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Sicily Daily Runs Call by Committee for Coincidence of Opposites on Afghanistan Emergency

Under the headline “Afghanistan, the Committee for the Republic: Let Us Help It,” the daily Il Corriere di Sicilia published the Dec. 10 call by the Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites with an endorsement by Alessia Ruggeri.

The paper quotes Ruggeri saying: “I join the declaration by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, president of the Schiller Institute, which has highlighted that for more than two months no one has talked about Afghanistan, totally ignoring the emergency and the fact that, with the confiscation of funds, the population is likely to die of hunger and hardship,” and it continues: “These are the words of Alessia Ruggeri, spokesperson of the political movement ‘Committee for the Republic’ member of the Committee for the Coincidence of the Opposites that supports the call by David Beasley, director of the WFP, which states that immediate support from the West is needed, defining it as a moral test for the West.” See the Italian original.


Zepp-LaRouche on CGTN Dialogue Program – “Democracy Summit” Examined

Dec. 5 (EIRNS)—On Sunday, Dec. 5, Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche joined a special hour-long episode of the CGTN program “Dialogue: Ideas Matter,” with host Xu Qinduo to discuss the concept of “democracy.” This is part of an assertive and confident push by China to challenge the absurd “Democracy Summit” hosted at the end of the week by the United States.

Xu put the first question to Helga Zepp-LaRouche: what does democracy mean? Zepp-LaRouche pointed out that democracy wasn’t necessarily considered a good thing by Plato, to whom it was the other side of the coin of tyranny. Beyond the use of the term, it is essential to look at what governments do. Open-minded people considering China’s approach to democracy will recognize that it has advantages not present among the “Western” democracies.

Martin Sieff, with the Global Policy Institute spoke next, emphasizing that there does not exist a single form of democracy in the world. Social democracies, Japan, India, the United States—these are different types of democracies.

Politburo member Huang Kunming appeared next, in the form of a clip from a recent speech. He reminded his audience that the Communist Party of China arose in the pursuit of democracy to replace the old feudal order, and it continues to lead the fight for Chinese democracy. This phrase itself means that people are the rulers, and the purpose of government. And there is no one-size-fits-all approach to democracy. Indeed, having such a view is itself undemocratic. Allow the people of each nation to decide.

The next guest, Dr. Wang Huiyao, a member of the China State Council, discussed what is meant by “whole process people’s democracy.” There is a consultative democracy, whereby suggestions and criticisms from across the country are considered. The selection and election process itself is designed to ensure that the people best able to serve the people take office. The powerful development and social development of China vindicates its approach.

Michele Geraci, of Italy, agreed that the point of government is to achieve results, to provide for the people (unlike a feudal system). He contrasted process-democracy with results-oriented democracy. Which system delivers better results for the people; results that people will be happy with?

Following a clip in which the head of China Media Group asked whether the people of Afghanistan benefitted from American democracy, and whether George Floyd benefitted from democracy, Zepp-LaRouche was asked whether the police reflect the will of the people. She pointed out that the militarization of the police over decades has created problems, and that the people of the United States are extremely polarized. Biden said he’d unify the country. But the only way to bring about a unity is to collaborate on a worthwhile mission, as did the Founders, Lincoln, FDR, and JFK. Afghanistan represents the enormous failure of attempting to impose a model on another country. And the theft and withdrawal of financial and other resources from that nation is a terrible crime.

The Syrian Ambassador to the P.R.C., Imad Moustapha, spoke up to say that the United States is in no position to be the cardinal arbiter of what democracy is, or to declare whether another nation’s system is democratic. The United States is truly a single party state, ruled by the rich, which cynically uses the terms “democracy” and “freedom” to justify its policies.

Must the concept of “democracy” itself be updated to be more relevant to the modern, connected world, asked the host. Michele Geraci compared the cartelized control of social media to the feudal order in which individual rulers could make decisions, rather than a government that is answerable to the general welfare.

Sergey Shakhray, former Deputy Prime Minister of Russia, spoke in the form of a video clip, to say that by creating a division line between democracies and autocracies ignores the actual outcomes provided by China and many Western nations. Former Japanese Prime Minister Hatoyama also spoke to the need to look for commonalities with other nations, rather than focusing on differences.

Zepp-LaRouche responded that it was absolutely necessary to seek out shared interests. A dialogue of cultures can best proceed by seeking out the best aspects of other countries and cultures. She took on the descent into broadly expressed anti-Americanism that had entered the discussion to point to the powerful historical successes of European culture. The Italian Renaissance was based on the idea of man as a limitlessly perfectible being. The problem in the West is not that we did not have a great tradition, but that we moved away from it to a liberal outlook in which everything is allowed, creating a decadence of culture. “To focus on the common aims of mankind, we must appeal to the best traditions of each culture.” Zepp-LaRouche called for joining together to achieve modern health care in every nation, with a particular focus on Operation Ibn Sina to begin with Afghanistan, which is in such great need, along with such countries as Haiti, Yemen and Syria. Building health infrastructure goes hand in hand with overall development, both requiring and enabling it.

The common aims of mankind should be more clearly defined, and present conditions provide the opportunity for a breakthrough. Contrast the inflation of the trans-Atlantic with the physical economic growth typified by the Belt and Road Initiative. {The full Dialogue can be accessed here.}

The broadcast reflected China’s confident efforts to undermine the “Democracy Summit” and the need for a greater understanding in China of the history of and fights within extended European civilization, including, emphatically, the United States.


International Groups Rally to Help Cuba Get Syringes To Vaccinate Population

International Groups Rally to Help Cuba Get Syringes To Vaccinate Population

May 28 (EIRNS)–The U.S. economic blockade of Cuba, in place since 1962, plus more recent sanctions imposed by the U.S. government, make it impossible for Cuba to obtain the 20 million syringes it needs to vaccinate its 11.2 million citizens against COVID. It has already vaccinated one million people with its Soberana 2 and Abdala vaccines, but hopes to begin a mass vaccination campaign by sometime in June, as soon as its regulatory agency grants emergency use authorization and phase 3 clinical trials are completed. Operating under the slogan “the blockade kills–your solidarity kills the blockade,” many international charitable organizations and Cuban solidarity groups, from the U.S., Europe and Ibero-America have begun raising funds to purchase the syringes and send them to Cuba, Telam news agency reported today. This collaborative effort expects to be able to raise enough money to buy and send all 20 million syringes


Italian Scientists Praise Russian and Chinese Climate Models, Blast Coming IPCC Report

May 28 (EIRNS) — At the first “Climate Dialogues” webinar on May 26, organized by the Padua Association of Engineers and by Galileo magazine, Italian climate scientists have exposed the biased climate models used by the IPCC to justify a so-called “climate emergency” and have praised more balanced Russian and Chinese climate models. They have also warned against the new IPCC report, expected to be issued soon, which is based on questionable 2019 charts. There will be seven more webinars between now and October.

Prof. Nicola Scafetta, a world expert on climate models based on Sun activity, counterposed climate models based on CO2 to models based on astronomical oscillations. The former are used by the IPCC and are regularly refuted by real data. When applied to the past, they are not able to reproduce past temperatures. Astronomical oscillations (Sun, Earth and other planets) can explain climate cycles much better.

Whereas polls show that 97% of scientists agree that we are in a warming phase, only 26% of them are convinced that it is due to human activity to some extent. Therefore, the famous “consensus” reported by the media is fake news. Professor Scafetta does not exclude human participation in climate change, but it considers it secondary to astronomical causes.

The next IPCC report, coming soon, is based on a 2019 chart which is very problematic, Scafetta said, because it puts together a series of inconsistent data for the purpose of demonstrating their hypothesis. There is a 1,000-year cycle determined by solar activity, which IPCC simply ignores, which is unacceptable.

What is interesting, in his view, are the indices of climate sensitivity that measure climate variations when CO2 doubles. Here, Chinese and Russian models show much lower indices than the Western ones (in particular Canadian models.) The Chinese and Russian results are converging on real historical data, and they have a higher rate of forecasting actual temperatures.

Professor Scafetta was preceded by Massimo Coccato, chairman of the Padua Association of Engineers, Galileo editor Enzo Siviero and by Prof. Alberto Prestininzi, founder and chief editor of the Journal of Engineering Geology and Environment. Both Scafetta and Prestininzi are among the initiators of the 2019 “There Is No Climate Emergency” manifesto of 200 Italian scientists, which became an international group of over 500 scientists by October 2019. Since then, at least another 300 scientists have signed the manifesto.

Siviero, who moderated the event, announced the cycle of “climate dialogues,” which is open to all opinions based on scientific data. In order to be a good engineer you need to be a great humanist, Siviero said.

Professor Prestinizi regretted that supporters of man-made climate change won’t undertake a scientific debate with critics. The debate occurs in the media instead of within scientific forums, while hundreds of millions of people in the world, whose primary fuel source is coal, have no adequate access to electricity. He gave a short historical review of climate hysteria, highlighting the example of the “hockey stick” curve, which was ruled to be false even by a court. In 1977, the IPCC forecast a sea level increase of 6 meters by 2030. Eventually, they revised their forecast and the most recent ones say the increase will be between a half and 1 meter.


As UN Offers Grim Report on World Hunger, 120 NGOs and Charities Call On World Leaders to Act Now

Dec. 3 (EIRNS)–On Dec. 2 , the UN’s Office of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) released its Global Humanitarian Overview 2022, which offers a dire picture of world famine and urgent financing needs for humanitarian aid–now far below the $7 billion requested by World Food Program director David Beasley. Coinciding with this, from London, a group of 120 NGOs and charities of varying sizes, issued a letter to world leaders from London, under the group name “Action Against Hunger,” also urging that immediate action be taken to ameliorate the “famine risk that is soaring globally,” and about which the UN warned over six months ago.

” We,” the letter states, “a group of 120 NGOs from around the world – are at a loss that since then the crisis has only worsened. There has been a 370% rise in people experiencing catastrophic levels of hunger since April and now a staggering 45 million people are at extreme risk – on the brink of famine. These numbers do not tell the whole story. Behind them are people suffering immensely from a crisis that we can prevent. What will it take for this situation to change?” The letter cites warnings by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres of huge funding deficits, rising rates of hunger and malnutrition, escalating conflict and humanitarian crises, underscoring that conflict impedes humanitarian access, using starvation as a means of warfare. It calls on world leaders to fully fund a $41 billion humanitarian hunger response to end famine globally and address emergencies that fuel hunger– the COVID pandemic, conflict and climate change. {The letter is available here.}

The OCHA report reiterates warnings made by David Beasley, that 274 million people could be in need of humanitarian aid next year–up from 235 million in 2020 and 168 million in 2019. There are 45 million people across 43 countries now at risk of famine and $7 billion needed to avert disaster. “Food insecurity”–starvation–is cited as the major cause for humanitarian need. Since before the COVID pandemic began, the number of people at risk for famine has risen by 60%, the report adds.


Forget Geopolitics: Save Lives With Vaccines, Ibero-American Experts Tell Atlantic Council

Forget Geopolitics, Save Lives With Vaccines, Ibero-American Experts Tell Atlantic Council

May 26 (EIRNS)—On May 24, the Atlantic Council sponsored a webinar “The Race to Vaccinate: Chinese Vaccines in Latin America and the Caribbean,” including Guyana’s Health Minister Dr. Frank Anthony as its special guest, and a panel of three commentators including Chile’s former ambassador to China, Jorge Heine, epidemiologist Dr. Jennifer Bouey of the RAND Corporation, and Ernesto Londoño, the New York Times correspondent in Brazil. Although the Atlantic Council has eagerly participated in the recent media and think tank rug-chewing about China’s vaccines being just a “cynical” political maneuver to increase its influence In Latin America and the Caribbean, moderator Pepe Zhang had to handle the discussion in an even-handed way—unable to directly challenge the reality that China’s vaccines are savings lives in the region, while the U.S. is absent.

That point was driven home in spades in response to one of Zhang’s carefully-constructed questions, about whether China’s “vaccine diplomacy” represents “a new avenue for engagement” in the region. Ambassador Heine quickly dispensed with the narrative coming from Western media and Washington think tanks that China is using its vaccines for political leverage and “domination,” stating that the issue here is timing. Chinese vaccines come “now” to Latin America whereas the U.S. and European countries are hoarding and talking about 2022 or 2023. That’s no good, he said, describing as absurd the discussion in the Western media comparing the efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine to China’s Sinopharm, whose efficacy is reportedly 70%. “This is rich country club talk,” he pronounced. The perception of Chinese vaccines in the region is very high, Heine added. Latin America is “ground zero” for COVID cases and deaths, and how the crisis is handled “will be remembered for a very long time,” he warned. So, the U.S. should get going, and start providing vaccines fast.

While initially offering a factual report on the situation in Guyana and the surrounding region, Dr. Anthony made the same point. China had donated large quantities of PPE and lab equipment as well as 20,000 doses of Sinopharm vaccine. (Anglo-American media lie that China never donates anything. India donated 800,000 doses. USAID offered a grant, “but no vaccines.” The situation in the region is now critical, he warned, with a surge in cases and deaths in Jamaica, Barbados and Trinidad & Tobago. Guyana and the region have also been driven into deep economic crises. The bottom line, he said, is that there aren’t enough vaccines. That is the case across the Caribbean, he underscored, where vaccination rates are extremely low. He pointed out that it’s easier to store Sinopharm vaccines because they don’t require the same cold-chain capacity as Pfizer. President Biden has donated 4,000 doses of AstraZeneca vaccines to Mexico and Canada and is offering Southeast Asia more, but, Dr. Anthony added, “we’re in the U.S.’s backyard, and with more vaccines, we can change the situation.”

Even the New York Times correspondent, Ernesto Londoño, noted that while the U.S. warns that dealing with China “comes at a price,” the reality is that China responded to many countries in their “hour of need…they showed up first and scaled a victory,” while the U.S. was hoarding vaccines. And when asked whether there were “geopolitical competition” between China and the U.S. in the region, the RAND Corporation’s Dr. Jennifer Bouey, a Chinese-American epidemiologist who has extensive experience working in China, responded that the current situation could offer an opportunity for the U.S. and China to work together, as they had done in the past, collaborating on SARS, Avian flu, and Ebola to “build a public good.” So, she said, the precedent is there. In concluding, Zhang asked each participant to express a final message, to which Heine said: Get U.S. vaccines to Latin America ASAP; Londoño, in the face of enormous loss, help must come soon; Anthony: get the vaccines in ASAP. Dr. Bouey: U.S., Chinese and Latin American scientists can work together in resolving the crisis.


WHO Dir. Denounces “Scandalous” Vaccine Inequity, Warns the Pandemic Is Not Over

WHO Director Denounces “Scandalous” Vaccine Inequity, Warns the Pandemic Is Not Over

May 25 (EIRNS)–Addressing the 74th annual meeting of the World Health Assembly (WHA), on May 24, World Health Organization director, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, delivered a stark message. “Make no mistake,” he said. “This will not be the last time the world faces the threat of a pandemic. It’s an evolutionary certainty that there will be another virus with the potential to be more transmittable and more deadly than this one..” Even though global COVID-19 cases have been decreasing for three consecutive weeks, he warned, the world is still in “a fragile situation…. No country is out of the woods. We must be very clear: the pandemic is not over and it will not be over until and unless transmission is controlled in every last country.” 

In this context, Dr. Tedros denounced the “scandalous” inequity in vaccine distribution, which, he charged, “is perpetuating the pandemic.” He pointed out that 75% of all the vaccines that have been administered were in only ten wealthy countries. There is “no diplomatic way to say it: a small group of countries that make and buy the majority of the world’s vaccines, control the fate of the rest of the world.” Now, he admonished, it is incumbent on wealthier countries to share their vaccines with the WHO’s COVAX mechanism, which provides vaccines to poorer nations. He also announced a “Drive to December” campaign, in which countries should aim to vaccinate at least 10% of their populations by September, and at least 30% by the end of this year. But, in order to reach the September goal, he said, 250 million more people in low- and middle-income countries have to get vaccinated, “including all health workers and the most at-risk groups as the first priority. Vaccine manufacturing must be scaled up, he argued, and questioned why some companies won’t share their licenses and technologies with those manufacturers who want to help produce vaccines. 

“This is crucial to stop severe disease and death, keep our health workers safe and reopen our economies,” Dr. Tedros elaborated. He warned that “those countries that vaccinate children and other low-risk groups now, do so at the expense of health workers and high-risk groups in other countries. That’s the reality.” He noted that while virus variants don’t seem to have undermined current vaccines, variants are “changing constantly,” and that any future ones could “render our tools ineffective and drag us back to square one.”


Schiller Institute Rep. Injects Necessary Principle Into Dialogue on China Policy

Schiller Institute Representative Injects Necessary Principle Into Dialogue on China Policy

Nov. 18 (EIRNS)—At a Watson Institute conference entitled “Rising Tensions in the Taiwan Straits: Will the Chinese Civil War End with a Bang or a Whimper,” the following exchange occurred between Schiller Institute representative Cloret Ferguson and the two very prominent speakers, Ambassador Chas Freeman and Professor Lyle Goldstein.

Cloret Ferguson: It’s a pleasure to see and hear both of you. My question is, why would we not seek a more Westphalian approach to the question of China and US relations? For instance, the fact that China has elevated more than 850 million of its own population out of dire poverty and has said that they are reaching out to the whole world, to solve the problem of poverty of the whole world in 30 or 40 years, why would we not approach these relationships and take that branch as a means to solve the problem on a much more noble plane? Why would we not accept this as the pathway for relations between China and the US instead of dwelling on the past. We have the biggest military arsenal in the world!

Chas Freeman: The military industrial complex is us. We have a very militarized foreign policy. The first thought when we run into a problem abroad is, sanctions, which is coercive, a form of war, an economic war; then we send in the Marines, or if the Marines aren’t available, the Army or somebody. This is our mentality, and it comes out of our history, I suppose. You are very rational; that is exactly what I think we should be doing, that is, we should accept that there is no military answer that is acceptable to the Taiwan question, either for China, or for us. We need to find a way to take it off the track that it is now on toward a fight. I don’t know about you, but at the moment, Americans have no consensus on what the past means; our founding myths are all being deconstructed, our heroes are being toppled from their pedestals. New heroes are not really being invented that appeal to everyone. We are more divided than ever. We don’t agree on what the present is; we have no common vision of the future. And if you doubt that, look at Washington DC at the present. What Ed said, China has a clear ambition and a strategy for achieving it. We are countering it with fumbling and internal division, and a focus on military uses of force.

Lyle Goldstein: I think this is a very wise question, and for those of you not familiar with 17th- Century European diplomacy, this term, the Westphalian model, is something we really ought to get back to, and I think it is generally studied in international relations classes, but I don’t think it’s known beyond that, but I’m glad you brought it up. I do think it’s absolutely critical to a way forward with China. All it is, is a basic principle, countries can be different, probably should be different, they shouldn’t interfere in each other’s affairs, and this eventually stopped the incredible warring that was going on between various Catholic and Protestant states in Central Europe. It’s very applicable to today, that most diplomats agree with these basic principles, but it seems to me, I’m not sure why this is completely broken down in the modern discourse in international politics. I have a feeling it has something to do with Twitter and journalism and Cable News, and all this, and kind of democracy run amok. I think George Kennan and people like that would certainly favor returning to the old ways, to this understanding that it is quite normal that countries are run in very different ways, and to resist the temptation to constantly be telling other countries how to run their affairs.

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Are We Deserving of the Future’s Gratitude?

May 19 (EIRNS)—Educating and Challenging the Resistance to Malthusianism and War Grow; Challenge Axioms To Create the Alternative

The legitimacy of a government in the eyes of history — its “mandate from Heaven” — is to promote the common good of its people and of humanity in general. Which governments in the world today can be said to deserve this legitimacy?

In welcoming ambassadors from two dozen countries to Russia, President Putin identified, in his own way, the fundamental principle that Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche has emphasized is required for human survival — agapē: “The epidemic has proved a real test for such universal human values as solidarity, mutual assistance, and love for humanity…. It is possible to ensure peace, stability and sustainable global development only through the efforts of the entire international community…. We are convinced that everything must be done to prevent the tragedy of World War II from repeating itself, so that its lessons will not be forgotten. All of us must cherish the priceless experience and spirit of allied relations during the struggle against common challenges and threats…. We must ensure the well-being and prosperity of all human beings.”

The Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites, which Zepp-LaRouche co-founded, insists in its recent statement that “Health security is possible anywhere, only by provision everywhere of sufficient public health infrastructure and medical treatment capacity. This, in turn, depends directly on expanding water, power and food, which is associated with building up industrial capacity, as well as providing for adequate transportation, housing and other basics.”

Against this humanist outlook stands the imperial, Malthusian model for society. It is represented in its more historical form in the City of London and Wall Street — whose increasing power over the nominally sovereign governments of the trans-Atlantic world recalls the earlier “privatization” of the British government under the British East India Company. And it has also adopted a new guise in the “synthetic left” which calls for an end to development and a redefinition of progress in identitarian and environmentalist terms — of “progressives” who think there should be fewer people, “progressives” taken in by uncontextualized appeals to effectively support fascist policies under the rubric of defending human rights.

This Malthusian monster seeks to implement a worldwide Great Reset that will reduce the potential human population of the world: dramatically increasing the physical cost of providing and consuming energy (through drastically reducing the use of hydrocarbons while demanding greatly expanded mining to produce rare earth elements necessary for batteries and motors) while pointlessly and perilously heightening the danger of deadly military conflict with Russia and China, to prevent any other paradigm from taking hold. Rather than moving for the development of low-income nations in Africa, the Malthusian beast seeks to pay these nations not to develop, by essentially allowing developed nations to pay for carbon offsets, which would be transferred to poor nations to leave their resources (at least those for domestic consumption rather than export) in the ground.

But human beings are resource creators, not merely resource consumers. The climate change catastrophism promoted today as a new secular (or Satanic?) religion, like such earlier studies as the 1980 Global 2000 Report, relies on the same old discredited Malthusian theorizing that has led its predecessors to make terrifying forecasts that were soon falsified by reality.

Human beings are resource creators, not merely resource consumers. Every new “mouth to feed” is associated with a new “mind to educate.” It is the ability of each human individual to make enduring contributions to human history that demands peace and development throughout the world.

It is for the sake of past, present, and future humanity that this view of the human individual be brought forward to guide policy, rejecting the depraved outlooks that would tolerate Israeli murder, Green destruction of productivity, and the drive to draw the United States into war with Russia and China.

Will we become deserving of the praise of the future?


Putin Tells Ambassadors, the Pathway to Peace Lies Through ‘Love for Humanity’

May 19 (EIRNS)—Welcoming new ambassadors from 23 countries yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed the unstable international situation, which as he observed, “is even becoming more complicated.” He named the crises facing the world’s nations: the coronavirus pandemic, the deterioration of the system of strategic stability and arms control, terrorism “rearing its ugly head once again,” growing problems in the sphere of international information security, the risks of drug trafficking and organized crime, decades-old regional conflicts in Afghanistan and Libya becoming aggravated, and now the dramatic escalation in the Middle East.

Putin then, in his own way, invoked the principle of agapē without which Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche has recently insisted humanity may not survive as a species, as the way out for all nations. Putin told the Ambassadors:

“The epidemic has proved a real test for such universal human values as solidarity, mutual assistance, and love for humanity….

“I repeat once again: It is possible to ensure peace, stability and sustainable global development only through the efforts of the entire international community. We are calling for well-coordinated work by states, permanent members of the UN Security Council and all concerned countries. As you know, Russia has recently celebrated the anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War that started 80 years ago, on June 22, 1941, when the Nazis treacherously attacked our Motherland….

“We are convinced that everything must be done to prevent the tragedy of World War II from repeating itself, so that its lessons will not be forgotten. All of us must cherish the priceless experience and spirit of allied relations during the struggle against common challenges and threats. We must remember the consequences of policies pandering to nationalism and xenophobia, and we must jointly elaborate a positive and unifying agenda to forge a more equitable and democratic multipolar world order. We must ensure the well-being and prosperity of all human beings.”


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