Zepp-LaRouche, Schiller Institute’s founder and international president, held this speech at the successful diplomatic seminar in Copenhagen on December 11, 2025.
The diplomatic seminar was attended by 14 diplomats from 10 countries, with guest speakers H.E. Ambassador Prof. Dr. Manuel Hassassian and Helga Zepp-LaRouche, who travelled to Copenhagen from Germany. The title was “Can There Finally Be Peace Through Development Between an Independent Palestine, Israel and the Region? Build the Oasis Plan Now!”
The countries in attendance comprised six from Southwest Asia, one from Western Europe, one from Eastern Europe, one from Africa, and one from Asia. Five other countries had registered but were unable to attend. A few Schiller Institute supporters were also in attendance.
Ambassador Hassassian delivered a one-hour speech with his insightful analysis of the obstacles and prospects for peace, and a wonderful conceptual description of the Oasis Plan, which he fully supports. He answered two questions from Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the first about the new U.S. national security report implications for the conflict in Southwest Asia, and the second, in which she thanked the Ambassador for his support for the Oasis Plan, and said that the next step should be for a government to sponsor a conference to elaborate the plan, including students making AI animations to visualize it. Ambassador Hassassian also answered questions from two diplomats.
Zepp-LaRouche denounced the ongoing genocide in Palestine and described the Oasis Plan in more detail, in connection with the World Land-Bridge. She then gave a briefing based on her new document, “Withdraw from NATO! New National Security Strategy Requires New Security Architecture,” calling for a Westphalian peace process. She answered two questions from a Schiller Institute organizer, about the need for a new cultural renaissance, and about using Nicholas of Cusa’s method of conflict resolution in our time.
Speakers: H.E. Prof. Dr. Manuel Hassassian, the Palestinian Authority’s ambassador to Denmark, who is shortly retiring from his post in Denmark, will present his parting evaluation about the prospects and obstacles for peace and Palestinian independence. He is a supporter of the Schiller Institute’s Oasis Plan for peace through development. H.E. Prof. Dr. Manuel Hassassian has “a PhD in comparative politics and has over 25 years of academic experience, including as executive vice president at Bethlehem University. Prior to his current role, he served as the Palestinian Ambassador to the United Kingdom from 2005 to 2018. Professor Hassassian is a dedicated advocate for Palestinian rights and has been actively involved in international dialogues promoting peace in the Middle East.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder and international president of the Schiller Institute and editor-in-chief of Executive Intelligence Review (via live video). Helga Zepp-LaRouche founded the Schiller Institute in 1984. She was married to Lyndon LaRouche (1922-2019) who, in 1975, proposed an Oasis Plan for peace through development between Israel and Palestine and the region. Since November 2022, she has been promoting the establishment of a New International Security and Development Architecture, and she initiated the International Peace Coalition in 2023.
Excerpt from the invitation:
The peace plan signed on October 9, 2025 was an inflection point in the long conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and the Southwest Asia region as a whole. The living Israeli hostages and hundreds of Palestinian prisoners were released from captivity. A cease-fire was agreed upon, yet the killing in Gaza continues, albeit at a lower level. The demolition of structures continues. Humanitarian aid is constricted. Israeli settler violence escalates on the West Bank. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu continues to say that he will not allow an independent Palestinian state to be established. Many parts of the peace plan are undefined or disputed. The question is, how can the international community act to ensure that a genuine peace is achieved? One thing is to increase support for the independence of Palestine. But another crucial element is the need to promote the idea of “peace through development.” In 1975, Lyndon LaRouche (1922-2019), the American economist and statesman proposed an Oasis Plan – an ambitious infrastructure project to produce massive amounts of fresh water in the region, to increase economic productivity and to provide a vision of win-win cooperation between Israel and Palestine, and the region – to pave a pathway to peace. As LaRouche emphasized after the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, the shovels have to hit the ground. That time, it did not happen. Can it happen now?
- The Oasis Plan — LaRouche’s Solution for the Middle East
- Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s Ten Principles for a New Security and Development Architecture
- Endorse Zepp-LaRouche’s Call to Withdraw from NATO & create a New Security Architecture
- Join the weekly meetings of the International Peace Coalition
Transcript
Moderator Tom Gillesberg, President, the Schiller Institute in Denmark: Helga Zepp-LaRouche over the last half decade has been engaged in so many projects of peace and development and creating prosperity for the world. But as she also said, as of late, she has also been the initiator and the driving force in the International Peace Coalition, which for more than two years, has been bringing together peace movements, and and other persons and groups from around the world to bring them into a discussion by saying, if you want to create peace, no matter where you are right now, we all have to work together because the challenges that stand in front of us right now are of a scale that we actually need to get everybody to collaborate. Very important for the discussions we just had is that she has been proposing ten points for a new security and development architecture for the world. How do you get this shared security for the world? You are not going to get it by leaving it to the European leadership right now, or leaving it to Donald Trump right now. You really need a leap in, what Ambassador Hassassian would say, powers of imaginations. And Helga definitely has that, and has put forward her points. So we are very, very happy that [you will speak to us.]
Helga Zepp-LaRouche: Let me ask a question. Who knows about the Oasis Plan? Are you familiar with it, or should I go through the basics?
Gillesberg: Maybe the basics.
Zepp-LaRouche: Okay, so I will. Given the fact that my presentation would be longer, I have to cut it now to a certain size [because of time constraints].
So as the ambassador said, the plight of the Palestinians right now is enormous. The ceasefire is not holding. Gaza is practically divided into three zones, a green zone, which is Israeli occupied, a yellow zone, which is where the border, so-called division line goes, and the red zone, which is supposed to be permanently rubble. It’s being dismissed as — because there are altogether, I think, 68 million tons of debris. This debris is, you know, many, bombs which did not explode, other missiles, things which are still war material and about 10,000 dead bodies under this debris. So it’s a unbelievable. And people are living in tents now. The winter is coming. The rain has been very heavy. So people are wet, have nothing to eat. They have no perspective. So I just think it’s very important that we in discussing all of that, do not forget that every day still children are dying. The malnutrition of children is enormous. Babies are born weighing less than a kilogram. Their life expectancy looks very bad as a result. So, you know, I just wanted to reemphasize – – I cannot go through a lengthy description of it – – but I think it is important, because it is completely intolerable that this situation continues despite the fact that there is a so-called peace plan. Just yesterday, Hassan Badran, who is Hamas official, basically said that there is no progress in the peace plan. I spare you the details of that.
Let me go through what our proposal is. When when I’m now talking about it, you have to have in mind where we are now, which is genocide, which is unbelievable humanitarian catastrophe. But if you don’t start with a vision, as the ambassador was, was saying, there is no way how you will get from that horrible condition to a better future. And therefore, let me start with the first picture. This is the the basic project. This is the idea – – This region actually, it’s not exactly visible here, but it’s all desert. I don’t know you. You all are from that region. But I have flown once from Khartoum to Jordan, to Jordan. And this is a 3.5 hour flight, three half hours over desert, desert, desert. So the idea basically is that, we have to create plenty new fresh water. So the idea is to make a canal. To take the second picture to create two canals, one to connect the Red sea and the Dead Sea, and another one to connect to the Mediterranean.
Now, because the the Dead Sea is 400 meter below sea. So therefore you can basically use the ocean water being pumped into this region or flowing into this region also for hydropower. Basically the the idea is to not only use existing fuel capacities like the oil and similar gas which is available in front of Gaza, but to build as quickly as possible small nuclear power plants. The fourth generation is inherently safe. You can use the the pebble bed reactor, the high temperature gas cooled reactor. These are all being in process already in China. Some of them were originally developed in Germany, but because Germany is so green, they were never put in there. But now China is having all of these reactors. Russia is building these reactors, as a mass production. That’s the idea for export to the countries of the global South, and then use this electricity to have large quantities of desalination of ocean water. And through some man made rivers, you can then distribute this water throughout the whole region, connecting it with other water resources like aquifers, like ionization of the atmosphere, which creates new rain patterns. I mean, this is a whole project which eventually should encompass the entire region from India to the Mediterranean, from the Caucasus to the Gulf.
So, this region, in the past, was a hub, in the times of the ancient Silk Road. This was a flourishing region. Damascus, for example, was a marvelous cultural high point. Baghdad, at a certain point, was the most developed city in the world. They had the most librarians, the most books of anybody in the Abbasid dynasty. Europe recaptured its own roots through the collaboration between Harun al-Rashid and Charlemagne. So this is a very rich history. We are not starting from scratch. The possibility to build that, it would be very easy to do. Technologically it’s a piece of cake. We had conferences on the Oasis plan with participation of Chinese scholars, among others, Professor Zhang Weiwei, who said, ‘yeah, China could do that. We have greened the desert in Xinjiang.’ And also in the northeast of China, there was a huge desert, which has been completely changed — it’s the size of a territory of Germany — where there is now forests, orchids, tourism. So the Chinese have the technological ability to do that. And as you know, the Chinese are doing everything very fast. If you go to the Germans these days, it takes a long time. But if you go to the Chinese, they build everything in half a year and it’s ready to go.
[Next slide] This is the nuclear power plants along the canals. [Next] This is how it will look like later on with the new man made rivers, which you can direct then in many directions. [Next] The reason why this is now eminently possible is because there is a huge change going on in the world. That is a plan we have developed, in 2014, when XI Jinping put the New Silk Road on the table in Kazakhstan. We published all our development studies, all over the world. We had worked on Africa plan, 40 year plan with India. Plan with Lopez Portillo for the integration of Latin America. A plan for the Pacific Basin. The next 50 years. When the wall came down [in Germany – edit], we developed the Eurasian Land Bridge as a proposal, as the economic basis for a peace order for the 21st century. So when XI Jinping announced the Silk Road as a Chinese policy, we updated all our plans. We put it in one book. You can find it at the book table. And this book was published immediately into Chinese, Arab, French, German and Korean. And it has been sent to 1000 universities and think tanks in China from the Zhongyang Finance Institute. They said this is the standard book for every scholar who wants to deal with the Silk Road, because it’s the most developed conception.
So many parts of this are being built already through the Belt and Road Initiative. China has made many projects. For example, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor or the railroad from Kunming to Laos, the fast train from Jakarta to Bandung, many projects in Africa. The Great Ethiopia Renaissance Dam (GERD) has just been opened in September. This is now producing electricity for all of Ethiopia. But also a neighbor countries. So anyway, so this is the context.
Now on the political side, we are experiencing right now, a complete earthquake. Because with the publication of the new security strategy paper of the United States, there is a revolution. You know, this paper has interesting parts, bad parts, good parts, but it has completely upturned the apple cart, so to speak. The bad part is for sure that they are now putting a lot of emphasis on the Western Hemisphere. There is a threat of an invasion in Venezuela going on right now as we speak. But the good part for sure is that Trump wants to normalize relations with Russia, and the Russians are taking this very serious. They’re not naive, but they say that they have, basically very good discussions between Witkoff and Kirill Dmitriev. They just published the recent round went very well. So this is hopefully getting the Ukraine crisis under control. Naturally, I mentioned already that the Middle East is supposed to have less emphasis. The relationship with China is moved away from the coming war with China to more, the fight with the competitor, economic competitor, China.
How that plays out in the Indo-Pacific is not yet completely clear, but it is definitely a complete change to all previous security doctrines of the previous administrations, Biden and Obama and Clinton and so forth. So this has caused a complete upset in Europe because in the paper, it’s very harsh on criticism of Europe. It says that if Europe does not change, it will face civilizational erasure. Now that is a pretty strong language. It says Europe should watch out that in 20 years it’s still there, more or less. The reason given is implied that it’s the migration. Now, I have said similar things that if Europe doesn’t change, we will basically become marginal in history, but not because of migration, because of wrong economic policies and wrong cultural policies. But I have said something going in a similar direction. So now there is a huge freakout in Europe. Some of the strongest pro-Atlanticist politicians, they say we no longer can talk about the United States as an ally. There are even people who say that the United States is now becoming an enemy. I mean, it’s a complete freak out. I mean, I can only emphasize I have never seen something like that. So obviously this means a lot of changes.
The coalition of the willing, that is Germany, France, Great Britain and Poland and, you know, Baltic Chihuahuas, as Pepe Escobar always says. They want to continue the war in Ukraine. But everybody knows the Europeans without the United States don’t have the military means to do that. And they don’t have the economic means either. So how that plays out remains to be seen.
But, if you look at the world as a whole, you have the Middle East horror show, you know, with Gaza, what I just said, you have the Ukraine war, which means in any case, you know, the country is destroyed, the population is halved. It’s a terrible situation. You have now the danger of an escalation between Japan and China because of the new prime Minister Takaichi, making these provocative remarks on Taiwan. You have a pending invasion in Venezuela. So looking at this picture as a whole, and you have right now elements who want to increase the offensive mode of NATO. In the first week of December, the present head of the military commission of NATO, Italian Admiral Tarragona [UNCLEAR], he said that NATO should make a preventive attack against Russia. And, it turns out this interview was given already in mid November but published only beginning of December. And the spokeswoman of the Russian government, Maria Zakharova, in my view, correctly said this was an attempt to sabotage the negotiations around Ukraine by just creating another havoc.
So I, I at that point said, look, since the beginning of the special military operation in February 2022, I already had called for a new security and development architecture, which must put the whole world on a completely different basis, because it’s very clear the neoliberal order is not functioning. The effort to establish an unipolar world after the end of the Cold War did not function. It caused a tremendous blowback because it caused the countries of the global South to basically say, now they have to end colonialism and become the producer of their own value chain in their own country. So they have formed the BRICs with Russia, China, Brazil, India, South Africa, which is now 20 countries, and many more want to be part. There is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and these organizations want to build a new economic system with an own credit system, their own investment possibilities for development.
So the world is breaking apart. And that is why I say we need a new security and development architecture, which this time must take into account the interests of every single country on the planet, or it will not work. So therefore, you know, I basically issued a statement, three or four days ago calling for the exit from NATO because, you know, Germany is in a NATO alliance, which if it ever comes to war, there will be nothing left of Germany. Germany will be erased. We had a conference with Ted Postol, who is an eminent rocket and nuclear scientist who produced maps of where the nuclear bombs would fall in Germany if it comes to war. And it makes very clear that there would be nobody left, not one living person in Germany. So if Germany is in a military alliance, which in the worst case does not allow the survival of this country, obviously we are in the wrong military alliance. And, the character of NATO has clearly changed. You know, I mean, one can argue all kinds of things about NATO in the time of the Cold War. But, from NATO, which was relatively defensive in the 80s, it has transformed into an organization whose function obviously is to protect the progress of the unipolar world. It has expansion plans for the Pacific, global NATO, which is only aimed to contain Russia and China, and therefore, it’s not a North Atlantic alliance, but it has other ambitions. So therefore I said, why don’t we dissolve NATO? It should have been dissolved in ’91 when the Warsaw Pact was dissolved. And let’s replace it with a new security and development architecture, which, you know, must really be global because otherwise it does not function. The Peace of Westphalia worked because it recognized the interest of the other, of every other. And it led to peace.
When the Versailles Conference took place, or the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, they did not invite Russia, the Soviet Union. They did not invite China. And therefore, you know, it was the stepping stone to the Second World War. So what I have proposed is, from a European standpoint, you know, based on the tradition of the Peace of Westphalia, which ended 150 years of religious war, because people realized that if they would continue the war, nobody would be left alive to survive and enjoy the victory. Now, a very similar proposal has been made by President XI Jinping, who has in the recent years made four global initiatives: the global Security, global development, Global civilizational and global governance initiative, where the last one, the Global Governance Initiative, is exactly the same idea that you need a new security architecture where every country participates in. And every country, if it’s big or small, powerful or not, have one voice, that there is no right to interfere in the affairs, in the internal affairs of the other country. There is no way how you can force a country to adopt a different social system than that, based on its own choice and tradition. So it ends the idea of export, of human rights, democracy, and all of this, which has been the trademark of the European policy.
So therefore, you know,President XI Jinping has proposed the Global Governance Initiative. President Putin several times proposed a Eurasian new security architecture. They just two days ago had in the Valdai Club conference on that topic. So they mean it very serious to have a new security architecture. He has not spoken what should happen with the United States or other parts of the world. And I think it has to include everybody because otherwise it does not function.
Now, obviously, this is also urgently needed for another reason, and that is that we are sitting on a time bomb. The time bomb being the threat of a new systemic financial collapse, much worse than that of 2008, because in 2008 we already had a systemic collapse. At that time, the root causes were not eliminated, but it was just, quantitative easing by the central banks flooding the problem just by, you know, inventing liquidity without any limitation. And that naturally comes to an end because it borders hyperinflation if you do that. And now the central banks are practically left without any remedy, and the amount of money in the system has increased by a factor of magnitude of several magnitudes. So we are sitting on a unpayable bubble of 2 quadrillion outstanding derivatives and other speculative assets, cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, things which have no value and are just added bubbles to this gigantic everything bubble. And if this bubble collapses and it could collapse through a whole variety of reasons, it could be a bankruptcy, a chain reaction.It could be the insolvency of emerging markets. It could be when the Europeans are stealing the Russian assets in Belgium and other countries of several hundred billion dollars, where Russia already has announced that they would answer that with equal countermeasures. This could blow up the whole system. So we are sitting on a powder keg of landmines, you know, where there are thousands of such mines and one doesn’t know which one will be the one which will explode. But if this would happen, it would lead to a total, total collapse of the financial system and the economy, industry, agriculture.
So the only way to approach that would be to do what my late husband, Lyndon LaRouche, already anticipated, which would happen in 1971, where he predicted that the replacement of fixed exchange rates through floating exchange rates by President Nixon would lead to a systemic collapse. And that’s exactly where we are at. And what one would need to do is what Franklin D Roosevelt did with the Glass-Steagall Banking Separation Act in 1933. That is that you have to take control over the financial system through government actions. You have to protect the commercial banks, because these are the banks who give credit to industry, to agriculture, to trade. However, the investment banks and everything which has to do with speculation has to be separated out. They have to see if they can bring their books in order without government money, without taxpayer money. And if they don’t are not able to do that, they have to close down and declare insolvency.
But this system where you permanently take money from the taxpayers to finance the speculative gains of the billionaires, that has to stop, because this system has led to a situation where the class of billionaires is growing. You know, you have now thousands of billionaires, and you have some of them who want to become trillionaires like Elon Musk, Bill gates, they all want to now reach trillions. I think this is actually obscene. That one person should have a trillion or several trillion dollars or euros, while the majority of the people are getting poorer and poorer and poorer. So we need to have a global Glass-Steagall. That is, every country has to do that, and preferably they should do it in consultation and coordination. Because if only one country does it and the other ones are sitting there with their positions not covered, it could have an incredible disruptive effect. So therefore, you know, there must be a recognition that this is a problem we only can solve together. And for that, a Peace of Westphalia kind of approach where you first agree on principle; to move away from confrontation to cooperation, to use diplomacy and negotiations to resolve all conflicts and to respect the interest of the other. So if you agree on these principles, then you can do exactly what they did in the Peace of Westphalia negotiations, where in Münster and Osnabrück they were sitting for years on tables discussing every detail, territorial disputes, you know, ethnic religious questions. And once you agree on principle that you want to solve something together, then you can find the atmosphere and the approach to solve any problem because they are all man made. They’re not, you know, not natural catastrophes. They are man made problems so men can solve it.
So that is our approach and that is why we have issued the Schiller Institute has issued this call. It’s called, stop NATO or, Withdraw from NATO. The new security strategy requires a new security and development architecture. Now, we are circulating that proposal, and I think you have it here. Oh, it’s in the package. I would like you to read it, if you agree, if you are a diplomat, you may not want to sign it, but you may know somebody who would sign it, like a professor or a government official or some other person. Because we want that proposal to be earnestly on the table. It includes such questions like the Oasis Plan. It includes, for example, when President Trump and President Putin met in Anchorage, Alaska, they met. And in the aftermath, it became very clear that one of the projects – – maybe you can show the other map where one can see the Bering Strait. This is the tunnel planned between Alaska and eastern Russia. This is only 100km, and you can build a tunnel, which then would connect the Americas through infrastructure with the Eurasian continent. It would mean that not only you could open up the far east of Siberia, where you have enormous, raw material riches which are not developed because large part of it is permafrost.
So, for the last several years, the economic forum in Vladivostok was always featuring the idea of developing the far east of Siberia, because here you find all the elements of the Mendeleev table, periodic table. So it is all the raw materials in the world where, for example, countries who have not a lot of raw materials, like Germany, like Japan, many others could be part of this investment and be part of an enormous economic boom in both Russia and China has expressed great interest as well. So if that happens, you can make back the landbridge. You can soon travel from the southern tip of Chile and Argentina with a fast train all the way up in North Latin America, Central America, United States, Canada, Alaska. Then you go through the Bering Strait tunnel. You travel through the Trans-Siberian railway. You connect to the European transport network. The Spanish government has just made a feasibility study, I think, with the German tunnel builder Herrenknecht to build the Tunnel of Gibraltar. This is also a very small strait where if you would build this tunnel, which has to be very deep, but it’s technologically not a big problem. You could then continue to travel with the same train, which you started in Chile, all the way through Africa to the Cape of Good Hope. Now go back to the Eurasian, to the world. Land-bridge.
So soon, if we come to this agreement of a new security and development architecture and development architecture, emphatically saying, these kinds of projects will be all agreed upon because it is in the mutual interest of of all sides. And you will connect all continents through either tunnels or bridges, so that basically the whole world will be infrastructurally connected. And that is, if you think about it, that is the normal path of events. Because, I mean, if you think 10,000, 20,000 years ago the only civilization was on rivers, on the ocean, and people did not go inward. Why? Because it was very difficult. You could not just go into the inner parts of the continents. Only when the railway was developed, you had transcontinental railways in the United States, in trans-Siberia. And slowly but steadily, the inner parts of the continents were opened up for development. And when we built this world system, it will connect the whole world. It will be the basis for peace. And the German economist Friedrich List, already had the vision that this would happen sometime in the future. And he said, you know, there will come a time where space and time will be shortened in such a way that the whole world will be understanding itself as a one.
And that will have an incredible impact on the identity of how people think. They will no longer think, these other people and these people, but they will understand that we are all part of the one human species where it is in our interest to work together. So I think that as a peace vision, this concept is absolutely, important. Actually Africa is right now, the most interesting continent because, you know, all the other continents have demographic negative curves. The United States, China, Latin America, they all go down. Africa is the only continent which has population growth. And by the year 2050, they will have 2.5 billion people. That means 1 billion more in 25 years. Naturally, they will all be under 25. Logically. And that means, you know, we have to build 1 billion new productive jobs in Africa to accommodate these people.
So, we have proposed, therefore, joint ventures between Africa, China and European nations. Naturally, other countries are as well. And that way we could think of transforming the African continent in a few years. If you go in basic infrastructure, ports, railways, waterways, highways, integrated energy production, communication, industrial hubs and certain game changer projects like for example, I mentioned already the GERD, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, as a perfect example because there China, Ethiopia, Italy and France were working together and this is a perfect project of what kinds of things can be done. There is now the plan we are working right now on the development plan for the Inga Dam in Congo. This will be a is actually several dams, and it will give electricity to all the countries around. Then another project is the Trans-Aqua project, which will basically industrialize 12 countries from the Congo to Lake Chad, because it’s the idea of taking 3% of the water which flows into the Atlantic and bring them from 500 kilometer heights through a system of canals to Lake Chad, where it will be used for irrigation. And you know that you can green the desert there as well. So that will be a game changer project. So that is basically how I think we should think about it, to intervene through peaceful development. So if you agree with that, then help us to distribute this call.
Moderator: We are running a little late, but maybe 1 or 2 quick questions if somebody has something.
Question: What one aspect that you have spoken about is the question of the culture and what what needs to be done to create a new renaissance of culture and how that would affect the rest of society.
Zepp-LaRouche: Well, the good news is that the renaissance of classical culture is already taking place in Asia, not in Europe, but in Asia, because the Asian countries, who all have a history, many of them 5000 years old, and they have, made a big effort. All of them. I mean, India, China, Persia, Vietnam, Thailand to actualize the knowledge about the ancient tradition in their populations, by making restoration, by digitalizing a lot of the cultural goods. So they understand that to be rooted in the best tradition of your own culture is the precondition to be oriented towards the future. Europe, unfortunately, has not done that yet. I hope that we can encourage them to do that. But I think the dialogue of cultures where every country and every civilization goes to their best tradition, and then that way you learn about the other one and vice versa. It will open people’s eyes. You know, it will be the best medicine against chauvinism, racism in all of these evils by simply showing people how beautiful the world is. Because I think the multiplicity of the different cultures is an enormous wealth, you know? And once you start knowing in depth the other culture, it opens your eyes about the limitless creativity of the human species. So I’m absolutely convinced that the cultural dialogue is an absolute important ingredient for our plan to work.
Question: And a related question. Recently you have been, expressing how important the statement by the Pope Leo the 14th about, referring to Nicholas of Cusa, of about –because the ambassador spoke about conflict resolution. Can you just say shortly, about the importance of of these ideas for the question of conflict resolution?
Zepp-LaRouche: Yes, because Nicholas of Cusa, who was an important, the most important thinker of the 15th century, at least in Europe, developed a new method of thinking, which he called the Coincidentia oppositorum, the coincidence of opposites. And that was, you know, he said that he had, when he travelled from Byzantium to Florence, in traveling over the ocean, he had a divine inspiration and all of a sudden thought, something which he recognized no human being had ever thought before. And it was a method, namely the idea that the human mind can always find the higher One, where all the contradictions on the level of the many is overcome. He discussed it from a theological standpoint that the One is naturally God, in which all contradictions are folded in which are then, let’s say, emanated through the creation, in the physical universe and on Earth. But the ability of the human mind to think that One which is of a higher magnitude and of a higher quality than the many, is a perfect conflict resolution. I have developed a habit to think that way a long time ago, because I come from Trier. And Nicholas, of course, naturally was called the [Treverensa], the person from Trier which comes from Bernkastel-Kues, which is half an hour away from Trier. And you know, I recognized something in his thinking, which, you know, you do not get stuck in contradictions. You don’t think that the progress comes from the conflict between A and B? And because A can never be B, and B never be A, and that contradiction moves things forward? No.
Nicholas of Cusa says that – – he was attacked for his writings, the Docta Ignorantia. I — the scholastic of his time, Johannes Wenck, who said Cusa is a heretic, he’s a pantheist. Cusa later discovered this writings, which he was not aware of for several years, and he wrote a little, counter paper called, In defensa Docta Ignoratiae [Apologia Doctae Ignorantiae]. And I can only advise you if you want to have a quick entry point in what he means, read that short document, because it says the Aristotelian is like the hunter and the hunted, and they’re running around and they’re searching. They don’t find each other. And while the person who looks at the world from the standpoint of the coincidentia oppositorum is like somebody who stands on a high tower and he sees from that height the search, the who searches and the process of searching. Or the hunter, the hunted, and the process of hunting. So it’s a completely different conceptualization of how you perceive what is going on around you. And I’m absolutely certain, even if it’s not easily provable, because Nicholas of Cusa was attacked by a certain faction in the church, for example, his books were put on the Index in the Council of Trent, so he was not very known for many centuries. So I cannot prove it through sources.
But from the idea content, I’m absolutely convinced that the Peace of Westphalia would not have been possible without the influence of Cusa’s thinking. And that method of the thinking, the One first, and then proceeding to look at the details, which are more tricky is a method of thinking you can apply for everything. I have done that effectively many times consciously where I said, no, I will not go that road. I will look at it from above and find a way how to solve something. I can only say I’m personally — and it’s very important. The Pope mentioned this in his sermon for the Jubilee Year, and he applied it for the present time, you know. He didn’t say – – He could have said it’s an important writings of a Cardinal of the 15th century. No, he said, he’s a very important thinker who is not yet very known, but he has found a way of bounding things together, which is very important in our troubled times. So he applied that same method of thinking to the present world situation, which is why – – We had a beautiful zoom meeting with Father Bury, who is a legendary priest. He was a he was part of the beatification of Mother Teresa. And he said that Nicholas of Cusa should be Canonized, and Lyndon LaRouche, who would have the same method of thinking, should be exonerated. So I think that is a very important idea.
See and read the first seminar speech by H.E. Ambassador Prof. Dr. Manuel Hassassian, who was the Palestinian ambassador to Denmark here.
