EDITORIAL
False Flags, Fake News, Regime Change in Washington: Exposed as Made in London
April 19 (EIRNS)—The lies of the British Empire—on Donald Trump’s “collusion” with Russia, the alleged Russian poisoning of the Skripals in Salisbury, Syrian President Bashar Assad’s alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma—are crumbling at an astonishing rate, which explains London’s growing hysteria and flailing about in a vain attempt to somehow hold the story together of Russian “state-ordered” assassinations, poisonings, etc. while posing as the great defender of “humanitarian” and “Western” values.
Today, Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman of Russia’s Foreign Ministry, ripped the mask off that narrative with a one-hour tour de force on Great Britain’s history as the worst colonialist power of all time, guilty of mass murder, assassinations, wars of extermination, coups, pillaging and brutal murder of entire colonial populations—millions of people. Look at what Great Britain did to India and South Africa, she said. Remember the Boer War, and Winston Churchill’s infamous statements “I hate the Indians. They are beastly people with a beastly religion.” And Britain’s Opium Wars against China? Was that a “humanitarian” intervention? Zakharova asked.
As Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche pointed out today in her international webcast, “there are more and more countries, governments, and also political forces who are speaking out against the fact that many of these British operations were orchestrated…. I think there is an increasing awareness that there is one country which is really on the war drive against Russia, and despite nice words, by implication, also against China. And that I think is a very important turn.”
But Zepp-LaRouche went further, there is a “huge battle going on…. I think the exposure of all of these British lies is a new phenomenon, and it also makes those governments which gave unconditional support to these military strikes against Syria, look really bad. They’ve lost all credibility, because they don’t care for truth, and when they join in these groundless attacks against Russia, I think it will lead further to the collapse of the Western system, because many people see that these governments cannot be trusted. And that’s not a good thing, but that’s what’s happening. “
The reality is, Zepp-LaRouche said, that “the geopolitical faction of the neo-cons in the United States … and the geopolitical British faction in Europe … are really in a rearguard battle, trying to prevail with their system, when their system is clearly inferior and outdated and not attractive to many countries in the world, which see as much more advantageous to work with China and also Russia, in building up their own economies. So this is really the battle at stake, and obviously, it’s very dangerous, but I think to the extent the lies being used by the British in particular—naturally [French President Emmanuel] Macron went along, and they’ve got Trump temporarily roped into this scheme—I think the more these lies are exposed, the less they are effective, and the less is the danger that they’re being repeated for the next dirty trick.”
How to outflank the geopoliticians and neo-cons who are trying to box President Trump in, so he can’t implement the campaign promises he made? Zepp-LaRouche asserted that “the whole question of the future of mankind, as I have said many times, depends on the most important countries having better relations: that is the United States, China, and Russia. And the best thing for all these petty and nasty attacks to be outflanked, would be a quick meeting between Trump and Putin, because I’m absolutely convinced that these are two people, despite all the criticism one can have of the one or the other … that have proven many times that they have better instincts. Without Putin’s intervention in Syria, we would still have a total madhouse, and possibly a situation in Libya where terrorists would be completely in command; so Putin has proven he can strategically outflank a seemingly hopeless situation.”
The enemy of mankind, Zepp-LaRouche affirmed, has “never been so exposed.” Ordinary people have lost any sense of trust in government and national institutions, but “in such a moment, when people realize who are the war-mongers, and that they’re pushing war against Russia using lies, I think this can completely backfire and once these lies are dismantled and ostracized, and the people pushing the lies are ostracized, I think there can be a real return to an international relation among nations, not only reviving the UN Charter, reviving international law, but also, I think sometimes you need a shock like this present experience, to move to a New Paradigm of international relations. And I think that is absolutely something on the horizon.
“I think the universe is made in such a way that there is this tremendous ability to improve, to become better, to have higher forms of existence. And it does require the individual action—it’s not a dialectical materialism, or historical materialism, which goes by itself—but there is such a thing as the combination of objective conditions and subjective intervention. And the objective conditions do exist. They exist in the form of a New Paradigm promoted by all the countries participating in the Belt and Road Initiative; and if you add to that the subjective factor, which is the courage of the world-historical individual acting on the basis of his or her knowledge, I think there is all the chances that we can move humanity into a more safe historical period.”
STRATEGIC WAR DANGER
Russian Foreign Ministry Charges British Actions Today Continue Centuries of Genocide
April 19 (EIRNS)—“Get ready,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman and top diplomat Maria Zakharova told journalists at her weekly briefing today. Let’s talk about state orders for mass killings; let’s talk about Great Britain’s history as one of the worst colonialist powers of all time. British diplomats seem not to be aware of their own history, and it is high time, from this very tribune, to fill that cognitive vacuum, she said.
Zakharova proceeded for the next hour to review case after case of the history of the British Empire’s mass murders, poisonings, pillaging and lies against peoples around the world, citing documentation, in some cases from Britain’s own archives, of the heinous “moral achievements” of the British Empire.
Zakharova’s two-and-a-half-hour briefing was broadcast live, with rough simultaneous translation, and is posted by Ruptly, starting at 31:24 minutes; the case against the British Empire starts at 71.53 minutes. We summarize here her presentations on key cases for the benefit of patriots in every nation in the world (including in the U.K.), who also understand that human civilization demands on eliminating British Empire once and for all.
Zakharova first took up the case of India. American historian Will Durant wrote in 1930 that Britain’s deliberate torture of India for 150 years can be considered the most horrible crime in world history, she remarked. India’s Shashi Tharoor, author of Infamous Empire, assembled documentation of that crime which Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on July 24, 2015 reflects what every patriotic Indian knows, Zakharova added. Tharoor recounts Britain’s deindustrialization and pillaging of India, including the death by starvation of 15-29 million people, 4 million in Bengal in one year alone, under one of the cruelest Prime Ministers of the 20th century, Winston Churchill. Zakharova quoted Churchill’s statement, “I hate Indians. They are beastly people with a beastly religion”; she recounted British execution of Indians by shooting them out of cannons; the infamous April 13, 1919 massacre, when 50 soldiers opened fire on unarmed civilians in the center of Amritsar, killing perhaps as many as 1,000.
Africa followed. Thirteen million people were taken from the continent as slaves, but it is known that 3-4 times as many Africans were killed, with the total victims numbering 50-52 million people.
Zakharova reminded journalists that British philosopher John Locke developed the constitution for the slave-owning Confederate States in America, and invested all his savings in slavery.
The British set up concentration camps in the Anglo-Boer War for anyone who it was thought could be sympathetic to the Boer rebels against British rule. Their homes were burned and their livestock and crops destroyed, and then the men were separated from the women and children, and shipped out of the country to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and India. When the news of the camps got out, Lord Kitchener claimed the camps were designed to provide “security” for the civilian population, and called them places of salvation, Zakharova reported.
Is this not the same as the White Helmets today, she asked? They find terrorists, call them “white helmets,” and use them for provocations “to save the population.” Many years have passed, but nothing has changed.
In Australia, the British killed 90-95% of the indigenous population during the occupation. That’s not our assessment; English occupiers were given compensation for each person killed, she stated.
She returned to Africa: In the 1870s, Britain conducted genocide against the Zulus in Cape Colony, and in 1954-1961, against the Kikuyu people in Kenya, “where in retaliation for the killing of 32 white colonists, the British authorities exterminated 300,000 members of the Kikuyu people, and drove another 1.5 million into concentration camps.”
We should remember the famous Opium Wars, where London was poisoning the Chinese people through opium.
When London is calling itself the representative of humanitarian causes, its actions against the people of the Middle East can be remembered. Just look at the map of the borders they drew, dividing people in ways that have implications to this day.
Then there are the classified documents of the British archives, on how British authorities ordered the use of chemical weapons in the spring of 1920 in Mesopotamia—Churchill, once again—and 6-10,000 of the natives in what is Iraq today were killed. Maybe that is not much for London, Zakharova said.
She cited cases involving the Greeks, the Libyans, Sudanese, Eritreans and others, before moving from straight genocide, to the British Empire’s love of spy operations and pinpoint subversive operations. James Bond films are not fiction, she pointed out; Ian Fleming was working from archival documents. British spies do have “a license to kill.”
Zakharova cited some of the known assassinations and coups run by British secret services. The admission by senior MI6 controller Baroness Daphne Park that she organized the assassination of the first elected prime minister of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba in 1961; the 1953 coup against Iran’s Mossadegh, which benefitted British oil interests; its killings in Northern Ireland; the sending of Stepan Bandera-backing fascist killers back into Ukraine in the early 1950s; etc.
Not left out of her marshalling of the facts, were the string of strange deaths of Russian and British scientists on U.K. soil between 2001 and 2014, many revolving around Porton Down, including the 2003 “suicide” of Porton Down’s David Kelly, who was a leading figure, along with Lyndon LaRouche, in exposing British intelligence’s “sexed up” lies to justify the Iraq 2003 invasion.
Lastly, Zakharova pointed to a favorite tactic of British authorities, of which Russia is currently a target, painting targets with “black advertising,” about which huge volumes have been written. It is not surprising that some people know this, Zakharova concluded. What is a surprise, is that some people do not.
UN Security Council Will See Proof that Douma Chemical Attack Was Faked
April 19 (EIRNS)—Russia television is showing a video which proves that the supposed April 7 chemical-warfare attack in Douma was faked. In it, an 11-year-old boy who featured prominently in the White Helmets video documenting the alleged attack, tells exactly what really happened, and what brought him into the hospital that day.
In this video, shown by Rossiya-1 earlier, the Syrian boy explains how he appeared in the faked chemical attack video spread by the White Helmets, and his father says that his son was given cookies and dates for his role, but that his son had been well all the time and there were “no chemical weapons at all.”
Russia’s UN Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia told Rossiya-1 TV this evening that the video has been subtitled, will be distributed to UN Security Council member-countries and journalists, and “at the forthcoming meeting of the UN Security Council we will let everybody see it on the big screen.”
The boy’s father, Omar Diab, told TASS today, “My boy had no traces that might indicate he had been harmed by chemical weapons. He looked slightly frightened but healthy. My family and myself are prepared to testify at any place around the world, be it Geneva or New York, [that] chemical weapons had not been used.”
Former Head of British Special Forces: ‘Assad Doesn’t Need To Use Gas’
April 19 (EIRNS)—Britain’s mass-circulation Daily Mail tabloid reported April 14 that former British Army Maj. Gen. Jonathan Shaw asked, “Why would Assad use chemical weapons at this time? He’s won the war.” Shaw is a former Assistant Chief of Defense Staff and was also Director of Special Forces.
“That’s not just my opinion,” Shaw stated, “it is shared by senior commanders in the U.S. military. There is no rationale behind Assad’s involvement whatsoever. He’s convinced the rebels to leave occupied areas in buses. He’s gained their territory. So why would he be bothering gassing them?
“The jihadists and the various opposition groups who’ve been fighting against Assad have much greater motivation to launch a chemical weapons attack, and make it look like Assad was responsible. Their motivation being that they want to keep the Americans involved in the war—following Trump saying the U.S. was going to leave Syria for other people to sort out.”
The Mail reports that Shaw’s views were echoed by Adm. Lord West of Spithead, Royal Navy, former First Sea Lord, who said: “If I was advising President Assad, why would I say use chemical weapons at this point? It doesn’t make any sense. But for the jihadist opposition groups I can see why they would.”
West also stated that “But one must give Theresa May the benefit of the doubt and trust she has seen some unequivocal evidence which leaves no doubt that Assad was behind the atrocity.”
Former Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi Writes, Russia Has Stabilized Syria
April 19 (EIRNS)—Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi wrote an open letter to Corriere della Sera on April 15, in which he invited the West to acknowledge that Russia’s intervention in Syria has stabilized the situation and that Moscow should be seen as a partner and not as an enemy.
Berlusconi made concrete proposals for a dialogue with Russia on Syria, which were quoted extensively by Sputnik.
“Direct involvement of Russia in Syria allowed us to avoid what happened in Libya with Qaddafi: The tragic mistakes of the West under those circumstances led to a catastrophe, with the Libyans immersed in bloody chaos, and we Italians, who have become victims of the new flows of illegal migration that our government had been able to block due to agreements with Qaddafi, are paying the price for its consequences,” Berlusconi said.
Sputnik continued that Berlusconi had “stressed that the situation in Syria proved the inaccuracy of hasty and generalized judgments: for example, not all enemies of Syrian President Bashar Assad are friends of the West and freedom.”
Berlusconi wrote that the Syrian leader had ensured a level of secularism and respect for the rights of minorities that can rarely be found in the Middle East: “That is why we cannot simplify judgments: Russia’s presence in Syria, for example, led to greater stability and peace in the country which was about to explode, while—regardless of good intentions—‘proxy wars’ and support for insurgent groups with arms supplies contributed to the strengthening of the ISIS [Daesh] and other terrorist groups associated with al-Qaeda.”
In conditions where the actions of Assad are influenced exclusively by the Russian leadership, which risks becoming the target of new restrictive measures imposed by the West, the new Italian government, based on the experience of the 2002 agreements between NATO and the Russian Federation at Pratica di Mare 15 years ago, should assume the role of mediator in relations between the West and Russia, Berlusconi stressed.
Western countries should consider Moscow as a strategic partner, not an enemy, Berlusconi emphasized.
U.S. POLITICAL & ECONOMIC
Legal Noose Tightens Around Andy McCabe’s Neck
April 19 (EIRNS)—Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz has formally asked the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C. to determine whether criminal charges should be brought against former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe for lying, “a source familiar with the matter” told various media this afternoon. By so doing, Horowitz is saying that he believes that grounds for prosecution do exist, as he laid out in the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report released April 13.
Adding to McCabe’s fury, is that his former boss and cohort in the “Get Trump” campaign, former FBI Director James Comey, is merrily throwing him under the bus, telling the media that he agrees with the OIG report, and now this afternoon saying that he might well testify against McCabe in any trial. There is no love among thieves.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg reported this afternoon that President Donald Trump was told last week by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein that he is not a target of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Here the sources are “two people familiar with the matter,” who say that White House General Counsel Don McGahn and Chief of Staff John Kelly, along with FBI general counsel Dana Boente were at the White House meeting between Trump and Rosenstein when this statement was made.
President Trump raised another hot question the Comey-McCabe FBI team has to answer, when asked by Bloomberg during his joint press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe yesterday if he had decided not to remove Mueller or Rosenstein. Trump didn’t answer that question, but tore into the whole lie of collusion with Russia, in the process raising the question: “The DNC server was never gotten by the FBI. Why didn’t the FBI take it? The FBI takes what they want. They go in; they wouldn’t get the server.”
First Project in West Virginia-China Energy $84 Billion Deal May Be Announced Soon
April 19 (EIRNS)—Some 200 people participated at a conference in Morgantown, West Virginia April 16-17, which featured a panel on “China Energy Investment Update,” addressed by the state’s Commerce Secretary H. Wood “Woody” Thrasher, and Brian J. Anderson, the Director of the Energy Institute at the University of West Virginia, which has had years of work with China on fossil fuel advanced technology. The event was the seventh such yearly gathering, titled “Marcellus and Manufacturing Development Conference,” sponsored by the manufacturing and gas associations in the state. The participants met to promote chemical manufacturing activity in the tri-state shale gas region of West Virginia, southeastern Ohio, and western Pennsylvania.
Thrasher, in the course of his presentation and Q&A, addressed the matter very much in the forefront of attention: Where does the $83.7 billion deal stand between West Virginia and the Chinese mega-firm, China Energy, that was signed last November in Beijing, at the time of Donald Trump’s “state visit-plus” with Xi Jinping.
Thrasher said, “I’m very hopeful in the very near future that we’ll be able to announce the first project.” He said that delegations from China Energy have made 15 visits to the area. A 16th visit will take place very soon.
Thrasher gave specifics of how to create an environment in the region that is favorable to chemical manufacturing. He supports establishing certain zones across the state, where such facilities can flourish. For example, they can make use of West Virginia’s many brownfield sites.
The strategic importance of China-U.S. collaboration was raised in the first question after Thrasher’s remarks, by 21st Century Science & Technology reporter Rick Sanders. He pointed out that there is a tug-of-war going on in Washington, with some people trying to start a war with Russia and a trade war with China, and this is opposed to what President Trump wants. He seeks good relations with both Russia and China.
Thrasher responded, “I’m not in charge of war and peace, but I agree with you that the issue is very delicate.”
Brian Anderson, a chemical engineer, presented the merits of developing the gas industry in the West Virginia area today. “The three-state region has the potential to build what we call the Tech Belt, not the Rust Belt.” A petrochemical industry was built in this region a century ago, and now must be recreated. Today, he said, “What we feel is we have all the required ingredients and we just have to put it in the oven.” He said that, “here we are in the 21st century, with a truly unique opportunity, to not grab what the U.S. Gulf Coast has, and bring it up here, but to create the second petrochemical hub here for the United States.”
COLLAPSING WESTERN FINANCIAL SYSTEM
Give Up Tinted Glasses and Dark Thoughts, Beijing Tells Anti-Belt and Road Neo-Cons
April 19 (EIRNS)—Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying yesterday readily dismissed the anti-Belt and Road report issued by the neo-cons of the strangely-named C4ADS think tank two days ago. The report, “Harbored Ambitions—How China’s Port Investments Are Strategically Reshaping the Indo-Pacific,” is being used to feed another barrage of anti-Belt and Road media stories. (See “Neo-Cons’ C4ADS Lies That Belt and Road Is Military Aggression,” EIR Daily Alert, April 18, 2018.)
If it’s so bad, why are over 100 countries and international organizations supporting it, she asked. It is helping “create the physical and cultural environment for interconnectivity” and global growth. “China has no geopolitical calculations, seeks no exclusionary blocs and imposes no business deals on others,” she asserted. Furthermore, it a mutually beneficial and win-win: “It is indeed a Chinese proposal for promoting global development cooperation.”
The problem, Hua concluded, lies with the authors: “To sum up, I would like to remind the relevant people who cooked up this report that if they continue looking at others as well as the world with dark thoughts and through tinted glasses, they will see everything as darkness and traps. On the contrary, if they are open and broadminded enough, they will find a sunlit world that is bright and warm.”
NEW GLOBAL ECONOMIC ORDER
Major Talks Underway among China, Japan, and the Two Koreas
April 19 (EIRNS)—While Japanese Premier Shinzo Abe was visiting President Trump in Florida, Chinese Foreign Minister and now State Councillor Wang Yi was undertaking the first Tokyo visit by a Chinese Foreign Minister in eight years over April 15-17. He met with Japan’s Premier Abe, Foreign Minister Taro Kono, Liberal Democratic Party Secretary-General Toshihiro Nikai, former Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda and other leaders. Wang also attended the first China-Japan economic talks in eight years.
Japan’s NHK broadcaster wrote April 7 that they had learned that a trilateral summit in Japan, with China and South Korea, is in the final planning stage, with a target date of May 9. The last such meeting was held three years ago. Chinese Premier Li Keqiang is expected to visit Japan to represent China at this summit, on his first trip to Japan since he became Premier five years ago. Japan Times reported April 15 that Japan wants to confer with China before the coming summit of North Korea and South Kore, and U.S. President Donald Trump’s meeting with Kim Jong-un.
China’s Global Times reported today that more than 300 politicians, scholars and business people from China, Japan and South Korea exchanged views on promoting trilateral cooperation at an international forum in Tokyo yesterday. The forum, hosted by the Trilateral Cooperation Secretariat set up by the three governments, had the theme “The Opening of a New Chapter for Trilateral Cooperation—The Past 10 years, the Coming 10 Years.”
Japan Times reported that after meeting Kono, Wang said that the Chinese side “confirmed Japan’s desire to improve its bilateral ties with China.” The two foreign ministers agreed to go forward with mutual visits by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Chinese President Xi Jinping, although no dates have been set yet.
On Korea, Global Times reported that Song Tao, head of the International Department of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, met with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang on April 14. There are rumors that this visit was in preparation for a visit by Xi Jinping to North Korea.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in let it be known today that North Korea does not consider the withdrawal of all U.S. troops to be a precondition for denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. A hotline between the two Korean leaders is to become operational tomorrow.
