a subscription, and to do that, you can contact us through the website.

Now, Rachel, and Leandra, you’ve just raised this question of the potential of Russia that was restored, or brought back into potential with Putin’s emergence at the end of the 1990s. There was a previous branching point, which was 1989, and Leandra, you’re working with a team of people putting together a new video documentary on what happened around 1989, when Lyndon LaRouche intervened at the time of the fall of the Soviet Union. What can you tell us about what you’re doing with that, Leandra.

Leandra Bernstein: Well, first of all, this is a very exciting project. We hope to have this up on the LaRouchePAC website [http://wwww.larouchepac.com] by either the start of the Convention, or hopefully, right before. So you should tune into LaRouchePAC for that.

Schlanger: Instead of Obama’s Nuremberg Rally.

Bernstein: [laughs] Right!

But there was a certain irony in what Rachel brought up, with the article from the Economist, where they’re saying—the article from the Economist, and also the response of certain Russians, and even certain Americans, is skepticism about LaRouche’s Four Powers perspective. And there was similar skepticism around the potentials for absolutely reshaping U.S.-Soviet relations, back in, really the heat of the Cold War. And that occurred, the dramatic policy-shifts occurred March 23rd, 1983, when President Reagan announced that he was going to be going with Lyndon LaRouche’s policy of a Strategic Defense Initiative. And this shocked the circles in the Soviet Union. This shocked the circles in the United States, who had really put some effort, as soon as Reagan was in the White House and collaborating with LaRouche, these circles around Reagan—Henry Kissinger, especially; Leo Cherne—to break that relationship between Reagan and LaRouche. Because what they saw, was totally unthinkable for them: That the United States was going to change policy out of Mutually Assured Destruction, and basically wreck the British system, this British-imposed system of what some people call a "multipolar world." But, you know, they should be honest, it was just a bipolar world. [ Douglas laughs]

But this shock, where suddenly LaRouche’s policies were at the center of completely changing world history—LaRouche had put this offer for beam defense, beam defense is essentially nuclear beam technologies that would disabled nuclear missiles in flight. It didn’t blow them up, it disabled them—we’ve published quite a it on this over the years!

Schlanger: And, Rachel, this was at another point, where there was an escalated tension between East and West. A long of our younger listeners don’t realize that the early 1980s there was tremendous tension of nuclear buildup in Europe, new weapons systems being built by both sides, and a whole series of potential confrontations that could have led to war.

Douglas: Yes. The events of the 1970s and ’80s, serve to illustrate another warning from Mr. LaRouche that he had actually published in a small book in that period, called, Why SALT Won’t Work, SALT being the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty. And Mr. LaRouche went through how the endless kind of ballet, or minuet of arms control agreements, restrictions, anti-ballistic missiles defense deals, in particular, which dated from the 1950s’ relationship between then-Soviet leader Khrushchev and Bertrand Russell and his circles, as a strategic influence in British intelligence, how that whole process not only didn’t serve as a protection against nuclear war, but made the likelihood of war greater.

And that became so evident in the 1970s: Of course, this intersects the period after the breakup of the fixed-exchange-rate system in 1971. Remember, that was followed two years later by multiple, simultaneous wars in the Middle East, following by what we call the oil-price-hike hoax of 1974, which involved recycling, channeling of oil earnings into the offshore Eurodollar market, part of the—

Schlanger: Controlled by the City of London.

Douglas: Yes, yes! Which was a major element of pumping up the bubble whose popping we’re living with today. And during the late 1970s, in that setting, you had, increasingly, attempts by both powers, militarily, to outfox the doctrine known as Mutual and Assured Destruction, which says you can’t really defend your country, you can only hold your population hostage to the other side’s thermonuclear missiles, by having more accurate and forward-based nuclear systems, that could carry out what was called—is called—a "first strike." That is, total surprise attack, wipe out the other side’s strategic capacity before they could retaliate. This was associated with the Jimmy Carter period, the ascendancy of the so-called Trilateral Commission, founded by David Rockefeller, which had both Republicans and Democrats on it in the United States, as well as some of the future "EU Empire" types of people from the European side that we’re dealing with today.

Schlanger: Okay, now to get back to the threat that Leandra was developing. Leandra, what happened? I think you’re absolutely right, there was skepticism around the potential to change, and overnight, Reagan went with LaRouche’s policy. What happened after that? Why didn’t that work? And how did that lead into the 1989 situation?

Bernstein: Well, basically, it didn’t work because the Soviets rejected it. I was talking with Rachel the other day, and she sort of gave me the profile of the Soviet leader at the time, Andropov. And there was a fishbowl mentality, where, you can imagine these leaders who believe that their power, the power of their nation, is caught up or determined entirely by this set of strategic relationships, which were completely insane.

So the Soviets rejected Reagan’s offer, for cooperation on the new physical principles technology, first on the basis—well, there were certain inherent problems in the Soviet economy, and they were concerned that because of an inability to integrate new technologies into their economy, the United States, or a revived United States—like what we saw under Roosevelt, what we saw under Kennedy—would outstrip them. And so the Soviets, on that assumption, as Rachel said, they went for full-out first-strike capability, and there’s a certain tendency I guess, in Soviet history, to just churn the economy to the breaking point.

Douglas: And, of course, Leandra, as LaRouche had warned them—and he was in touch, on behalf of himself, but with the knowledge of the Reagan Administration, he served as what was called a "back channel" in sounding out the potential of the cooperation. And when he got the word, quote, "from the highest level," unquote—that is, from Andropov’s circles, that they were not going to go with this cooperation, LaRouche warned them: If you try, to put your economy, your militarized economy into a surge mobilization to get a first strike or counterstrike capability before the SDI could be in place, you’ll break the back of your economy, you’ll break the back of the Eastern European economies— Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia—on which you depend for your military, and that’ll be the end of your empire. And LaRouche said, that’ll happen to you within five years, and that was based on his estimation of the process of strain of a kind of Spartan, militarized economy in the Soviet bloc. It happened in six years.

And that great—the Soviet Union came to an end. And LaRouche said, at that point: That’s the first shoe to drop. The second shoe that’s going to drop will be the end of the Anglo-American financial empire, and that will bring us back to a strategic threat—unless we change the agenda.

Schlanger: Okay, now to go back to changing the agenda, and the potential. There was a potential still, in spite of this, in 1988-89, that LaRouche put forward, that could have avoided what we’ve seen over the last two decades.

Douglas: Yeah.

Bernstein: He remade his proposal to the Soviet Union. Ronald Reagan was absolutely committed to Lyndon LaRouche’s policy. The White House was absolutely committed to Lyndon LaRouche’s policy. But: While they really still had the chance in ’83, they also had the delusion, "Oh, you know, it won’t really happen. LaRouche can’t really be right." But by 1989, that delusion was absolutely crushed.

Douglas: And of course, Reagan was no longer President. LaRouche in—of course, the breakup of the Eastern European bloc was 1989; of the Soviet Union per se, in August ’91. And I remember Lyndon putting out a warning in December of 1991, saying that if Yeltsin, the President of Russia, and his incoming government adopt the radical deregulation, shock therapy—meaning, decontrol of prices overnight, privatization very quickly—policies being thrust upon them by the Harvard Business School, the Chicago School of Economics, the International Monetary Fund, etc., then there will be such devastation of Russia’s economy, that we will, again, be back to a strategic threat. And he was right.

Schlanger: And Rachel, as LaRouche said that, he understood something about the intention of the people pushing these policies. Shock therapy was not intended to enable Russia to develop into a post-Soviet industrial power, was it?

Douglas: No! It was intended to accomplish what was described in that Defense Department memo under Cheney, which is to prevent Russia from ever being a strong nation, again.

And also, remember, this is taking place, still, in the post-1971, bubble world, in which the bubble requires ever-greater sources of loot. And if you look at the international expansion of the dope trade, you look at raw materials flows, you look cheap labor flows—the creation of a huge cheap-labor pool out of Eastern Europe, which is now all over the Middle East, and especially Western Europe and so on—this part of the world has been one of the biggest sources of loot to sustain the bubble since then.

So that was their agenda. And, just so we don’t lose it in our timeframe, since George Soros has been the owner of the government of Georgia, for all intents and purposes, Soros—not alone, but as representative of these London-centered financial interests—was right in the thick of it, funding the takeover, for a period of six, seven years, of Russian economic policy by young agents of this destructive policy. I mean, Soros financed the trips of young economists to the International Monetary Fund meetings, from Russia, in 1990. Some of these people had been groomed by Lord Harris of Highcross, the head of the London Institute of Economic Affairs since 1983, when, again, in the wake of the Andropov rejection of the SDI, such British strategists saw a potential for change, and regime-change in the Soviet Union. And they cultivated, through seminars abroad, and junkets, in which people like George Soros funded the travel, they cultivated a small group of economists, who would go in and fund that policy.

The same thing happened throughout Eastern Europe, and what we’re looking at in the case of Georgia is, as a result of what are sometimes called the "color revolutions"—the Rose Revolution in 2003 in Georgia, the Orange Revolution in 2004, in Ukraine—is the creation, the synthesis of capabilities; not in the interests of democracy! My goodness! Looking in the case of Georgia, we should just be clear that Mr. Saakashvili, has been opposed by tens of thousands of people in the street, for months, last fall for example, because of vote fraud and vote suppression in the Georgian parliamentary elections.

Schlanger: That sounds a lot like what Soros did with the caucuses with Democratic primaries this year!

Douglas: Well, there are so many similarities, Harley! I heard some on-the-ground reports from the LaRouche Youth Movement activists and LaRouchePAC activists, who were involved in the caucuses in Texas, for example, and what they described, with the kind of "flash mob," sudden deployment "for change"—rally for change for Obama—and then all of a sudden everybody disappears, and there’s nobody sitting down to deliberate on policy: When I heard that report, I said, "Wait a minute—I know about that! That’s what happened in Ukraine, that’s what happened in Georgia."

A friend of mine of in Russia, in 1996, came across a little handout from the International Republican Institute—this is part of the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy. And this was a brochure distributed by the IRI, to instruct Russians, who after all had no experience with democratic elections, to conduct election campaigns. And the authors of the brochure instructed the youth organizers who were distributing this (quote), "You should be able to express your world outlook in three sentences, and an idea in three words" (close quote). And my friend—

Schlanger: Open "change"!

Douglas: [laughs] Exactly! And my friend who was describing this, said, "Now look"—that was 1996; this actually also is in an EIR article dated Feb. 11, 2005, on the synthetic revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia. And he said, "Well, a decade has gone by, and now, you don’t need three words, you only need one. And you don’t need a world outlook, you just need to dress yourself in whatever color people have been instructed to wear— whether it’s orange, green, pink, or whatever—and go out on the street, and shout the single word, whether Purah! in Ukraine, or Kamara! in Georgia."

Now, this is so relevant: Because when we look at the Georgian regime, the EIR this week has an article by Michele Steinberg, who, I think very aptly, calls Mr. Saakashvili, "a wholly owned test tube baby of the British Empire"! And she goes through the funding of the government, and literally, George Soros’s foundation has channeled money into Georgian government officials at all levels, ostensibly to keep them from being corrupt! And you go through the background of the creation of that government, and you see that the young, kind of squadristi, activists who spearheaded the Rose Revolution in 2003, were put through a training process. It involved their going to Serbia, where this flash-mob technique had been pioneered, and learning the techniques and taking them back to Georgia.

And there are whole think tanks, in Britain and in the United States, such as the Albert Einstein Institution at Harvard University where Prof. Gene Sharp specializes in what he calls "the politics of non-violent action," but it’s techniques that people like real non-violent political activists like Mahatma Gandhi would turn over in their grave if they saw what they were being invoked for. And actually, the patrons of these campaigns, have drawn the parallel—this is in publications, think tank discussions of these techniques—between this political approach, and what’s called "viral marketing." Do you know that term?

Schlanger: Oh, sure!

Douglas: This is from the whole pop music school, where there’s—viral marketing is used to create a "buzz" about a new CD for example.

Schlanger: Or on the internet, when a so-called idea goes out, they say "it goes viral," that it’s just picked up and spread.

Douglas: Right. Well, the people who do this, actually don’t believe ideas exist. You’ll probably remember, Harley, in 1995, Lyndon LaRouche wrote an article in EIR called "The Case of the Inedible Professor," this was about Professor Dawkins, who says, that belief in God is a virus.

Schlanger: Well, now, this is very interesting, because I think you mentioned the worldview in three words, the techniques that were involved, and the Soros money, ample amount of money made by this financial predator. Maybe, Leandra, we should put something out on Obama being the Saakashvili of the United States.

Bernstein: I don’t think that that would be terribly inaccurate. [laughter]

Schlanger: And we were talking in the beginning, about this question of truth, and that truth is the first casualty in this kind of war.

I want to come back, because we only have a little more than ten minutes—I want to come back to the situation as it exists in Georgia today, because we’re seeing continued psychological warfare, an effort to blame Russia for the crisis. But one of the things which you brought up, Rachel, which I thought was fascinating, was, the idea that Russia would back down, that the power of NATO, the expanded NATO, would cause the Russians to back down. And what Lyndon LaRouche pointed out, is that Putin had no option, and he did what he had to do. And this is something, that is supposedly the cause of the war danger, not the provocation. I wonder if you could just say a couple things about that?

Douglas: Yes, I think we should just quickly refer to two aspects of history, one old and one current. The current is Kosovo. We haven’t mentioned that, but it’s so important. And just to say, that Mr. LaRouche has warned repeatedly—he put out a statement, right at the beginning of this year, when Kosovo, the province within Serbia was about to declare independence, and that was backed by NATO and by the U.S., he put out a warning. He said, keep Richard Holbrooke out of the area, the ex-State Department official, who has a very nasty record in terms of the conflict within the Balkans area; and he warned of the effect of the Kosovo independence, because of the Russia-Serbia many centuries’ long historical relationship, of leading to provocations elsewhere. Well, obviously, since British strategists, and British-linked strategists like Ivan Krastev of Bulgaria, were explicitly saying that’s what was going to happen. This morning was apt: Mr. Krastev called Kosovo "the crisis that the EU needs in order to prove itself as an empire. Get Russia out of any role that it might be playing in the former Soviet area, under UN auspices, or any auspices." And that in fact, is what was going on right around Georgia.

Just to go with the recent history: When the Soviet Union broke up, these different republics, like Georgia—Georgia, again, had been part of the Russian Empire since 1801—the area of the Caucasus was a stomping ground for empires, going back to the Persians 2500 years ago. In the 18th century, Georgia, which is an old and independent culture, one of the first Christian nations of Europe—Georgia was devastated repeatedly by marauding from both Persian and Turkish Ottoman imperial forces, and one of the kings of Georgia, in desperation, sought protection under Russia; it became part of the Russian Empire. But in 1991, Georgia was independent, again, but there was the question of these autonomies; and the Autonomous Areas were inherited from the Soviet so-called "nationalities policy" that Josef Stalin, for somewhat defensive reasons, and a very problematic policy, the way it was framed.

But the first post-Soviet President of Georgia, Gamsakhurdia—and this is something that’s not even ever mentioned in the media, really, in the last two weeks, though it’s so relevant!—his people very quickly said, "No more autonomies. No more special privileges for the authorities or the population in South Ossetia or Abkhazia." These are Caucasus Mountain areas; they are also very old cultures. The Ossetians are ethnically different from the Georgians and from the Russians. The Ossetian language is actually in the same language-group as Persian and Dahri, some of these Afghan languages; and Ossetia, because there had been a North Ossetia and a South Ossetia in the Soviet period, ended up half in Georgia and half in Russia!

And when Tbilisi, that’s the capital of Georgia—when the Gamsakhurdia regime and some of his associates used the phrase, "Georgia for the Georgians!"—in other words, "don’t tell me you’re an Ossetian, don’t tell me you should have Ossetian-language schools, or anything, you’re just going to be part of Georgia," people resisted in Ossetia. There’s also, as you know, a culture of a kind of clan, land-control, social relations—there was a very quick move into fighting, a brutal civil war, in both that kind of north-central part of Georgia, and also the west-northern part of Georgia on the Black Sea, around Abkhazia— thousands of people killed.

The Ossetian situation was kind of cooled out by 1992.

Schlanger: When did you say Russian peacekeepers came in?

Douglas: Yeah, that’s what I’m saying, and in Abkhazia by 1994, and in each case—the two cases are somewhat different—there was an arrangement made at that time, under the auspices of the CIS, the Commonwealth of Independent States, the association of the former Soviet Republics, of which Georgia has been a member (though Saakashvili says he’s now quit it, that’s not entirely clear). So, there were peacekeeping forces set up, of combined Georgian and Russian units, in South Ossetia. In the case of Abkhazia, the peacekeeping arrangement ultimately received the endorsement of the United Nations; there is a UN observers group there. One of the things the EU people have been trying to do, is to replace the UN-sponsored Russian peacekeepers, with EU or NATO peacekeepers.

Schlanger: I just want to emphasize that, because we’re down to under five minutes and we sort of have to wrap it up: But the Russian peacekeepers were there under UN mandate, right?

Douglas: That’s in Abkhazia. In South Ossetia, they were there under the mandate of the CIS and the OSCE, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Schlanger: Right. And so, what we’ve been discussing on this whole program—and I’d urge our listeners to get your friends to listen to this. It’ll be archived on http://www.larouchepub.com/radio/archive_2008.html. There’s absolutely crucial information, and Rachel, I’m going to come back to you for a summary in just a moment, as to what do you expect will happen, and what LaRouche is saying.

But, Leandra, in a minute or two, when will this "1989" video be out, and what will be the benefit for people in watching it?

Bernstein: Well, essentially, the benefit is going to be to my generation, especially, the youth generation who know virtually nothing about current history. And LaRouche basically commissioned this for that reason: That in order to understand the point that we’re at in history right now, we have to see where we came from. A lot of young people have the idea that "something" happened to us. Something, Sept. 11th happened to us, and then everything changed from that point on. And that’s not accurate, there’s actually nothing in the experience of people my age, that explains current history. But where we are, we are at a point now, where LaRouche has put the solution to the present crisis on the table for decades, and so we’re at one of these moments like 1989. Where we can still make a decision: You know, the ghost of Margaret Thatcher isn’t going to determine our fate at this point!

Schlanger: The living-dead ghost of Margaret Thatcher!

Bernstein: Yeah, exactly!

Schlanger: And Leandra, you think this will be out in the next couple of days, so people should be looking at www.larouchepac.com website for it.

Bernstein: Yeah, absolutely. It’ll be up in the next few days. And right now, we have a new posting by LaRouche’s wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, called, "New Cuba Missiles Crisis in Europe: Are We Heading Towards World War III?" That’s available right now, on the website.

Schlanger: Okay. Now Rachel, we have just a little more than two minutes. Give us a quick summary: What do you think has to be done to stop World War III?

Douglas: That’s great: Leandra just cited the exact article I was going to cite. Before we went on the air, Harley, I was finishing off a package of supporting material for the EIR published version of Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s article, where she says: "Either there is an immediate halt to the imperial geopolitics-driven provocations against Russia, such as the attack on South Ossetia, by the British puppet regime in Georgia, and so forth, or the strategic situation very well escalate into World War III." And, we document extensively what those further provocation points are—Azerbaijan is involved, Ukraine is involved, it’s very dangerous.

I think we have to be focused on bringing back the lost opportunity of 1989, and I think that the place where people can get a tremendously inspiring, as well as urgent, picture of how that can happen, is in Mr. LaRouche’s July 22nd webcast, where he talks about the need for the United States to initiate the new monetary system, new economic system, ending geopolitics and war, and going with a development perspective, anti-imperial, under sovereign nation-states.

Schlanger: And this is in keeping with the best traditions of the United States, which came out of this Leibnizian perspective: The idea of physical economy—gee, there’s so much more we could have talked about, that’s also in a new paper Mr. LaRouche is writing.

Rachel, thank you very much for being with us today. Leandra, thank you.

Get on the EIR website, www.larouchepub.com and www.larouchepac.com: Your life depends on it. This has been The LaRouche Show. We’ll be back next Saturday, at 3 p.m. Eastern Time.

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