July 5 — Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told TASS on July 4 that there are no negotiations now and there have been no negotiations with the United States for Russian participation in an expanded G7 meeting, as proposed by President Trump in May, specifically because the proposal excludes China. He reiterated, perhaps more strongly, what Russian diplomats had said when the idea was first proposed: “The idea of the so-called expanded G7 summit is flawed, because it is unclear to us how the authors of that initiative plan to consider the Chinese factor. Without China, it is just impossible to discuss certain issues in the modern world.”
U.S. ambassador to Russia John Sullivan had told RBC TV the day before that Washington was “engaged with the Russian Foreign Ministry and with the other G7 governments about whether there is an appropriate role for Russia at the G7.”
Russia is instead working on its proposal for a summit of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, Ryabkov said. “This is a completely different format. We believe that work in that format, including on the most pressing current issues, is optimal…. We have submitted appropriate proposals to other partners in the P5, and we are waiting for their reaction.”
President Trump announced in May the U.S. proposal that the G7 meeting be expanded to include Australia, South Korea and India, in addition to Russia. According to Reuters, Australia has accepted the U.S. invitation to take part.
A detailed working-through of the latest scholarly edition of Beethoven’s stupendous Missa Solemnis (published by Bärenreiter in 2019), reveals many aspects of the work which have yet to be performed in the way Beethoven clearly specified.
One aspect of Beethoven’s specifications that has been generally ignored, is the relation of the soloists to the chorus. In the “Sanctus” movement, for example, a sloppy copyist’s error resulted in most printed scores indicating that both the opening “Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus,” and also the following Allegro “Pleni sunt coeli” section, should be sung by soloists only. Most conductors have more or less instinctively concluded that the latter “Pleni” section was obviously meant for the full chorus, yet they have left the opening to be sung by soloists only. However, the new scholarly edition’s notes clearly demonstrate that the opening “Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus” should likewise be sung by the chorus, and not soloists.
Even more revolutionary is how Beethoven deals with the soloists and chorus in the great profession of faith in the Creator and in human creativity, the “Credo.” In four of the main source manuscripts—namely in (a) Beethoven’s own working manuscript, (b) the version he presented to his benefactor Archduke Rudolph, (c) the version sent to the publishers for engraving, and (d) the subscription copy he sent to King Frederick VI of Denmark—Beethoven clearly specifies that the soloists should join with the chorus in singing all those sections that do not include separate solo parts! I.e., the soloists must sing everything in the “Credo” and must never be sitting idle as mute “specialists” while faith is being professed.
To quote from the scholarly note on page 278 of the Bärenreiter edition:
“The solo voices are marked ‘Col coro’, written across the four staves, in the first few bars in BCDE [the four aforementioned manuscripts], though not in A or M [the autograph score, and the first 1827 published edition by Schott]. In NGA [Neue Gesamtausgabe published in 2000 by Henle] the annotation is noted in the Critical Commentary but the solo voices are given rests in the main score [!]. The instruction ‘Col Coro’ must have originated with Beethoven, however, and so solo voices should be asked to join with the chorus for the relevant sections of the Credo, as indicated in the present edition, in any performance that is attempting to follow Beethoven’s instructions [emphasis added].”
The Schiller Institute NYC Chorus continues to rehearse the Missa Solemnis via Zoom during this socially-distanced Year of Beethoven, and will definitely follow Beethoven’s instructions at the earliest opportunity, in the hopes that many others will follow.
It is possible to effectively combat the coronavirus. The number of countries that have brought their number of new daily infections either to zero or very close to it continues to grow. Examples are Cambodia, China, Bahamas, Cuba, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, New Zealand, Norway, Thailand, Slovakia, Trinidad and Tobago, and Vietnam. The only number not capable of exponential growth is zero.
For too many nations, however, infections continue to grow nearly exponentially: Bangladesh, Bulgaria, India, nearly all nations in Ibero-America, Iraq, South Africa, and even Israel, which had brought its cases down almost to zero in mid-May, but which has since seen daily numbers that exceed what had been its late-March peak.
Nations that have aggressively pursued the available health measures — masks, distancing, contract tracing, and isolation / quarantine — have succeeded while those that have taken a fragmented approach face, in the words of WHO head Dr. Tedros, a “long, hard road ahead.”
While the case fatality rate is decreasing in such nations as the United States, due to a combination of younger people being infected and advances in knowledge about how to treat the disease (including the steroid dexamethasone), the question remains: is the goal to crush the virus, allowing life to return to an approximation of its pre-coronavirus status? Or is the intent simply to keep the number of cases and deaths within a range considered acceptable?
Looking a year into the future, it is clear that those societies that have taken very aggressive measures to defeat the coronavirus will be far better positioned to develop and grow than those choosing to tolerate a festering of infection and long-term, half-followed measures at prevention. Far better to deal with the disease aggressively and move on. What’s worse: wearing a mask or waiting a year for your new job to be created?
A chorus of voices answers the call from Theo Mitchell, former State Senator of South Carolina, concerning what can be done to exonerate Lyndon LaRouche and correct the injustice rampant around the world. Leaders from the International LaRouche Youth Movement addressed the June 27 Schiller Institute conference concerning the urgent requirement to recruit a new generation of leaders to think at the level of Lyndon and Helga LaRouche.
July 2 – Dr. Anthony Fauci of the NIH has recently been hammering away at what he has described as an anti-science, anti-authority problem in the American population, which has gotten in the way of taking the needed measures to contain the Covid-19 pandemic. In congressional testimony earlier this week he stated: “I think the attitude of pushing back from authority and pushing back on scientific data is very concerning. We’re in the middle of a catastrophic outbreak and we really do need to be guided by scientific principles.”
Examples abound. Take the case of a group of students in Tuscaloosa, Alabama who were just diagnosed with Covid-19 after attending “Covid parties” as part of a contest to see who can catch the virus first, a city council member told ABC News on July 1. Tuscaloosa City Councilor Sonya McKinstry said the organizers of the parties are purposely inviting guests who have Covid-19. “They put money in a pot and they try to get Covid. Whoever gets Covid first gets the pot. It makes no sense; they’re intentionally doing it.”
Nor can this be written off as “just kids.” In Rockland County, NY, so many residents have flat-out refused to cooperate with authorities on contact tracing, that the county has been forced to use subpoenas to enforce the process. NBC New York reported yesterday: “Health officials are investigating a new cluster of eight or more COVID-19 cases in Rockland County tied to a large party earlier this month, but they’re running into trouble with contact tracing because people refuse to cooperate. The county plans to resort to subpoenas, as it did during its measles outbreak some years ago, to compel people to work with contact tracers as they work to contain a new potential outbreak… That party linked to the new potential cluster was the first of three large parties in Rockland County in the last two weeks. It was hosted June 13 by someone in New City who was sick with coronavirus at the time, sources say. County officials said Wednesday that the host knew they were symptomatic and held the party anyway.”
Insight into such problems, which affect both “left-wing” radicals and “right-wing” libertarians in the country, was provided 310 years ago by Gottfried Leibniz in his {Theodicy} (1710):
“Men have been perplexed in well-nigh every age by a sophism which the ancients called the `Lazy Reason’, because it tended towards doing nothing, or at least towards being careful for nothing and only following inclination for the pleasure of the moment. For, they said, if the future is necessary, that which must happen will happen, whatever I may do…
“The false conception of necessity, being applied in practice, has given rise to what I call {Fatum Mahometanum}, fate after the Turkish fashion, because it is said of the Turks that they do not shun danger or even abandon places infected with plague, owing to their use of such reasoning as that just recorded…
“It is true that they are not inactive or negligent when obvious perils or great and manifest hopes present themselves; for they will not fail to abandon a house that is about to fall and to turn aside from a precipice they see in their path; and they will burrow in the earth to dig up a treasure half uncovered, without waiting for to finish dislodging it. But when the good or the evil is remote and uncertain and the remedy painful or little to our taste, the lazy reason seems to us to be valid. For example, when it is a question of preserving one’s health and even one’s life by good diet, people to whom one gives advise thereupon very often answer that our days are numbered and that it avails nothing to try to struggle against that which God destines for us. But these same persons run to even the most absurd remedies when the evil they had neglected draws near…
“One will employ the lazy reason, derived form the idea of inevitable fate, to relieve oneself of the need to reason properly.”
July 2 – The proper way to commemorate the upcoming July 4 anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a document of universal importance for all nations to this day, is by carrying that same spirit forward into organizing an urgent summit of world leaders around the New Deal and Good Neighbor policies of American statesman Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In her weekly webcast yesterday, Schiller Institute founder and President Helga Zepp-LaRouche picked up on British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s announcement of the adoption of FDR New Deal-style economic policies by his government, by stating:
“If, however, Boris Johnson would be serious about it [the New Deal approach], and he would immediately agree to participate in the summit called by Putin, and would insist that the New Deal in the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt is being made the subject of such a P5 summit, then it could be taken seriously and would actually be a useful contribution.”
There is little doubt that such an approach would be welcomed by Chinese President Xi Jinping, who told a Seattle business group during a visit to the U.S. in 2016: “In my younger years…I was interested in the life story and thinking of Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and other American statesmen.”
The same holds for Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose call for a new, global security architecture in his famous 2007 speech at the Munich Security Conference, was shaped around FDR’s approach after World War II: “It is well known that the field of international security goes well beyond issues of military and political stability. It involves the stability of the world economy, overcoming poverty, economic security, and the development of a dialogue among civilizations. This all-encompassing, indivisible character of security is expressed in its fundamental principle, that `the security of each is the security of all.’ As Franklin Roosevelt put it in the first days after the outbreak of the Second World War, `When peace has been broken anywhere, peace of all countries everywhere is in danger.’ These words remain topical today.”
Trump has also turned directly to FDR on numerous occasions, including in his victory speech the night of the 2016 election, stating: “The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.” President Trump’s leading participation in such an international summit would also be the perfect rejoinder to the British-led efforts to remove him from office, either now with fabricated scandals (such as the absurd Russian “bounty-gate” hoax), or by trying to defeat him in the November elections, by attempting to blame {Trump} for the economic and coronavirus pandemic crises which {the British} in fact caused by 50-plus years of their policies of economic looting.
Nor is there any doubt that the global systemic breakdown crisis makes such a summit of leaders urgently necessary, whether it be under the aegis of a Four Power meeting of the U.S., China, Russia and India, as Lyndon LaRouche long proposed, or the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, as Putin has called for — so long as the agenda is building a New Paradigm of world peace based on universal economic development.
In her webcast today, Helga Zepp LaRouche threw down a challenge to all governments, and all people. In a world dominated by crises, there is a clear choice: either the ideas which resulted in the establishment of America as a constitution republic prevail, or the chaos unleashed by the British-directed Jacobins in France will plunge the world into a Dark Age.
We see the British imperial forces at work, in the unwillingness of many to face the reality of the Coronavirus pandemic; in the latest version of Russiagate, with the {New York Slimes} attack on Putin and Trump; and in the British meddling in Hong Kong, as an escalation against China. The June 27 Schiller Institute conference presented the clear alternative to these provocations, and Russia’s President Putin’s initiative for a P-5 summit is very important, as what is needed is dialogue, not geopolitics and ideology.
We have a choice today, she said, between the American Revolution, and the French Revolution. Schiller and his allies hoped the French Revolution would replicate what happened in America. Instead, the Jacobin terror took over, creating a nightmare. For the coming commemoration of the world historic event of July 4, she urged viewers to take up the best tradition, that of the American Republic, with its commitment to the Common Good. The urgent convening of a summit of the great powers would be a good step in that direction.
Keynote speaker: Helga Zepp-LaRouche: “The Alternative to a Dark Age and a Third World War”
Dr. Jin Zhongxia, Executive Director for China, IMF; Washington, D.C., United States: “The Fundamentals of East-West Philosophic Relations”
Boris Meshchanov, Counselor, Russian Federation Mission to the UN, New York City, United States: “Russia’s Global Economic Perspective, Post COVID-19”
Dr. Joycelyn Elders, former Surgeon-General of the United States
Ding Yifan, Deputy Director, Research Institute of World Development, China Development Research Center, China: “A Chinese Perspective on a Post-COVID Paradigm”
Daisuke Kotegawa, former Executive Director for Japan at the IMF; Research Director, The Canon Institute, Japan
Mayor DeWayne Hopkins (fmr); Former Mayor, Muscatine, Iowa; The Mayor’s Muscatine-China Initiative Committee, United States: “A View from the Iowa Farm Belt: the Muscatine-China Cultural Connection”
Question and Answer session
Panel II — 1:30pm EDT
“Why a 1.5 Billion Productive Jobs Program Can End War, Famine, Poverty, and Disease”
Jacques Cheminade, President Solidarité & Progrès, France: “How Food Production Can Unite the World”
Diogène Senny, Founder of the Pan-African League: “Thrive or perish: An Introduction to the Geopolitics of Hunger and Poverty”
Walter Formento, Director, Center for Political and Economic Research, Argentina; “South America on the New Multipolar Road”
Dr. Kirk Meighoo, political economist, broadcaster, and former Senator, Trinidad & Tobago: “The Caribbean’s True Importance in the Making and Re-Making of the Modern Global Economy”
Mark Sweazy, former UAW trade union leader, United States: “Returning the U.S. Work Force to a Culture of Scientific Progress”
Robert L. Baker, Schiller Institute, United States
Mike Callicrate, Board of Directors, Organization for Competitive Markets, Owner Ranch Foods Direct, United States: “Food Unites People Around the Planet”
Alicia Díaz Brown, Citizens Movement for Water, Sonora, Mexico: “Let Us Return to the Best Moments of the U.S.–Mexico Relationship”
Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Schiller Institute, Germany: Opening Remarks
Keynote: Daniel Burke, Schiller Institute, United States: “If You Sat Where They Sit, What Would You Do?”
Carolina Domínguez Cisneros, Mexico; Sebastián Debernardi, Peru; Andrés Carpintero, Colombia; Daniel Dufreine Arévalo, Mexico: “Getting Back the Great Ideas That Were Stolen From Us”
Franklin Mireri, YouLead Partnerships Coordinator, Tanzania: “The Greatest Want of the World is for True Leaders.”
Sarah Fahim, Student from Morocco Studying in Paris, France
Chérine Sultan, Institut Schiller, Paris, France
Lissie Brobjerg, Schiller Institute, United States: “Are You a Large-Scale Geological Force?”
Areej Atef, Education Committee Vice President of BRICS Youth Parliament, Sana’a, Yemen: “Youth of the World Face Two World Systems: The Old and the New”
In reviewing the deepening civilizational crisis confronting humanity, Helga Zepp LaRouche, in her weekly webcast, kept returning to the central cause of the systemic collapse: the stupidity of those who continue to push geopolitical and neoliberal policies, long after they have failed completely. For example, take the Coronavirus pandemic. Our emphasis has been that what is required is a worldwide health “Silk Road”, as the cause of the pandemic has been the economic policies of the last forty years which have destroyed health care in much of the advanced sector, and never allowed it to be developed in the former colonial nations.
This is the same problem with the global economic collapse. According to the IMF, and several reports from economic think tanks, we are headed toward what one called an “economic apocalypse.” The only way to address this is the way the Schiller Institute will in its conference this Saturday, with a mobilization to bring the four most powerful nations together to establish a New Bretton Woods. The anti-China hysteria coming from leading governments goes in the opposite direction, typified by the anti-China photo op stunt of U.S. negotiator Billingslea — though the summit itself between Russia and the U.S. on arms control was constructive. The last third of her discussion was a thorough report on Russian President Putin’s article on the lessons of World War II. Everyone should read this, she advised, especially those who will be participating in the June 27 SI Conference, as Putin made clear that there is a way to avoid an even greater disaster than World War II, and that is by recognizing that staying in a geopolitical geometry will lead to war — therefore, nations must come together to collaborate, to solve the outstanding issues among them.
On June 24, 2020, the following statement was issued today by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Founder of the Schiller Institute.
Vladimir Putin’s detailed and very straightforward article on the background to the Second World War, which he substantiates with important historical documents, and his speech to the June 24 military parade in Red Square to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Soviet victory over fascism, are urgent must-reads for every politician and politically aware person around the world. At the same time, one should definitely watch the entire military parade, but keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of the Russian population had already read Putin’s article as they followed the parade on television.
What comes across is an approach to understanding why May 9 is the most important holiday in Russia, and that the same almost superhuman determination that enabled the Soviet population to survive the barbaric attack by the Wehrmacht and to achieve victory over Nazi Germany despite the loss of 27 million people, still exists in Russia today. But Putin also extends an olive branch to the West by calling on all countries to publish the still secret historical documents from before and during the Second World War, and to use them together with the testimonies of contemporary witnesses to launch a truth-seeking debate among historians. Reflecting on why World War II came about should cause political forces in the world today to draw the necessary lessons and rudely awaken the world to the escalating war danger so as to avoid repeating the same mistakes.
Given the gigantic destructive power of the two world wars of the 20th century and the almost certainty that mankind would not survive a third world war, this time thermonuclear,, it is useful to realize the point at which these world wars could no longer have been prevented. Putin answers this question very clearly regarding World War II by saying that it was the “Munich Betrayal” as the Russians truthfully call it—called the “Munich Pact” in the West—that triggered the war.
Putin’s article also responds to various historical misrepresentations, such as the European Parliament’s declaration of September 19, 2019, which gave equal blame to the Nazis and the Soviet Union for the Second World War, or numerous accounts that mention all the participants in the anti-Hitler coalition with the exception of the Soviet Union, or the claim that it was primarily the United States and Britain that defeated the Nazi war machine. There is no longer any public awareness in the West of the fact that the Soviet Union, in reaction to the blitzkrieg attack carried out with never before seen destructive power by the Nazis on June 22, 1941, carried out an unprecedented evacuation of people and production facilities to the east. Within a year and a half, the Soviet Union had surpassed the military production of Germany and its allies.
As quoted in the 1945 report by the International Reparations Commission headed by the Russian diplomat, Ivan Maisky, the number of soldiers deployed by Germany on the Soviet front was at least ten times greater than on all other allied fronts, four fifths of the German tanks were deployed there, and about two thirds of the German aircraft; in total the Soviet Union accounted for about 75% of all military operations. Roosevelt’s Fireside Chat presentation to the American people on April 28, 1942 is quoted: “These Russian forces have destroyed and are destroying more armed power of our enemies—troops, planes, tanks and guns—than all the other united nations put together.”
Moreover, Churchill wrote in a letter to Stalin on September 27, 1944, that “it is the Russian army that tore the guts out of the German military machine.” Putin expresses gratitude for the efforts of all the countries and peoples who fought on different fronts and the eventual support of the Allies for the Red Army through the provision of ammunition, food and equipment, that accounted for seven percent of the total military production of the Soviet Union. It follows that one of the most important corrections to be made in the accounts of the Second World War is to emphasize, contrary to what is done today, the outstanding role of the Soviet Union in the victory over fascism.
Putin makes a clear distinction throughout between the German population and the National Socialists, who skillfully exploited the intention of the Western allies to rob Germany under the conditionalities of the Versailles Treaty and drove Germany into a new war. He notes that the Western states, especially political forces in the United Kingdom and the United States, directly or indirectly made this possible; certain financial and industrial circles invested very actively in German factories that were producing military products, and there were many supporters of extreme right-wing nationalist movements among the aristocracy of western nations and political establishments.
One could add to that that Hitler was extremely “socially acceptable” in these same circles: The New York Times fully supported Hitler until 1938, and Time magazine declared him “Man of the Year” that same year. What Putin states only summarily here, has been documented in great detail by Lyndon LaRouche and authors associated with him—from the support for Hitler coming from Averell Harriman and Prescott Bush to that of Montagu Norman, head of the Bank of England, as well as the American eugenics movement’s open support for the Nazis’ racial teachings. Prescott S. Bush’s banking partner Fritz Thyssen, in his 1941 book I Paid Hitler, openly admitted that he was Hitler’s most generous supporter. Putin also mentions the deliberate setting of arbitrary borders under the Treaty of Versailles (one could add Sykes–Picot and Trianon), which were intended to be time bombs for geopolitical manipulation.
Putin hits a particularly sensitive point when he addresses the fact that politicians in the West do not like to be reminded of the Munich Pact, in which under the guise of an appeasement policy, the booty was divvied up. Czechoslovakia was betrayed by its allies France and Great Britain, and war between Germany and the Soviet Union was in principle pre-programmed. It was absolutely clear to the British and French geopoliticians that “Germany and the Soviet Union would inevitably clash and bleed each other white,” Putin writes.
Documents are also cited that show how the British and Polish sides tried to prevent the formation of an anti-Hitler coalition, and that the signing of the Non-Aggression Pact, which in fact made the Soviet Union the last country to sign any such treaty with Germany, took place against the backdrop of the real threat of war against the Soviet Union on two fronts, as Japan was already involved in fierce fighting on the Khalhin-Gol River.
That France and Britain clung firmly to their plan to have Germany and the Soviet Union destroy each other, became even clearer when, after Hitler’s invasion, neither country came to Poland’s aid at all, moving militarily a few kilometers into German territory, to give the appearance of warlike activity, a farce called the “phony war” (Sitzkrieg in Germany and drôle de guerre in France). Putin quotes General Jodl during the Nuremberg Trials saying that Germany did not lose the war as early as 1939, only because the 110 or so French and British divisions, which were up against 23 German divisions in the West, remained completely idle during the war with Poland.
It will not please those in the West who have been writing a revisionist history of the Second World War, and its prelude, for some time now, but Putin has outlined in this article the essential process of these maneuvers that created the greatest catastrophe in history to date. He is now calling on all states, each of which is to blame in varying degrees because of their geopolitical interests, to cooperate in this historical reappraisal. Each believed they could outsmart the others, as Putin writes. But in the end, it was the short-sightedness of refusing to create a system of collective security, that sealed the road to the great war.
Putin’s call to create a comprehensive archive of the history of World War II, and the pre-war period, in which all film and photographic material, all documents already published and documents yet to be released would be available to historians, must be realized without delay.
I have been deeply convinced for a long time that the German population, for example, will never gain internal freedom and their sovereignty until they understand that Hitler and the Nazis were not a purely German phenomenon, but a project that was supported for geopolitical reasons by British and American circles. For this reason, I published The Hitler Book back in January 1984, which goes into some of the background that led to the Nazis, one among the many tendencies of the Conservative Revolution which was supported by the international oligarchy.
Such a public international debate is also urgent because thinking people can quickly recognize the parallels to politics today. The plan at that time, which was to let Germany and the Soviet Union bleed each other white, is now a plan to encircle Russia and China, and to bring about regime changes against the governments of both of nations, and in the United States it is the ongoing “Maidan” against President Trump, who waged his 2016 presidential campaign with the pledge to establish a good relationship with Russia, and who was building, at the beginning of his Presidency, a good relationship with China.
President Putin ends his article with a reference to the summit of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, which he has proposed, and which the other four heads of state have already agreed to. This summit, he says, should frankly discuss, among other things, issues of preserving peace and in particular, of overcoming the economic crisis which has been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. How severe the impact of the pandemic will be, he points out, depends decisively on the ability of these countries to work together, as real partners, in an open and coordinated manner, and to revive those high humanist ideals and values for which their fathers and grandfathers fought shoulder to shoulder.
Such a summit must be supported by all peace-loving nations and people, because only the combination of the United States, Russia and China can implement the needed reorganization of the hopelessly bankrupt financial system through a new Bretton Woods credit system, and hopefully, the desolate state of the world will convince France and Great Britain that they have to give up their colonial and imperial traditions.
Vladimir Putin’s initiative to use the 75th anniversary of the end of the Great Patriotic War to launch an international discussion about the historical truth of the causes of World War II is a brilliant flank, which may possibly prevent the world from sleepwalking once again into a new world war.
