Harley Schlanger (@HarleySchlanger) of @LaRoucheOrg exposes the British imperial strategy behind the Southwest Asian crisis. For generations, British networks cultivated competing Zionist and Wahhabi movements to serve their geopolitical ambitions. As the Ottoman Empire collapsed, London maneuvered to install client states and secure the crossroads linking Europe, Asia, and Africa. The legacy of that manipulation continues to fuel conflict and obstruct a durable peace. “Now then, look at Southwest Asia, which is very interesting right now. Dangerous, incredibly dangerous. But what you can see is very clearly the origin of the conflict in two completely different strains of not even religious belief, but things connected to religion. That is Zionism and Wahhabism. These two movements, from the beginning, have been at the center of the crisis in Southwest Asia, deliberately put in there by the British Empire. Now, in terms of the Israeli side, you have the Oxford movement of Christian Zionism, which was created among a certain segment of British establishment going back to the Puritans: the belief that the ingathering of the Jews in the Holy Land is what will bring back the Messiah. And other kinds of what are called pre-millennial dispensation cult beliefs. But it essentially assigns to the Jewish people the responsibility to claim the land and to fight for it to bring on the Battle of Armageddon. And this, in particular in the 1830s, was associated with a figure named Lord Shaftesbury, who constantly tried to put pressure on Lord Palmerston to have Jewish refugees sent to Palestine on behalf of the interests of the British Empire. And this later included, besides Palmerston, Lord Balfour, who drafted the Balfour Declaration, who worked with Lord Rothschild, who had a connection to the official Zionist movement. And then, after World War I, when the British had the mandate from the League of Nations to settle the situation in the Middle East, you had a series of British military leaders, including Orde Wingate, who were involved in training the Zionist forces, the Haganah, to fight a war of independence. So you have a clear line from the British side through Jabotinsky, even through Ben-Gurion and the more liberal social democratic networks of the Zionists, to use Israel as an extension of British foreign policy as the Ottoman Empire was collapsing. And that was the key issue. What’s going to replace the Ottomans? Because this is an area, Southwest Asia, of immense importance in terms of the crossroads connecting Europe, Asia, Eurasia, and Africa. That’s why they were so concerned with it. That’s why the Zionist movement was given the go-ahead to create a state in the Middle East, even though, at the time that the Balfour Declaration was drafted, there were 10 times the number of Arab and Christians and Muslims living in Palestine than there were Jews. So this was a project that would take oppressed Jewish populations from Eastern Europe, move them into Palestine, and if you actually look at the figures, you’ll see that most of the Jews who were facing persecution in Eastern Europe and Russia went to the United States. That’s where they wanted to go. They didn’t want to go to Palestine. So there was an arbitrary creation of a so-called Jewish state that was run largely by the British and through what we would call today the Epstein-connected networks of British intelligence. Now, what about the Arab side? This is really interesting. I hadn’t put this together in the same way until just the last couple of days. But this goes back to the House of Saud: in 1744, there was a pact signed between Muhammad ibn Saud, who was the head of the Saudi tribe, and Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, a Sufi mystic, who created the branch of Islam called Wahhabism, which is a fundamentalist variety which has a lot of what Westerners don’t like about Islam, the Sharia law and so on. But what happened is that this was consolidated as a fighting force over the next couple of centuries. And a key moment in this was World War I with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. What’s going to replace the Ottoman Empire? And here’s where you see the British, on the one hand, the Balfour Declaration of 1917, working to create a so-called Jewish state, and at the same time working with the Arabs, a commitment to some kind of Arab Muslim state, which eventually became Saudi Arabia. Now, there were two different forces fighting over who would do this. On the one side, you had a grouping in the British Arab Bureau in Cairo, who chose as their leader for this revolt Hussein ibn Ali, the Sharif of Mecca, and he was a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. He had the responsibility for guarding the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. But he had a weakness: a family that was not as militantly committed to the task as the British wanted. He was brought in through Henry McMahon of the Arab Bureau to run the Arab Revolt of 1916 against the Ottomans. But this ran out of steam by 1924. At that point, Hussein bin Ali abdicated, and in return two of his children were made king of Iraq and king of Transjordan. This was part of the British manipulation from the Sykes-Picot Agreement of creating these mini states. Now, at the same time, you had another grouping in the British Foreign Office that had a different idea. They wanted to bring in the Saud family as the rulers of the Arabian Peninsula. And the person who was deployed to coordinate this was a man named Harry St. John Philby. He is perhaps more famous because of his son, the World War II-era triple agent Kim Philby, who was involved in passing on secrets during the war between the Americans and the British. Kim Philby was based in Washington, sending war plans to the Soviet Union. He later defected and lived in the Soviet Union as a hero. But his father, St. John Philby, was deployed to Baghdad and, from Baghdad, was in charge of finance for the British operations in the Middle East. He then became revenue commissioner of the British-occupied territories and, in November 1917, the head of the mission to coordinate with Ibn Saud. So you had, on the one hand, the Arab Bureau in Cairo, which had among its operatives the famous Lawrence of Arabia, who was working with the Hussein family. And on the other side, you had Philby working with the Saudi family. And what eventually happened was that Sharif Hussein abdicated in 1924, and the Saudi family consolidated control of the Arabian Peninsula, and they’ve been there since. And they are corrupt. They are extremely wealthy. And they are now in the crosshairs of this revolt from Yemen by the Ansar Allah, the so-called Houthis, who are out to bring them down. And you have warnings coming from key US intelligence figures that we should be a little careful about putting too much into the alliance with the Saudi family because it may not survive. And so you have these various strands of British intelligence: the Saudi dynasty, now largely run by Mohammed bin Salman and the Zionist faction around Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, who are pushing for ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians to ensure that there will be a continued Zionist state in Israel. And this is why Lyndon LaRouche said all roads lead to London. You’re not going to get a peace agreement unless you address the insanity of this kind of arrangement. And there’ll be more material coming out on this in the @execintelreview, and also there’ll be a discussion of the prospects for overcoming these war policies which represent the interests of an empire which is collapsing.” This is why Lyndon LaRouche said all roads lead to London. There is no peace agreement without confronting the arrangement itself. Lasting peace requires breaking with British-centered geopolitical manipulation and establishing a new international security and economic architecture based on the sovereign development of nations and their mutual interests.

Mattias Desmet (@DesmetMattias), Belgian professor of clinical psychology and author of The Psychology of Totalitarianism, analyzes how propaganda becomes effective once loneliness and free-floating anxiety have prepared a population to accept it. He argues that the rapid shift from the COVID narrative to the Ukraine war demonstrates the mechanism of mass formation, and that only a minority willing to keep speaking out can prevent the process from reaching its most destructive stage. “I do believe that modern democracy actually from the beginning was a state system where propaganda was the organizing principle. Modern geopolitical leaders have a huge machinery at their disposal, like the internet, to manipulate public opinion. That’s one important aspect of propaganda. But there is a second one. You need a population who buys into it, and to do that you need a lonely population. The Corona narrative was dominant at the psychological level in Western culture. Then suddenly the war in Ukraine started, and almost overnight you could see how the Corona narrative lost its power at the beginning of 2022. The Ukraine narrative, which in many respects I do believe was as absurd as the corona narrative, replaced that function. People found a new object of anxiety, and all the anxiety, frustration, and aggression switched from the corona virus to Putin. In the same way, we could see that first people were willing to self-sacrifice to fight the corona virus, and then in the same strange way they were willing to self-sacrifice to fight Putin. There is always a group of people, usually small, which is resilient to it and doesn’t fall prey to the mass formation. There are always three groups. You have one group who is really in a hypnotic stage, hypnotized by the mass formation. That’s about 30% usually. That’s the really totalitarian group—the group who really believes and blindly buys into the narrative. Then there is a very large second group, 50–60% of the people, who know that there is something wrong with the narrative but who will remain silent because they want to choose the easy way. And then there is a very small group of people, between 1% and 10%, who see that there is something wrong with the mainstream narrative and who choose to speak out, who refuse to remain silent. Gustav Le Bon remarked something very important. He said that when a mass formation emerges, there is always a group of people who try to speak out and who try to wake up the masses. They will usually be very disappointed, because they will see that the people don’t want to wake up, that they want to continue to buy into the narrative, and that they even become very aggressive against those who speak out. He mentioned this already in his seminal work The Psychology of the Crowd, but he also notes that this group of people, even when it doesn’t succeed in waking up the masses, nevertheless has a very important effect. When these people continue to speak out, the mass formation usually will not go deeper, and it will not go to the last stage where the masses start to destroy everyone who doesn’t go along with them. When this group chooses to continue to speak out, no matter whether the masses wake up or not, the mass formation usually won’t go to the ultimate and destructive phase.” The danger is not only propaganda from above, but a population conditioned to accept it. The duty of those who recognize the manipulation is to keep speaking out, even when the majority refuses to listen.

Dr. Ulrike Guérot (@ulrikeguerot) argues that Europe’s emancipation project was deliberately blocked. U.S. interference after 2004, the Maidan operation, and the refusal of a Eurasian orientation left the continent without strategic capacity. What remains is an oligarchic system that stabilizes itself through war, austerity, and the suppression of dissent, while pretending moral superiority it no longer possesses. “So, the Americans basically went to Iraq and then divided Europe. The BRICS countries were founded in 2009. You see the moment of 2011 to 2014 as a moment when Germany wanted to drop Europe but go east, go BRICS, but then was cut off from doing so. I can tell you, out of the EU Commission, that in these years, 2012-13, you would say I’m doing a conference with the Chinese and Russians, and so the Commission would say no money for this. There was clear interference in doing so. And then came Maidan. In which the Americans interfered in a way that Maidan was the glue to keep Europe west. To basically keep it west and to make it align in this anti-Russian spin. So the geopolitics and the geoeconomics were to keep Germany and keep Europe away from going with China, going with the BRICS, going with Russia, building the pipeline. I think Europe is in the worst condition today because, whatever you say about the US or China or Russia or Iran or India, at least they have somehow functioning states. So the only way we have is to pretend that we are the best. That’s still what we are doing. And because we are the best, all the others are evil. So the Chinese are evil, and our competitors now and Russia’s anyway evil and the US starts to be evil, and Iran is anyway evil. So we are the good, and the others are evil, which is a very, very non-intelligent position to take. We are the liberal democracies; we are Atlanticists, a huge consensus, and this consensus is now really breaking up. It’s breaking up with respect to Israel; you know why. It’s breaking up because the US is now drawing the red line and basically dividing Europe, trying to divide Europe. It’s breaking up with respect to Russia; are the Russians really evil? It’s breaking up with respect to China because the Chinese are basically lifting two-thirds of their population out of poverty and have the best car industry now. You can’t basically say that the Chinese are not running a good societal model. And in that respect, Europe is totally lost, and it’s not only lost geo-strategically and socially and economically, but also in mindset. Because the EU doesn’t function. I showed you Thomas Fasi’s book. The structures are totally flawed. No democracy, no participation of citizens. The EU is totally incapable of doing the real things, meaning peace in Ukraine and the big things. We can’t even build trains from Copenhagen to Rome or from Paris to Budapest, so we can not lift the economic potential. We need to accept that the system of the EU now is so flawed and there is so much resentment against the EU that, with this system, there’s just one chance to stabilize it, and that is violence and authoritarianism. And that is what is happening. What we are seeing — these oligarchic policies and this warmongering — basically means stabilizing a system that is now fueled by resentment and has no more consent among citizens. Essentially, most of the European countries now have an oligarchic structure, essentially in four industry pillars. One is armaments, the second is pharmaceuticals, the third is the digital complex, and the fourth is energy. And these are structures in which state money is spent for state goals like climate protection and energy. We need the mint bills or the corona vaccine; we do need to spend state money for the vaccine or armaments. Putin is Hitler, so we need to spend money on armaments or the whole digital complex, digital violations, so we need to spend money on the digital complex, and this is no more competition. This is basically state money flowing to big sections of industry and to organize this because, in a way, it’s protofascism. In the definition of Mussolini, if you have corporate structures where you have a merger and a fusion between the state and the economy, and the state fuels the economy without competition, then it’s no longer a market economy. So it’s basically protofascism in the definition of Mussolini. Freedom is gone in Europe. Dissident voices are gone, which they are, because they are put on EU sanctions lists. And the problem is that if this should stabilize and I’m fearful that it will — because it’s not only state money from Italy, France, and so on and so forth, but it’s also EU money on top of it that stabilizes all these oligarchic structures — then there’s no escape. Every citizen in Europe needs to earn a salary, has a husband, has a wife to feed, or kids, or whatever, so if you’re a school teacher, you can’t sneak out; if you’re a professor, you can’t sneak out. So the control features are very sublimated and go to the churches, go to the trade unions and go to every sort of civil society part and if you’re not sort of behaving in terms of war with Putin, Corona, digital, whatever climate, because these discourses are now institutionalized also in schools. And so there is no escape for citizens in terms of freedom and freedom of speech, which is a huge problem in Europe now across the European Union. And this is why there’s no quick fix. I’m not standing here to say there’s a quick fix for Europe. I guess Europe is lost at least for the next 20 years. That the only way is to blame Putin, escalation into nuclear war. Then there’s destruction, and then at least I am not guilty. I’m fearful about the future of Europe. I’m most fearful about this nihilism which is sort of sneaking into society. Thank you for listening.” The EU’s technocratic project has collapsed into oligarchy and moral pretension. A viable Europe requires a republican reconstruction oriented toward Eurasian cooperation rather than permanent vassalage and war.