Join Helga Zepp-LaRouche in her weekly Live-Dialogue Wednesday, December 27 at 11am EDT/5pm CET! Please submit your questions ahead of time to questions@schillerinstitute.org Or you can write them live in the YouTube chat.
Read or watch the searing sermon delivered on Dec. 23, 2023 by the Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac, pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem. Dr. Isaac, a Palestinian Christian pastor and theologian, designed and placed a now-famous creche of Christ in the Rubble in his church, and was part of a delegation of religious leaders from Bethlehem who visited Washington, D.C. in late November carrying an open letter to President Biden and U.S. congressmen demanding: “We want a constant and comprehensive ceasefire. Enough death. Enough destruction.”
In his traditional “Urbi et Orbi” blessing at St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican on Christmas day, Pope Francis demanded the world’s public be informed of the countless billions spent on weapons, called for beating “swords into plowshares,” and again insisted on a lasting ceasefire in tortured Gaza.
Join Helga Zepp-LaRouche in her weekly Live-Dialogue Wednesday, December 27 at 11am EDT/5pm CET! Please submit your questions ahead of time to questions@schillerinstitute.org Or you can write them live in the YouTube chat.
No one will be able to claim, as historians said of World War I, that we sleepwalked into World War III. The war cries today are so deafening that they threaten to awaken from the dead all of the victims of previous wars, including the First and Second World Wars.
Tax money is poured into military spending of all kinds, while civilian economies collapse, infrastructure decays, and schools and hospitals are closed or fall apart. In the United States, the Pentagon’s defense budget for 2024 amounts to nearly one trillion dollars, while the entire EU budget and all national budgets in Europe are slated for militarization. German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius is demanding that society become “war-ready” and has asserted that we only have five to eight years before a major military confrontation with Russia. American think-tanks are working feverishly on “war games” for a major war with China, which should, in their view, take place sooner rather than later. See the article by the Council of Foreign Relations magazine, Foreign Affairs, “The Big One: Preparing for a Long War With China.”
How did we end up on this trajectory, which can only take us to a Third World War, a global nuclear war between the U.S. and NATO on the one side, and Russia and China on the other, and thus nuclear Armageddon?
President Eisenhower, at the end of his mandate, warned in 1961 against the explosion of the power of the military-industrial complex (MIC), saying:
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Since then, history has unfortunately shown that Eisenhower’s advice was not followed, and that this “unwarranted influence” has spread throughout society and reduced governments to institutions doing the bidding of that MIC.
The decisive turning point occurred when the Soviet Union dissolved. Instead of establishing a new global order of peace, as Lyndon LaRouche had envisioned with his proposal for the Eurasian Land Bridge, which would have integrated the Eurasian continent economically and ensured close ties between East and West, the neocons opted for Anglo-American dominance over a unipolar world. The Wolfowitz Doctrine of 1992 stipulated that no country or group of countries would ever be allowed to surpass the U.S. in political, economic or military power.
Contrary to promises made to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at the time of German reunification, that NATO would not expand an “inch” eastward, NATO did just that. There were five NATO expansions extending 1,000 km eastward toward Russia’s borders, including the installation of potentially offensive missile defense systems in that area, which all preceded the Russian special operation of February 24, 2022 in Ukraine. A new Cuban Missile Crisis at a snail’s pace, so to speak.
The U.S. and NATO countries went for political control, for the idea that all countries in the world had to adopt the Western neoliberal model, i.e. regime change, color revolutions; interventionist wars in which many millions have died; military bases built around the world; war training for their foreign allies; imperial expansion of the EU and NATO up to the point of creating a global NATO as a means to contain real and potential rivals; sanctions aimed at affecting regime change; and finally weaponization of the dollar. All this under the banner of the “rules-based order,” liberal democracy, and human rights.
China, on the other hand, went for economic development and overcoming poverty for 850 million of its own citizens, initially, and then increasingly for win-win cooperation with the nations of the Global South through the New Silk Road Initiative. Thanks to this cooperation, those nations were given the chance for the first time to free themselves from the poverty and underdevelopment dating back to the colonial era. Today, 150 countries of the Global South are working together with China on thousands of New Silk Road projects, building roads and high-speed railroads, ports, airports, development corridors, industrial parks and more.
In the past ten years since China put the Belt and Road Initiative on the agenda, unbounded cultural optimism has spread among nations of the Global South, which has long since become the Global Majority, with the idea that they will soon become fully developed nations. They are responding to the weaponization of the dollar with de-dollarization, i.e., by trading in their own currencies and eventually planning their own reserve currency, by deepening the strategic partnership between Russia and China, creating their own organizations, such as the BRICS Plus, which will include ten members as of January 1, 2024, and dozens more very soon.
Conclusion: the attempt to respond to the disintegration of the Soviet Union with the utopia of a unipolar world order, held together by military power, has been a monumental failure. It has led to an unprecedented strategic blowback.
Therefore, the most crucial question is: Can we in the West, the U.S. and European nations, correct our political course in time, and choose cooperation with the Global South instead of confrontation? China and Russia have repeatedly emphasized that the Belt and Road Initiative and the BRICS countries are open to cooperation with the West!
The main difficulty lies in the fact that much of the economic capacities in the United States, and a growing share of those in Europe, have been taken over by the MIC, and are so closely entwined with the big investment firms and asset management companies of Wall Street and the City of London, that a better term is the military-industrial-financial complex (MIFC). (See this package of material on the MIFC.)
Technically speaking, it would be relatively easy to re-tool these capacities for civilian purposes, and rather than producing bombers, fighter jets, and missiles, to produce modern high-speed rail systems, inherently safe nuclear reactors of the 4th generation, and nuclear fusion reactors, as well as space stations for international space travel. In other words, all the industrial capacity currently used for the destruction of actual physical value—what else are weapons systems good for?—could serve the production of useful goods that promote the common good. Instead of tanks and ammunition, they could produce schools and hospitals, and help our nations to have prosperous economies once again!
Russian economist Sergei Glazyev put it in a nutshell in a message on the occasion of what would have been Lyndon LaRouche’s 100th birthday, which he unfortunately did not live to see. LaRouche not only forecast with farsightedness the crisis of the neoliberal system, but also proposed solutions to overcome this crisis. The countries that rejected his solutions are in crisis today, while those that implemented his ideas are prospering, Glazyev stated:
“In practically all the major countries in the world that today are developing successfully—above all India, and China—there are partisans of LaRouche. They have used his thoughts and ideas, for creating their economic miracles. It is the principles of Physical Economy championed by LaRouche, that today underlie the Chinese economic miracle and are there in the foundations of India’s economic development policy. The supporters of LaRouche in those countries exert a fruitful, very positive, and constructive influence on economic policy-shaping in these leading nations of the new world economic paradigm.”
It’s not yet too late. We need to replace the war cries for ever “more weapons” with a return to diplomacy and the idea that we can—and must—resolve all conflicts through negotiation, if we are to avoid ending up in global nuclear war and a nuclear winter, which would wipe out all memory of humanity’s existence.
Instead of the greed of the speculators of the MIFC, Wall Street, and the City of London, whose high rates of profit rely on taxpayer money pouring into new wars, we must defend the existential interest of the population: The interests of farmers, small and medium-sized businesses, train drivers, bakers, etc.
Swords to plowshares!
We are many, they are few!
For cooperation with the nations of the Global South!
Join Helga Zepp-LaRouche in her weekly Live-Dialogue Wednesday, December 20 at 11am EDT/5pm CET! Please submit your questions ahead of time to questions@schillerinstitute.org Or you can write them live in the YouTube chat.
The toll of death and misery rises by the hour in Gaza, with the latest official count of 19,500 dead, dozens of thousands wounded, and over two million suffering.
Yet the United States continues its lone stance in the UN Security Council, to oppose a ceasefire, talks and rebuilding in Palestine/Israel. The UAE is submitting a new resolution this week, and reports are that the U.S. is already cavilling, and opposing it.
Similarly, the U.S., UK and NATO decree there can be no negotiations and ceasefire for Ukraine, where the population is already down by half.
Behind the disgusting pretense cited by the Global NATO bloc of defending Western “values,” in these and other cases, two things stand out: First, the military-financial-industrial-complex of Wall Street/London is supported off the backs of everyone. And secondly, the actual social and economic conditions of the Trans-Atlantic NATO zone are rapidly falling apart.
A dramatic example of protest against this, is the mass farmer action today at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. Farm protests are occurring in many cities in Bavaria and other states. Farmers are demanding affordable gas for their machinery, and other measures, in order to continue to produce food. But the German government’s policies, following the leader after the U.S., are backing warfare, and destroying the German physical economy, even food.
Schiller Institute founder and leader Helga Zepp-LaRouche, reviewing these situations with associates today, summed up the strategic picture with these remarks:
“I think it’s not so difficult if you look at the strategic situation from the top. Why are we in the crisis we are? Because–as by the way, Sergei Glazyev had said so pointedly in his letter for Lyn’s 100th birthday–the countries that follow Lyndon LaRouche are doing well; and those that don’t, don’t. I think it’s really as simple as that, because if you look at why it is that Asia—above all China, but also other Asian countries and also now the BRICS, the BRICS+, the SCO, and other such organizations tend to do much better in terms of growth rates, it is because they have been applying innovation. They may not call it with the same terms like Lyn would discuss it in physical economy, but the entire Chinese economy is based on innovation, innovation, innovation. This is why they didn’t have a cycle of boom and bust; because they have been continuously applying the breakthroughs in new discoveries into the economy. That’s why they had a steady curve upwards while the West was collapsing.
Why is the West collapsing? Because they are wasting all productive capacity in what used to be called “primitive accumulation” in the Soviet Union. The West is doing the same thing. Do you think the almost $1 trillion military budget in the United States is not a waste, and primitive accumulation against the actual physical assets of the economy? Has it done any good for the United States to have built almost 1000 military bases around the world, when all they offer to these countries is to become training grounds for wars? They offer “security,” they offer training in the war against terrorism; but they don’t offer development. That’s why these countries have turned away from the United States and the West towards the Belt and Road Initiative which offers development.
It’s really not that complicated at all, and all this military build-up, all these interventionist wars to keep up the American way of life, as Bush Sr. said in the case of the Iraq War, has not done anybody any good. So, it’s a failed approach. You cannot build an economy by building military fortresses to protect your privileges when the rest of the world is no longer going along with it because they have an alternative.
So, I think it’s very important that we somehow say, look, this whole military-industrial-financial complex is doing the wrong model. They should stop it and agree to be peacefully turned into plowshares before they ruin all of us. I think this intervention– it’s very clear that this is not functioning and ideology is crashing against the wall of reality.
For example, look at what happened in Germany right now, where the Constitutional Court made the long-overdue decision that this fraudulent accounting had to stop. Now, what happened to the big transformation of the economy, the Green Deal? It flops because the pots are empty. The Constitutional Court said you cannot use money anymore for purposes you have not declared. They had to stop the e-car subsidies from one day to the next. So, all the people who bought an e-car with the idea that they would get a several thousand euro subsidy, [Finance Minister] Lindner just said, “Sorry, the pot is empty.” That will happen to a lot of things.
So, I think this idea that reality is stronger than ideology, [reality being] otherwise called natural law, or the mandate of heaven, or however you want to call it [is true.] There is a higher lawfulness which you cannot bend forever, without the laws of the universe bending back. They swing back to where things belong, and I think that’s a very clear demonstration of this principle.
The way out obviously is that we have to go back to the idea of physical economy, the American System, Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich List, Henry Carey, Count Witte, all of these people who knew how to build an economy. They have been proven right, and Lyndon LaRouche has carried that philosophy and physical economic theory a lot further. That is what it comes down to. If you want to survive, go back to LaRouche; if you want to go under, go the way of military spending until you are dead, one way or another.”
Join Helga Zepp-LaRouche in her weekly Live-Dialogue Wednesday, December 20 at 11am EDT/5pm CET! Please submit your questions ahead of time to questions@schillerinstitute.org Or you can write them live in the YouTube chat.
At the moment, destabilization and “surprise” among the policy establishment is seen throughout the trans-Atlantic sector, from Canada, to Washington, to the entirety of Europe. Though NATO (27 of whose EU foreign ministers recently met on an emergency basis with Zelenskyy and others in Kiev) is nasty, and lethally so, it is also reactive, and therefore predictable. Africa, Asia and South America continue to be defiantly unconvinced of the righteousness of the “Ukrainian cause,” as they increasingly are about other matters, from “global warming policy” to “immigration policy.” And the failed “counter-offensive” by Ukraine has meant that, when Zelenskyy tried to go to Congress, he and his handlers were too tone-deaf to realize that you should never ask the same people for more tens of billions of dollars to fight a war whose “decisive” battle you have just lost. That’s called “throwing good money after bad,” not to mention lives. Though people don’t say it out loud, you have become personally synonymous with failure, including “among your own people.”
In contrast, despite views to the contrary, the Zepp-LaRouche promotion of the German “Ending the War by a Negotiated Peace” initiative, is an example of how to violate the ostensibly “unbreakable” constraints of the British intelligence-orchestrated advocacy of total war, including thermonuclear war. Look at what Britain just did, using the “deniable” Nazi SS caper in the Canadian Parliament. As one publication pointed out, “The appearance of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in front of the Canadian Parliament was an important political event that was meticulously prepared. Invited guests would have been thoroughly vetted for security reasons. This is especially true for a ‘guest of honor’ like Hunka, who was called by name and officially celebrated.”
A Transformation Bigger than the End of the Cold War
It is most urgent that we make the ordinary citizens of European nations and the USA–who are bombarded on a daily basis with a barrage of news in the mainstream mass media, which all have generally a spin in such a way, as to create an almost entirely fictitious parallel reality–aware of the tectonic change going on in this historic moment. Because only if they recognize the choices clearly lying ahead of us, is there hope for a positive way out of the present existential crisis of humanity.
It is high time to review the success and respectively the failure of the official policies of the recent period in order to assess the validity or flaws of ones own axioms of thinking. If there is one lesson about how it came to two world wars in the 20th century, then it is the number of miscalculations on the part of the participants in those wars. Having that parallel in mind one can only sound the alarm bells in the shrillest way possible.
The geopolitical confrontation of the US-led NATO over Ukraine, which did not start „unprovoked“ on February 23, 2022, but really already with the „Orange Revolution“ financed by the NED in 2004, and escalated with Victoria Nuland’s Maidan Coup in 2014, is clearly not working the way it was intended. The unprecedented series of sanctions did not „ruin Russia“, as Annalena Baerbock had wished, but caused a far reaching reorientation of Russia to the East and the South. But also Russia’s expectation about a short term nature of the military special operation did not materialize since the Russian leadership obviously underestimated the effect of NATO-operations in Ukraine since the Maidan coup and the subsequent attitude of the population, as well as the far reaching willingness for military engagement in Ukraine by the West.
Now a military stalemate has been reached, and the continuation of the military operations can, despite all new weapon deliveries, only lead to the complete attrition of the human resources of Ukraine, who already has suffered horrendous casualty figures, and the danger of an escalation to the nuclear level, if either Russia sees its territorial integrity threatened or somebody thinks that a limited nuclear war is feasible.
If the Europeans believed that their giving in to the demands of ever „more weapons“ to Ukraine, would lead to a victory of Ukraine on the battlefield, that also did not work out. Instead European nations find themselves completely cut off from any ties with their neighbor Russia, the „energy- dependency“ shifted from Russia to the much more expensive American energy, and in the meantime Germany has lost even the appearance of a remnant of sovereignty and with it the respect in the whole world. Germany, the erstwhile economic powerhouse of Europe is rapidly undergoing a process of deindustrialization caused by exorbitant energy prices provided by the wonderful protective power and ally US, who is not hesitating to lure the battered German industries to resettle in the US with the help of the Inflation Reduction Act–not even to mention the North Stream Pipelines about which nobody believes the belatedly made up story about the sailing yacht Andromeda. A popular saying these days is: What do you need enemies for with friends like this?
Germany has been transformed into a doormat, trampled upon by NATO-boots, while the present political leadership with its green Atlanticist ideology, for whom it would be a euphemism to call it „German,“ is gambling away about everything all the generations have built up from the rubble fields after the Second World War. Half of the German Mittelstand, the source of the entire social system in the country, is either going bankrupt or leaving to reinvest either in the US or in China. The overwhelming mood in the country is one of desperation, restaurant owners, farmers, craftsmen, store owners, nurses, all kinds of service industries, all feel that the floor is being pulled away from under them, and those, who don’t want to move to the Alternative for Germany, a right wing party, with some good points, but also unacceptable elements in it, feel that they have no place to turn to. „Everything will crash against the wall“, is one of the most heard sentences in many private discussions. People feel completely betrayed. We should remember, it was that utter feeling of betrayal after the Versailles treaty, which was the death-nail for the Weimar Republic!
But what most citizens of the West have no inkling about, is that a much bigger, much more consequential development is taking place elsewhere, in those parts of the world, which are effected by what is going on between NATO and Russia, where the „collateral damage“, such as high energy and food prices in these countries was considered „negligible“. And now that oversight is turning out to be the biggest misjudgment of all.
The unilateral (and therefore illegal) sanctions against Russia and a whole series of other countries, the confiscation of state assets and weaponization of the dollar on top of the longstanding experience of unfair trade and credit conditions have led to a gigantic blowback in the countries of the Global South which since has emerged as the Global Majority, representing more than 85 % of the world population. The massive attempts by NATO countries to pressure countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa to take the side of the „democracies“ of the „rules based order“ against the supposed „autocracies“ and „dictatorships“ in the Ukraine conflict backfired thoroughly. The identity of these countries as being part of the Nonalignment Movement and the „Spirit of Bandung“, the major alliance between Asian and African countries of the 1955 conference, came back to life and with it the memory that it was the Soviet Union which had helped many of the developing countries in their struggles for independence against the colonial powers.
When Lyndon LaRouche, my late husband, had first proposed an alternative to the IMF and its conditionalities in 1975 with the proposal for the IDB, which was intended to issue 400 Billion dollar credit lines per year for industrial development projects, this proposal was fullheartedly endorsed be the NAM then, who incorporated it in their final resolution in Colombo, Sri Lanka, representing already 75 % of the world population. The reaction of the financial powers to be were brutal: Indira Gandhi and Mrs. Bandaranaike were ousted from power, President Ali Bhutto and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi several years later were assassinated. The NAM played a subdued role for many years to come as a result of these attacks.
Lyndon LaRouche, whose 101st birthday we were celebrating yesterday, and his international movement kept writing development plans relentlessly, a comprehensive infrastructure plan for the entire African continent, presented in 1976 in a conference in Paris, Operation Juarez for Latin America in cooperation with Mexican President Lopez Portillo, a 50 year plan for the Pacific Basin in light of the expected increase on population density in that part of the world, a 40 year plan for India, which Mrs. Gandhi started to implement, the Oasis plan for Southwest Asia, and in 91, when the Soviet Union disintegrated, the Eurasian Landbridge, the New Silk Road–all of these programs were presented at literally hundreds of conferences and seminars on five continents.
After President Xi Jinping presented the concept of the New Silk Road in Kazakhstan, exactly 10 years and 2 days ago, Western governments, think tanks and media amazingly ignored this program which was clearly the largest infrastructure program in history ever, easily an order of magnitude larger then the Marshal Plan for Europe after the second World War.
But for the countries of the Global South the BRI became the game changer, allowing many of them for the first time to seriously launch infrastructure programs, industrial parks, advanced science projects, etc. From the end of 2017 the attitude in the West towards the BRI suddenly shifted from indifference to hostility, in the security papers of the Pentagon first, and then synchronized in all western media and think tanks, China’s rise was characterized as „systemic rival“ and „opponent“ culminating in the recent „decoupling“ and „de-risking“ frenzy. With the recent enlargement of the BRICS into BRICS-11 and the expressed interest of around 40 more countries to join likewise, the idea of a complete decoupling from Russia and China is more than absurd: it is suicidal. The perspective of creating two more or less separate blocs in reality is not feasible and can be only seen as the futile effort to economically weaken an adversary before a planned military attack, which given the existence of several thousands of nuclear missiles would mean the annihilation of the human species and with it all life on earth.
It is time for a fundamental strategic reevaluation. Is it not now more in the interest of the US and European nations to take the initiative to cooperate with all the countries of the Global South and build a prosperous world for all nations, than taking the risk of pursuing a policy which may lead to the „end of history“, albeit in a different way than Francis Fukuyama, the father of all political misjudgments fantasized?
News are coming in this morning, that Prime Minister Modi announced in a long overdue step at the ongoing G20 summit in New Delhi, that the African Union has been admitted to the G20, making the G21. That is positive, but completely insufficient. In order to eliminate the danger of a third, this time thermonuclear war, we need to create a totally new international security and development architecture, which takes into account the security and economic interest of all nations on the planet. And that is only possible, if it is based on the development of all, on the interest of the other, and the creation of a common future, which is promising and uplifting for all of humanity.
The comprehensive study the Schiller Institute published in 2014 in response to President Xi’s announcement from 2013 in Kazakhstan, „The New Silk Road becomes the World Land Bridge“ can be the basis for such a peace order for the 21st Century. It gives a clear orientation for the economic buildup of all parts of the planet, concrete plans for overcoming underdevelopment in the Global South as well as concrete guidelines for the reconstruction of the decaying economies of the Global North. Together with the Ten Principles I suggested for such a new architecture, these proposals could be the basis for any serious attempt to find a solution to the present crisis. Why not conduct a special session of the UNGA to discuss such a new international architecture, when clearly so many people around the world are concerned about the threat to world peace?
The idea of a World Landbridge, connecting all infrastructurally developed continents through tunnels and bridges, so that one can travel soon with a maglev train from the southern tip of Argentina or Chile up north through the Americas via the Bering Strait all way along the transsiberean railway to Gibraltar and on through Africa to the Cape of Good Hope. This will be the realization of the vision of the German economist Friedrich List and his „space and time economy“, where he outlined, how an advanced transport and communication system with a high speed, dense regularity and cost efficiency of infrastructure would allow for new levels of the mental and material productive powers. This development would then lead to a „Republic of the planet“ based on the „economy of humanity“, which would make it possible that all talents would exchange their ideas and work together in all areas in science and art and all areas of knowledge, which in turn would increase the efficiency of all powers of humanity, the exact opposite of „decoupling“ and „derisking“, obviously.
A similar idea about the future development of humanity to become a great community of the entire world, a „datong shijie“, one can also find with Cai Yuanpei, the first education minister of the Republic of China and President of Peking University, who introduced Schiller’s conception of aesthetic education into China. Obviously the same evolutionary innate idea governed Nikolaus of Kues idea about harmony in the macrocosm based on the best mutual development of all microcosms. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’ idea of a preestablished harmony in the universe represents the same idea, Vernadsky’s notion of the increasing dominance of the noosphere over the biosphere, as well. And I remember very well, how Lyndon LaRouche stunned his associates, when he talked about how despite the present importance of the sovereignty of the nation state, that would not be the last stage in the evolution of the the development of humanity.
Look at this latest breakthrough China made in controllable nuclear fusion technology for a new generation of an „artificial sun“, the Huanliu-3, a week ago. They realized high-confinement mode operation with a plasma current of one million ampere for the first time, according to the China National Nuclear Corporation, (CNNC). The high-confinement mode, is also used as the standard mode for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), in Cadarache, France, which is run by seven member parties, China, the EU, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the US. This inherently safe form of nuclear energy, once it is fully realized, is one of the technologies which will remove the basis for geopolitical rivalry, because it will make energy so plentiful and cheap, that it will be cheaper than the continuation of military conflict.
The perspective for a completely new paradigm in international relations is on the horizon, and this could come much faster then most can imagine. A change in the US with the next presidential election could return the US on the path of a republic. As Sergey Glazyev indicated, a new BRICS currency will likely materialize in 2024 during Russia’s chairmanship of the BRICS, which could turn out to be the lifeboat for the global financial system.
So, there is all the reason for a culturally optimistic view for the future of mankind, provided we replace hatred, envy and resentment with love, generosity, and curiosity for the potential of the other cultures. We still have time to reset the axioms of our thinking.
Join Helga Zepp-LaRouche in a live dialogue on August 30 to discuss the challenge of the Global North from the BRICS. Send in your questions early to questions@schillerinstitute.org
Invitation for the Schiller Institute Online Conference September 9, 2023
The world is presently undergoing changes, changes which occur only once in a thousand years: The age of colonialism, which began in the 16th Century, and has lasted almost 600 years, is coming to an end. The countries of the Global South, which represent by far the majority of mankind, are shedding the remnants of colonial suppression, as it still exists in the form of international control over their resources, unfair conditions of trade, and financial subjugation and looting by the City of London and Wall Street. The countries of the Global South are asserting their right to process these resources and produce value-added goods as a means of becoming middle income societies in the foreseeable future through high-technology industrialization. Lyndon LaRouche, for decades, specified the needed concepts and policies in physical economy to expedite that transition.
It can be expected that the summit of the BRICS countries, to take place August 22-24, will reflect the tectonic shift going on: Twenty-three countries have applied formally for membership in this organization and more than twenty informally. Rather than regarding this process as a threat to the West, the nations of Europe and even the U.S. should take up the offer of cooperation. If the countries of the Global North go forward with their stated intent to “decouple” or “de-risk” from China, which is the largest trading partner of many countries of the Global South, this will be especially devastating for the economies of Europe, which are already in the process of deindustrialization. Even more fundamentally, if the West sticks to a policy of geopolitical confrontation with Russia and China, and tries to maintain an unipolar world by creating a Global NATO, the present conflicts around Ukraine now and soon Taiwan, could escalate into a third, this time thermonuclear world war.
The fact that the old order has failed to solve the problems of poverty, hunger, and the underdevelopment of billions of people in the developing countries, is demonstrated by the horrendous migrant crisis, where thousands and thousands of desperate people are assembling, at national borders—be it between the U.S. and Mexico, or be it along the Mediterranean, which has already become a mass grave. Instead of resorting to cruel and inhumane methods to keep human beings out, we should join hands with China and other emerging countries to help the countries of the Global South industrialize. There is no need for rivalry; there is so much for everyone to do to meet the existential needs of people now suffering.
Which way we decide to go, will in all likelihood determine if we end up in a world war resulting in the annihilation of the human species, or if we keep our humanity and open a new, more beautiful chapter in the history of mankind.
We need a new international security and development architecture that takes into account the interests of every single country on the planet. The warring parties of the Thirty Years War were able to reach the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, because they realized that there would be no one left to enjoy the victory, if they had continued to fight. We should at least be that intelligent.
We must revive the most beautiful traditions of our cultures, especially in classical art, and celebrate the image of man as the creative species, to develop from there a vision of how to create a durable peace for all of humanity.
Following last week’s Humanity For Peace demonstrations around the world, a new force for peace has been introduced in the political environment. The unique idea to merge the peace movement with the Global South, as one anti-imperialist movement, is taking shape.
Join us this Thursday (August 3rd) 3pm EDT (9pm CET) for a special No2Nato Humanity for Peace rally featuring just some guest speakers from across the globe who will be speaking at the Sunday 6 Aug rallies across the globe commemorating the anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. Unite with us demanding it to never happen again!
July 14—The International Peace Coalition (IPC), initiated by Helga Zepp- LaRouche, held its sixth weekly Zoom meeting today, chaired by the Schiller Institute’s Anastasia Battle, with 38 guests from 15 countries and peace organizations, in addition to members of the Schiller Institute.
At their fifth meeting, in an impassioned presentation, Dr. Chandra Muzaffar, President of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST), had described he just concluded July 4–5 conference sponsored by JUST and the Save Humanity and the Planet (SHAPE) centered in Malaysia, titled “Asia-Pacific NATO: Fanning the Flames of War.” The target was AUKUS, the Australia-U.K.-U.S. security pact whose purpose, Dr. Muzaffar said, is to “contain China.” Most Asians oppose this pact, but the political leaders want to “assure the domination of Asia by the British and the U.S.,” and undermine any peace movement. The meeting was quite successful, with speakers from Australia, China, Malaysia, the U.S China and South Korea, with several new organizations participating in the event. JUST and SHAPE will get the news on the IPC to their mailing lists. Dr. Muzaffar thanked Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche and the Schiller Institute for building the IPC, which he said he “hopes will grow and flourish, as it is key to our future.” [Read IPC#5 Press Release Here]
Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the founder and leader of the Schiller Institute, opened the sixth meeting by noting two globally important events in the week since the IPC’s fifth meeting on July 7: the two-day international conference of the Schiller Institute in Strasbourg, France on July 8-9; and the NATO Summit of July 11-12 in Vilnius (referred to as the “villainous Vilnius Summit” by one speaker at the IPC meeting). While the NATO Summit was a war cry for more escalation of the surrogate NATO war against Russia centered in Ukraine, the Schiller Institute conference provided ideas and discussion on the urgency of substituting cooperation for confrontation, preventing the current rush to an outbreak of global nuclear war, and bringing the world’s nations together in a paradigm of development.
Zepp-LaRouche pointed to the newly-announced decision by President Joe Biden to deploy cluster bombs to Ukraine—altogether 300 million bomblets—a madness that will cause thousands of deaths of innocents, as has already been demonstrated by the death and maiming of children and other civilians in Cambodia and Vietnam from the landmines and cluster bombs deployed during the Indochina war of the 1960-70s—deaths and injuries continuing even today. There is international opposition to this genocidal act, including from within the United States, but Biden is going ahead regardless.
The ugly irony of this move, Zepp-LaRouche added, is that Biden has admitted that even though he once opposed the use of cluster bombs as a war crime, now the U.S. and its NATO allies are running out of ammunition to continue the bloodletting in Ukraine, and therefore will use the cluster bombs to keep the war going. She pointed to the decision to deploy F-16s to Ukraine as yet another insane act, noting that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that Russia will have no way to know if the nuclear-weapon capable F-16s are armed with nuclear weapons or not, and must therefore treat them as being nuclear armed.
Zepp-LaRouche also pointed to the NATO Summit’s embrace of a policy to expand the domain of NATO to the Asia-Pacific region, targeting China with the same war-policy as deployed against Russia in Europe.
As to Ukraine, she reported the intention presented at the NATO Summit to turn the country into a military production center, with the West’s major military-industrial companies setting up production facilities in Ukraine for a “forever war.” In the process, there was no discussion by any NATO participants of a peace plan, or even for negotiations for peace. At the rate of destruction of the Ukraine economy and the death of thousands of young men in the bloody cauldron of war, there will be no way for the country to rebuild even if the war can be stopped.
The lesson, Zepp-LaRouche concluded, is that the International Peace Coalition must grow and create a massive public outcry against the madness. The plan for international demonstrations on Aug. 6, the 78th anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima by U.S. President Harry Truman, must be the basis for expanding this effort.
Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst and a co-founder of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), gave a situation report on the war in Ukraine, asserting that while Biden is declaring that Ukraine is winning, even that Putin has “already lost” the war, that simply demonstrates that Biden is living in an “alternative reality,” since it is abundantly clear that the opposite is the case. The much-heralded “counter-offensive” by the Zelenskyy government forces has been a colossal failure, with the mass destruction of tanks and other military equipment, as well as yet more thousands of lives sacrificed.
Col. Richard H. Black, a retired Marine officer and former Army Joint Advocate General (JAG) lawyer who headed the Army’s Criminal Law Division at the Pentagon before retiring from the military and serving in Virginia’s House of Delegates and Senate, reviewed the failure of Kiev’s “counteroffensive,” suggesting that the idea of a perpetual war of attrition is a losing proposition for Ukraine, and that they may not be able to sustain the current pace even through the end of August.
Regarding the cluster bombs, Col. Black remarked that the world agreed to ban mustard gas and other chemical weapons as war crimes, and for the U.S. to simply declare that cluster bombs are to be accepted because “Ukraine needs them” does not change the fact that their use is a war crime. Are we to declare later that nuclear weapons will stop being illegal if “Ukraine needs them,” he asked? We are heading for nuclear war, he warned, and there is far too little resistance to it in the U.S., so this Coalition must grow.
Joseph Boyd-Barrett, a professor (emeritus) at California State University and an expert on the uses of propaganda, gave further evidence of the falsification in the mainstream media about the war in Ukraine. Ukraine and its Western backers in NATO have already essentially lost the war, as their munitions are running out and the NATO countries are not able to sustain the supply, while Russia “can produce multiples” of the munitions produced by the combined NATO backers of Kiev. He also estimates that the supply of weapons to Ukraine will run out by the end of August.
The problem remains that the Ukraine government, and its backers in NATO, don’t care that the country and the population are being destroyed by the war policy, and refuse to negotiate. Zelenskyy was elected on a pledge to bring peace, but now it must be said that the Kiev regime’s policy is to see their own population murdered by continuing a war which cannot be won. The Democratic Party in power in Washington appears to believe that the only way to win the next general election in November 2024 is to keep the war going through next year.
Juan Carrero, a peace activist from Spain, said that the Western elites are suffering from dementia, as they repeat without any evidence that Russia will lose the war. He said that he had lived in Hiroshima for a year and a half, and saw the effects of the destruction, calling for the Aug. 6 demonstrations worldwide to be a turning point to stop the madness.
Moderator Anastasia Battle read four demands which the IPC will issue on its website https://humanityforpeace.net/ They are:
1. End the supply of weapons to Ukraine.
2. Begin unconditional peace talks with all parties to the war
3. End the NATO alliance.
4. Establish a new security architecture for all nations, ending the division of the world into warring “blocs.”
Zepp-LaRouche replied with an in-depth discussion of the concept, developed by the 15th-century genius Nicholas of Cusa, who discovered the idea as a method of thought based on the truth that the “One” is superior to the “Many,” that only by recognizing that there is a common principle which unites all human beings, whatever their faith or ethnicity or nationality. This method of thinking made it possible for Cusa to bring about the unity of the Roman and Orthodox Christian religions at the ecumenical Council of Florence between 1431 and 1449, and later was the basis of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 ending the Thirty Years’ War in Europe. In the current age of nuclear weapons, that principle of creative thought, based on love rather than hate, is the only basis for world peace. Other speakers reported on their organizing efforts for peace in Argentina, Chile, England, France, Germany, Holland, India, Italy, Nicaragua, Scotland, and across the U.S. All agreed to build an even larger attendance, including representatives from the Global South, for the next meeting on Friday, July 21.
Rally and Concert: Humanity for Peace is hosting a “Global Rally for World Peace and an End to All Wars!” On Sunday, Aug. 6 from 1-4 pm at the Dag Hammerskjöld Plaza (United Nations Plaza) in New York City, 47th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenue, followed by an evening concert from 6-8 pm at the Unitarian Church of All Souls, 1157 Lexington Ave. at East 80th Street, of Mozart’s Requiem, performed by a combined chorus and orchestra which will include the Schiller Institute NYC Chorus and musicians. It will be free and open to the public.
Fr. Robert Cushing (U.S.), Association of US Catholic Priests (AUSCP), Pax Christi GA, former priest
Bolívar Téllez Castellón (Nicaragua), Lawyer and university professor
Boubacar Sidy (USA/Guinea)
Christer Lundgren, (Sweden)
Ruben Dario Guzzetti (Argentina), Argentine Institute of Geopolitical Studies (IADEG)
Christine Bierre (France), Solidarity and Progress
Fr. Harry Bury (U.S.), Archdiocese of Saint Paul in Minneapolis, MN
Ingo Scharpff (Germany)
Jacques Cheminade (France), head of Solidarity and Progress
Jimmy Gerum (Germany), Lighthouse Media
Juan Carrero (Spain), President, S’Olivar Foundation
Juan Gómez (Chile)
Karen Ball (U.S.) Pax Christi – Texas
Liliana Gorini (Italy), Movisol
Mike Billington, (U.S.) Executive Intelligence Review Magazine
Muhammad Selim Akhtar (U.S.) Muslim Alliance
Ray McGovern (U.S.) former senior analyst, U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); founding member, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
Rev. Dr. Terri L. Strong (U.S.), AME minister from Memphis, TN Chair of the Actions and Global Concern Committee of the Church Women United
Ulf Sandmark (Sweden), President Schiller Institute, Sweden
Wolfgang Lieberknecht (Germany)
David Andersson, (U.S.) Coordinator of NYC bureau for Pressenza Press Agency and hosts a talk-show, Face 2 Face, broadcast on Youtube and Facebook
Jurgen Wolf (Scotland), No2NATO UK, Workers Party BG
Jack Gilroy (U.S.), Organizer, Pax Christi, NY State/Pax Christi International; Board Member, New York Veterans for Peace
Sonja Van den Ende, (Netherlands/Russia) Independent Journalist, covers Russia/Ukraine conflict, for Katehon
Chris Fogarty (U.S./Ireland), Irish American Leader
Fredrick Weiss (U.S.) Classical musician
Dennis Small (U.S.), Schiller Institute, Virginia
Dennis Speed (U.S.), Schiller Institute, New Jersey
Diane Sare, (U.S.) U.S. Senate Candidate, New York
Jose Vega, (U.S.) Interventionist, Organizer Schiller Institute
Anastasia Battle (U.S.) Organizer, Interventionist and Editor-in-Chief, Leonore Magazine
