EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR FRIDAY FEBRUARY 10, 2023

Tanks, Fighter Jets, Long-Range Missiles for Ukraine; Will Nukes Be Next?

Feb. 9, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)—After playing London, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy yesterday took his road show to Paris and then Brussels for summit meetings with the EU, where he demanded that those nations provide Kiev with “artillery guns, ammunition, modern tanks, long-range missiles and modern fighter jets.” It is likely that the EU nations will promptly follow London in lock-step, providing all that Zelenskyy demands—and more.

Soon, these weapons will be used to launch strikes deep into Russian territory, including Crimea—if London’s script continues to be followed. Soon, Global NATO actions will be taken against China, opening up a second front in their war, as NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg made clear during his Feb. 8 visit to the United States, when he stated: “Security is global. What happens in Asia matters for Europe, and what happens in Europe matters for Asia and also, of course, for North America.”

Not a day goes by that Russia doesn’t warn of the consequences of these reckless actions, often prefacing them with the advice: “Don’t say we didn’t warn you.” Yesterday, it was the Russian Embassy in London that warned of “the ‘bloody harvest’ the next round of escalation will reap, as well as the military-political consequences ensuing from this for the European continent and the whole world.” Today, the Russian Foreign Ministry also issued a statement underscoring that the U.S. has effectively initiated a total, hybrid war against Russia, “which poses a real danger of a direct military clash between two nuclear powers.”

Soon, we will wish we had acted earlier to stop this insane spiral into nuclear war; that we had taken up the Pope’s call for a negotiated solution; that we had supported Brazilian President Lula’s offer to form a “Peace Club”—and most of all, that we had listened to the warnings, solutions, and wise words of Lyndon LaRouche and of Helga Zepp-LaRouche.

The words written by Lyndon LaRouche almost 46 years ago, in an Aug. 1, 1977, piece published in Campaigner magazine under the title “Jürgen Ponto Victim of Carter Administration Assassination,” ring out like the clearest of bells for us today. We are able to bring them to you again today, thanks to the efforts of the LaRouche Legacy Foundation to locate, archive, and make available to the public worldwide the entire corpus of LaRouche’s work. Writing from Wiesbaden, Germany, the day after Dresdner Bank’s Jürgen Ponto was assassinated by the so-called “Baader-Meinhof” gang, LaRouche explained the connection of that murder to the danger of nuclear war, and concluded his 1977 urgent report with a section headlined “Fight for Peace”:

“Have no illusions. When men choose war, either by election or default of action to prevent it, they can not choose the course war will follow. If war breaks out, war will be fought to win at all costs. In war, the fundamental danger is that of losing the war. There will be no conventional war in Europe, no tactical-nuclear-augmented form of conventional warfare until after the United States has been destroyed as a nation and the battlefields of Central Europe have first been prepared for assault by paving these areas with maximum saturation with atomic, bacteriological, and chemical warfare ‘artillery’ capabilities. Whoever would not fight war in that way, on those terms from the beginning, must therefore be assured of losing the war. Hence, that is what war would be, and nothing else.

“To fight for peace, to avoid war, the political and military commanders must first look into the radioactive bowels of Hell. Once they have faced the Hell of war as it must be fought, let them imagine themselves in the middle of that war thinking back to the time they might have prevented it. Let them focus that foreseen passion of embittered regret on the present moment, and let them act to prevent war with that same ruthless, grim determination with which war would have to be fought....

“Catch the zombie assassins of Jürgen Ponto by all means. But capturing those poor, degraded wretches does not really deal with the problem. Will you allow the leaders of nations to be shot down and merely arrest the pathetic tools used by the actual murderers? A nation which will permit such a charade of justice has lost its soul, its qualifications to survive. Look then at the faces of ordinary working people and other Europeans as I see those faces. See the faces of my fellow American citizens as I see them before me now. See those faces, those trusting faces obliterated by radioactive Hell. Those of us who in one capacity or another are the leaders of the OECD nations have above all the moral responsibility to fulfill the trust those ordinary Europeans and Americans have placed in us. We carry as our moral responsibility the hopes of all the generations before us, the anxiety of the present and the possibility of the future. If we can not act to deal properly with the real assassins of Jürgen Ponto under these circumstances, our culture is not fit to survive—and it will not survive!”