Executive Intelligence Review, Volume 47, Number 27, July 3, 2020

- Cover

- Masthead

- PDF edition Table of Contents — Volume 47, Number 27, July 3, 2020

- I. Science and Statecraft

- BOOK REVIEW: Who Was Charles Babbage? by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (2000)

- Putin’s Discussion of the Second World War Can Prevent World War III! by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

- John Bolton Exposes Himself and the Coup by Barbara Boyd

- II. The Principles of Statecraft (Schiller Institute International Conference June 27, 2020)

- Leaders and Youth Examine Every Aspect of a Crisis Summit for World Recovery

- PANEL 1: Instead of Geopolitics: The Principles of Statecraft

- Opening Remarks by Lyndon LaRouche and Dennis Speed

- Helga Zepp-LaRouche: The Alternative to a Dark Age and a Third World War

- Dr. Jin Zhongxia: The Fundamentals of East-West Philosophic Relations

- Boris Meshchanov: Russia’s Relations with the African Continent

- Dr. Joycelyn Elders: ALL THE WORLD IS AT STAKE, AND ALL THE WORLD IS IN NEED: A New World Healthcare Platform

- Dr. Ding Yifan: The Epidemic Demonstrates That Humanity is a Community of Common Destiny

- DeWayne Hopkins: A View from the Iowa Farm Belt: The Muscatine-China Cultural Connection

- Daisuke Kotegawa: A Personal Recollection of Economic Assistance in Africa

- Ramasimong Phillip Tsokolibane: You Must Help Make the Decision: It Will Either Be Africa’s Time to Die, Or To Lead Humanity into a Bright Future

- Discussion

World Recovery Through a

New Bretton Woods System

Founder: Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (1922–2019)

Editor-in-Chief: Helga Zepp-LaRouche

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EIR Contents

www.larouchepub.com — Volume 47, Number 27, July 3, 2020

Cover This Week

Stuart Lewis

Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. in his State of the Union webcast, January 22, 2011.

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WORLD RECOVERY THROUGH

A NEW BRETTON WOODS SYSTEM

I. SCIENCE AND STATECRAFT

3 BOOK REVIEW

Who Was Charles Babbage?

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

May 11, 2000

8 Putin’s Discussion of the Second World War Can Prevent World War III

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

11 John Bolton Exposes Himself and the Coup

by Barbara Boyd

II. THE PRINCIPLES OF STATECRAFT

Schiller Institute Conference on the Internet

June 27, 2020

Will Humanity Prosper or Perish?

The Future Demands a

‘Four-Power’ Summit Now

15 Leaders and Youth Examine Every Aspect of a Crisis Summit for World Recovery

PANEL 1

Instead of Geopolitics:

The Principles of Statecraft

16 Opening Remarks

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. and Dennis Speed

19 The Alternative to a Dark Age and a Third World War

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

22 The Fundamentals of East-West Philosophic Relations

Dr. Jin Zhongxia

25 Russia’s Relations with the African Continent

by Boris Meshchanov

28 A New World Healthcare Platform

by Dr. Joycelyn Elders

30 The Epidemic Demonstrates that Humanity Is a Community of Common Destiny

by Ding Yifan

31 A View from the Iowa Farm Belt: The Muscatine-China Cultural Connection

by DeWayne Hopkins

33 A Personal Recollection of Economic Assistance in Africa

by Daisuke Kotegawa

35 You Must Help Make the Decision: It Will Either Be Africa’s Time to Die, Or to Lead Humanity into a Bright Future

by Ramasimong Phillip Tsokolibane

36 Discussion Among Participants

I. Science and Statecraft

May 11, 2000

BOOK REVIEW

Who Was Charles Babbage?

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

Editor’s Note: This article by Mr. LaRouche was first published in EIR Vol. 27, No. 20, May 19, 2000, pp. 24-27

The Cogwheel Brain

by Doron Swade

London: Little, Brown, 2000

Hardbound, 342 pages, £14.99

The specific merit in Doron Swade’s new assessment of Charles Babbage’s role in the development of modern mathematical computing machines, lies in Swade’s notable part in the actual construction of a machine according to Babbage’s own designs. Swade describes the circumstances leading into the first public demonstration, which was made in London, on Friday, November 29, 1991, three days after inventor Babbage’s 200th birthday.

On background, Swade reports: “Charles Babbage came into my life in May 1985 when I was appointed curator of computing at the Science Museum in London.” He describes his own role, in that capacity, leading to the launching of the project culminating in both the 1991 public demonstration, and the writing of his biographical account of Babbage’s role in this particular matter. He describes the collection of calculating machines which that appointment placed into his custody. So, he encountered Charles Babbage:

[T]here was an incomparable prize which stood apart from everything else. This was the largest collection of physical relics of Babbage’s efforts to construct his vast and intricate machines. This collection of trophies, all on public display, includes the experimental assembly of the Analytical Engine that was under construction at the time of Babbage’s death, all he ever built of that revolutionary machine. Its modest size gives little clue to the monumental intellectual accomplishment of its conception and its much publicized role as the symbolic antecedent of the modern computer.

That part of Swade’s account, covering the period from the launching of the Science Museum’s Babbage project, from May 20, 1985 through the public demonstration of November 29, 1991, occupies the concluding, third section of his book, which is subtitled: “A Modern Sequel.” For qualified specialists familiar with earlier standard sources on Babbage’s life and work, the useful contribution of Swade’s book, lies almost entirely in the content of that third section.

The misleading elements in the earlier part of Swade’s book as a whole, lie in his fallacy of composition. Instead of proceeding from what Babbage represented in science, from his days at Cambridge, on, Swade pushes those issues to the side. He attempts to explain Babbage as a whole, from a narrower standpoint of the computing-machine projects as such, rather than defining the computing-machine projects from the standpoint of the issues of the collaboration with Herschel, the issues which made Babbage the target of an enraged English academic establishment at that time.

Swade pushes aside the matters which he declines to examine; as a result, Swade presents a systemic misrepresentation of Babbage’s significance as among the central figures of the early Nineteenth-Century internal history of science in England. Babbage was not the principal hero of British science as a whole, during the period of the adult life of astronomer John Herschel, but is among the leading such figures.

Babbage, for a time, played a leading political role in shaping the history of British science. This began during his student days at Cambridge, and continued for a few decades after that. Notable, on this account, is Swade’s misreading of the related political issues of British science and economic policy during the period from the Congress of Vienna to the early days of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS). It is in the last section of the book, after Swade has dropped further attempts to interpret the issues reflecting that early Nineteenth-Century controversy and its aftermath, that he is able to attack the more narrowly specialized area of his account in a clear-headed and relatively faultless way.

LoC

Charles Babbage

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Who Was Charles Babbage?

The issues posed by that, Swade’s fallacy of composition, are by no means merely academic ones; but, are, again, today, a life and death issue for the economy of the United Kingdom. The implications of the peril to one of the U.K.’s last remaining keystone industries, Rover, is one which Charles Babbage, in his time would have taken up most heartily. Would the threatened death of imperilled Rover mean, today, the end of technological competence in the U.K.? That same kind of strategic issue was posed in a somewhat different, but not dissimilar historical setting, during the first years of John Herschel’s and Babbage’s youthful collaboration on related issues of science.

To be fair, in the Preface to the book, Swade did forewarn the reader of the crucial element of risk in his undertaking an appreciation of a subject-matter as historically and scientifically sophisticated as Babbage’s life and work actually represents.

At that time [May 1985] I was an electronics engineer on the [Science] Museum’s staff, designing interactive computer-based displays for the galleries which occupy some seven acres of public exhibition space. Engineers and scientists are trained largely without the civilizing influences of history or philosophy, and I was no exception. The two years I spent at Cambridge in the early 1970s was a rewarding counterbalance, though it brought me no closer to the nineteenth century, to Babbage or to his work.

Although I see no specific harm done, within Swade’s, somewhat oversimplified, concluding appreciation of Babbage’s contributions to the development of the modern computing machine, he does miss the key point about the history of computing machinery considered as a whole. The tulip-bubble-style catastrophe now in progress within the financially bloated speculation in “information economy” stockholdings, should provide Swade the opportunity to devote his next book on computing machinery, to such relevant matters which he overlooked in the present one.

I now summarize that case, for those readers who, like Swade, might benefit from my summary reminders on these matters of the history of science and economy.

Swade should have taken the first development of a modern computing machine, by Johannes Kepler, as his point of departure for locating the significance of the collaboration of Babbage and fellow-student John Herschel. As Kepler emphasizes, in his The New Astronomy, in his attack on the lack of competence of the theoretical side of the work of Claudius Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Tycho Brahe, it was the practical problems posed by the study of the implications of the elliptical orbit of Mars, which continued to supply the impetus for the development of computing machinery, from Kepler, through Pascal, Leibniz, and the circles of such collaborators of Gauss as England’s William and John Herschel.

Photo by Julia Margaret Cameron

John Herschel

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There is nothing in Swade’s book which reflects the titanic quarrel over both scientific method in general, and mathematics in particular, which enveloped, and was expressed by young Herschel’s and Babbage’s devastating, pro-Leibniz attack on the mind-dulling methods of Isaac Newton, during their attendance at Cambridge.

To understand with even minimal competence, the problems and related controversies surrounding the development and applications of modern computing machinery, it is indispensable to start from the most essential controversy within modern physical science. That issue is: whether physical science should be appreciated from the standpoint of the “ivory tower” outlook typified by such empiricist followers of neo-Ockhamite Paolo Sarpi, as both Bertrand Russell and such among Russell’s devotees as Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann, or from the contrary standpoint, of viewing mathematics as rooted in, and to be understood from the standpoint of experimental physics?

From the beginning of the development of modern computing machines, this was the crucially underlying issue to be addressed. This begins with the Kepler machine reconstructed by Pascal, and the revolutionary advances contributed by Leibniz, the last respecting both the principles of construction and application of computing machines, and the nature and function of binary numbers.

There are some secondary features of the history of computing machines, which admittedly do not involve that issue of scientific method. Nonetheless, the point may be fairly put, that, in the broad sweep of the matter, a modern secondary and university instruction, both in law and economics, as in mathematics and physical science, seems to prefer to promote the obsession, that the function of mathematics is to degrade physical science to a mere describing of nature, that according to the modern positivist’s ivory-tower geometries, or digital-keyboard algebras, rather than the contrary view, of learning the universal principles we have yet to discover at the present boundaries of experimental physical science. It is only from the contrary standpoint of such opponents of ivory-tower formalism as Kepler, Leibniz, Kästner, Gauss, and Riemann, that the crucial issues for the continuing development of computing machines can be properly appreciated.

The latter standpoint, was that of modern science, from Nicholas of Cusa’s seminal De docta ignorantia, through Cusa’s self-proclaimed followers Luca Pacioli, Leonardo da Vinci, and Kepler, and, after Kepler, of Pascal, Huyghens, Leibniz, Gauss’s teacher Abraham Kästner, Gauss, Wilhelm Weber, and Riemann. It is the bottomless font of formal anomalies, which experimental physics repeatedly forces upon the attention of pre-existing mathematical assumptions, which is the key to the modern history of computing machines since Kepler. This was the point of view of Kepler’s founding of modern astronomy, the point of view emphasized by the crucial work of Fermat, of Pascal, Huyghens, Leibniz, and, most emphatically the Herschels’ contemporary, Gauss.

Gauss’s solution for the orbit of the asteroid Ceres, Gauss’s related development of geodesy, and Gauss’s famous essay on the principles of curved surfaces, typify the kinds of issues which occupied the attention of Babbage and John Herschel. As Gauss’s Ceres project typifies the case: How, from measuring relatively tiny samples of action within a regular system, can we adduce the measurably characteristic action which defines the curvature of that system as a whole? Riemann’s 1954 habilitation dissertation summarizes and typifies the work of Gauss and Gauss’s predecessors to this effect.

From that standpoint, modern mathematical physical science, has but begun to scratch the surface, both in discovery of new physical principles, and in the revolutionary changes which those discoveries will impose upon the continued revolutionary transformations in the proper, current definition of the principles of mathematics itself. From this, flows the endless task of freshly redefining mathematics: not only with increasing precision in experimental measurements, but also in entirely new kinds of non-linear methods. There, we meet the crucial function which the continued, revolutionary development of computing machinery must contribute to the progress of civilization.

Babbage, especially in his collaboration with John Herschel, reflected their shared, accurate, and openly expressed concern, that, at that time, the United Kingdom was being left strategically behind both continental Europe and the United States, by the progress of science and mathematics in those latter nations, which was ongoing during the early Nineteenth Century. This is where Swade’s book has missed the point. Two paragraphs from early pages of his book, brought together, demonstrate that point.

Science in Post-Vienna-Congress England

It is most notable, that, nowhere does Swade take up the content of the way in which the Cambridge “manifesto” of Herschel’s and Babbage’s Cambridge book, on the subject of “D-ism and Dot-age,” shook up the academic life of England at that time. Instead, Swade makes an oblique, tendentious, and extremely misleading reference to the interest of Babbage and Herschel in the developments within France’s École Polytechnique at that time. I begin with quoting two successive paragraphs, from Swade’s opening chapter in full, and then juxtapose that to most of a paragraph from earlier in the same chapter. Both must be cited in full to present the issue fairly.

Babbage’s interest in mathematics was evident early on. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in April 1810, aged eighteen, already a precociously accomplished mathematician, and as a new undergraduate he looked forward to having his curiosity and mathematical puzzlement illuminated by his tutors. To his disappointment he found his teachers a staid lot, stuck in an unchanging curriculum and uninterested in the new Continental theories which excited him. Disaffected, independent-minded and even rebellious, he pursued a programme of study of his own which favoured the work of French mathematicians. Babbage was a radical: he admired Napoleonic France (with which Britain was at war), decried the unquestioned acceptance of religious doctrine reflected in the inflexible regulation of university life by the Church [of England], and lamented the stagnant state of mathematics in England. Active and spirited, he became one of the instigators of the Analytical Society, which was dedicated to reform of English mathematics.

At Cambridge he enjoyed student life to the full. He formed an enduring friendship with John Herschel [the son of the leading scientist of England], who had entered St. John’s College in 1809, and relished the company of a wide circle of friends. He played chess, took part in all-night sixpenny whist sessions, and bunked lectures and chapel to sailing on the river with his chums.

Before commenting on this excerpt, turn to the second.

The heroes of the age laid much of the foundation for modern scientific and industrial life—Michael Faraday, Charles Wheatstone, Humphrey Davy, John Dalton, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Joseph Whitworth, and Charles Darwin. It was also an age of quantification in which science and engineering set about reducing the world to number. With the rise of science and the burgeoning Industrial Revolution, the need for accurate and convenient numerical calculations mushroomed.

Portrait by Christian Albrecht Jensen

Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss

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All but the concluding sentence of that latter excerpt, is pretty much standard empiricist’s mythological fustian, with no better than a few, almost accidental connections to the comparative developments in North America, Continental Europe, and England during the first quarter of the Nineteenth Century. The fact of the matter is, that, during that period, but for the work of John’s father, William Herschel, the state of science and technology in England and its universities, represented a stagnant backwater in the development of science and technology.

Indeed, that was the point which William’s son, John Herschel, Babbage, and their friends made, in translating a modern French calculus text into English, in their efforts to introduce competence into the moribund mathematics training in England at that time. Moreover, within the ebullient wit of their student-years publication, “D-ism and Dot-age,” they presented shocking proof that this was the state of science and mathematics in England at that time.

Moreover, the historical significance of the work of Herschel, Babbage, et al., from the beginning of their collaboration in this matter, was that they succeeded in provoking relevant English reformers to bring about the revival of science and technological progress in England during the second quarter of that century. The establishment of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), whose colonial branch became the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), was an outgrowth of the success of Herschel, Babbage, et al., to expose, and remedy somewhat the virtually bankrupt condition of English science during the period of, and immediately following the Napoleonic wars.

The relevant fact is, that from the accession to power in France, by the networks of Cardinal Mazarin and his protégé Jean-Baptiste Colbert, until the increasing decadence of France’s École Polytechnique under the Restoration monarchy, France was, beyond reasonable objections, the center of the progress of science and technology for the world as a whole. The work of Desargues, Fermat, Pascal, Huyghens, Leibniz, and the Swiss Jean Bernouilli, typified this Paris-centered network, which came, by the close of the Seventeenth Century, to be a world-wide leadership in science, centered around Leibniz’s Acta Eruditorum. The role of England’s Royal Society merely sat at the table of continental science in this respect.

Later, during the middle of the Eighteenth Century, all of the leading currents in European culture, including science, were embroiled in a virtual war, a contest between two opposing currents. On the one side, there was the Classical faction, gathered around such figures as the scientist Abraham Kästner at Göttingen University, Kästner’s Gotthold Lessing, and Moses Mendelssohn. On the opposing side, was the anti-Classical, Romantic school, typified by the empiricists and the Cartesians, of the Eighteenth-Century British and French Enlightenment. The former, typified by Kästner, Lessing, and Mendelssohn, were openly avowed defenders of the legacy of Leibniz and J.S. Bach. Thus, until the emergence of the leading influence of Kästner’s former student Gauss, with the success of Gauss’s Ceres project, the center of development of physical science and mathematics, was in the Leibniz tradition of France’s Gaspard Monge and his associates Lazare Carnot and A.M. Legendre, while leadership in Classical artistic culture was centered in the Germany of poets and thinkers, that of Kästner, Lessing, Mendelssohn, Haydn, Goethe, Mozart, Schiller, and Beethoven.

During the period from 1789 through 1827, history witnessed the transfer of leadership in science from the France of Monge, Legendre, and Lazare Carnot, into the Germany of Gauss and Alexander von Humboldt. École Polytechnique member Alexander von Humboldt served as the key figure in moving scientific leadership from under the decadent influence of the Restoration monarchy and its Augustin Cauchy, into Germany. Gauss served, together with École Polytechnique veteran Lejeune Dirichlet, as Humboldt’s key figures in the emerging supremacy of German science. Charles Babbage, not accidentally, was a participant in the extended circles of Humboldt.

It was during the pre-Vienna Congress period, while the Napoleonic wars were still ongoing, that Gauss’s work in astronomy electrified all Europe’s scientific circles. Astronomer William Herschel, the father of astronomer John, was part of the circles of Gauss at that time.

Thus, the material from the three paragraphs quoted above, shows that Swade’s studies had made him aware of the setting and significance of Herschel’s and Babbage’s attacks on the bankruptcy of English science at the time of Babbage’s Cambridge years; it shows, that, for whatever reason, Swade elected to attempt to divert the reader’s attention from such matters, by the relevant sort of what today’s American vernacular terms euphemistically, “spin.”

Otherwise, we should be pleased that Swade and his institution have done the sort of work which is described in the concluding section of that book. The account is useful as well as pleasant reading. However, if the economy of the United Kingdom is to be rescued from the disaster so aptly summarized in recent statements by Michael Heseltine and Anthony Wedgwood Benn, much thought and effort will be needed, to develop the young scientific and industrial cadres needed to effect a viable sort of modern reindustrialization of England’s economy.

In that connection, two points which I have stressed here, ought to be leading concerns of those, of author Swade’s generation, who are either coming into senior positions of responsibility at this time, or have already arrived there.

First, the aspect of the Babbage case which I have stressed here, should be studied in comparing the ruined situation of British science and technology, during the period of the Napoleonic wars and immediately following, to the ruinous situation to which Wedgwood Benn, Heseltine, and Ken Livingstone, among many others, have made reference recently.

Second, relevant parties in the U.K. must recognize, that the new leading issues of science and technology, under the emerging “post-information society” epoch now erupting, requires a ridding of science and economic policy of the curse of “ivory tower” mathematics. The frontiers of science and technology today, lie in the domain of the non-linear properly defined, in respect of living processes, microphysics generally, and elsewhere. To master those frontiers, requires both the scientific cadres and skilled industrial labor and farmers, qualified for that sort of job.

Putin’s Discussion of the Second World War Can Prevent World War III!

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

kremlin.ru

Vladimir Putin, President of Russia.

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The following statement was issued on June 24 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.

Bundesarchiv

From left to right: Chamberlain (UK), Daladier (France), Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), and Ciano (Italy), pictured before signing the Munich Agreement, which gave the Sudetenland, part of Czechoslovakia, to Germany, 1938.

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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.

Adolf Hitler, Time magazine’s “Man of the Year”: 1938.

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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 Khalkhin Gol.

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 had The Hitler Book published 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 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.

John Bolton Exposes Himself and the Coup

by Barbara Boyd

White House/Shealah Craighead

John Bolton with President Donald Trump, June 5, 2019.

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June 28—John Bolton’s revenge porn novel is out. Despite its incorporation into the mainstream media’s virulent anti-Trump spew for a period of 2-3 weeks, its reality is sinking in. It is a bore. Even Chris Wallace says so, on Fox. Rudy Giuliani, the President’s personal lawyer, admits to a catastrophic mistake in recommending that Bolton, a personal friend, take over from H.R. McMaster as National Security Adviser.

If you want the short version, rather than the 578-page Bolton daily diary of notes congratulating himself for his superior intelligence when compared to the person he considers a vulgar oaf occupying the White House, then watch the ad campaign now being mounted by the Lincoln Project nightly on Fox. Bolton and the Lincoln Project are kin: both are products of the Bush-associated Republican elites that Donald Trump defeated in 2016. They are now out to defeat him in 2020, using the politicized COVID epidemic, race war, fake polls, and outright censorship to sow pessimism and atomize the President’s base, while continuing their efforts to destabilize the presidency itself.

In chapter after chapter of Bolton’s book, he inadvertently reveals the true source of “turmoil” in the White House. The representatives of the Republican, Democratic, and military elite, from which any U.S. president picks a government, conspire endlessly against a President who has acted to end the financial and imperial regime put into place following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. That regime depends financially on the endless wars which Donald Trump was elected to end.

Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Joe Biden are on the other side of this. They conspired, throughout 2016, to tar Trump and Russia in a totally fake conspiracy. They now rail at Trump’s avoidance of the latest fake intelligence dump, the claim that Russia paid the Taliban to target American soldiers. They say Trump’s inaction amounts to treason. The intelligence dump is intended to keep American troops in Afghanistan protecting the world’s opium supply chain, while Trump seeks a total U.S. withdrawal.

Time after time, in Bolton’s book, Trump, like the Road Runner, aborts their plans for war, reminding them after endless arguments, that he has “heard from his base” and “they don’t want this.” Unable to fathom that Trump actually has a base that elected him President, and to whom he answers, Bolton envisions his main opposition, in addition to Trump himself, to consist of Tucker Carlson and Senator Rand Paul. He rails against both repeatedly.

DoS/Ron Przysucha

John Bolton speaks with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo outside the 2018 G20 Leaders’ Summit, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

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Typical is Bolton’s account of the massive scheme—involving generals in the Pentagon, Mike Pompeo at State, Gina Haspel at CIA, pro-war Senators and Congressmen, Republican funders, and Fox News—ginning up for a military attack on Iran in retaliation for the June 20, 2019 shoot-down of an unmanned American Global Hawk drone. Among the people Bolton names in the book as those willing to keep this scheme on track were General Jack Keane, Senator Lindsay Graham, and Senator Tom Cotton.

But John Eisenberg, a lawyer in the White House Counsel’s Office, at the very last minute, informed the President that the Iran strike would kill 100-150 Iranians. It was hardly reciprocal: 150 humans vs. an unmanned drone. All of the schemers, it turns out, had assiduously avoided presenting the President of the United States with potential human casualty figures. Bolton declares that Trump’s calling off the strike was the “most irrational thing” he had ever witnessed a President do, while decrying the “chaotic” process that allowed a lowly White House lawyer to prevent a potential war.

White House/Tia Dufour

John Bolton, speaking with reporters outside the White House, May 1, 2019.

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Who Is John Bolton?

In describing the present British Empire, Lyndon LaRouche likened it to a “slime mold”:

The Anglo-Dutch Liberal system is the Anglo-Dutch Liberal version of the old Venetian oligarchical system....This system was established as a system of bankers, of loan sharks, which is operating above the level of governments, financing governments and controlling governments....

And a slime mold goes through a phase where it seems to be a uniform slime, and then at another point, it takes the form of individualities standing up in the middle of the slime, as individualities.... So you have a system throughout the world now, which is centered nominally in Anglo-Dutch liberalism, the Dutch and the British financial system. Nominally, it’s under the King or Queen of England, but in point of fact, it controls the King and Queen of England, or whatever. What it is, it’s a concert of private banking interests like a slime mold, which, in concert—while they’re cutting each other’s throats in competition, and so forth—work to try to impose their system on the world....

While Bolton attempts to dress up his beliefs as a synthesis of “Edmond Burke, Dean Acheson, and John Foster Dulles, and the Federalist papers,” which is bad enough, he explicitly states that his guiding principle is that “homo sapiens are hardwired for violent conflict.” In other words, Bolton says that men and women are beasts, acting in a slime-mold war of each against all, precisely the evil view described by LaRouche. Small wonder then, that President Trump would attempt to rewire this monster in one of the book’s more humorous and telling episodes, by persistently asking Bolton why he is so hostile.

White House/Eric Draper

Bolton’s true pedigree is that of a hired thug for the Republican Party of George H.W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who is pictured here with George W. Bush.

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

James Baker III

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There are two telling points in Bolton’s book that underline his true pedigree as a hired thug for the Republican Party built by George H.W. Bush and Dick Cheney. The first is his reference to Bush lawyer James Baker III as a kind of sherpa throughout his career. The second is that Bolton nowhere references the ongoing coup against the president as a factor shaping policy. In fact, he as much as admits that he is a part of that coup. Commenting on the selection of Michael Flynn rather than himself as National Security Adviser, Bolton tells us that Henry A. Kissinger had assured him that Flynn would be out within a year.

Bolton’s financial disclosures, filed when he became National Security Adviser in April of 2018, reveal the same thing. First, Bolton’s wife Gretchen, is a financial adviser for AXA, the two-century old French global insurance firm, which ranked 11th in the world in terms of assets as of 2019—a bona fide leading member of the slime mold. John Bolton was, at the time of filing, a paid adviser to the Rhone Group, the New York private equity firm operated by Robert Agnostinelli and Steven Langman. It is the corporate affiliation most highlighted by Bolton in his book.

Both Agnostinelli and Langman are veterans of the synarchist investment house Lazard Freres, under the tutelage of Felix Rohatyn. Lazard’s Paris branch and its Banque Worms played a major role in installing Europe’s pre-World War II fascist governments. Agnostinelli is, by his account, a close friend of former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, George W. Bush, Jeb Bush, and former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar. He is, also by his account, fanatically pro-Israel and fanatically pro-British Empire and British colonialism, just like Bolton.

Bolton is also a senior fellow of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he has lived when out of government for years. AEI is considered to be the most prominent Republican Party think tank presently, and during the Bush Administration was the center of advocacy of the Iraq War and regime-change throughout the Middle East and the world. It is funded by the Koch Brothers and related conservative donors, billionaire Wall Street operators like Bruce Kovner, and a plethora of intelligence community-related foundations including the Bradley, Smith-Richardson, and Scaife foundations.

In the run-up to the Iraq War, AEI rented space to the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), the propaganda front for the war. Bolton was a director of PNAC. AEI has included Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, John Yoo, and Dick Cheney himself among its scholars, advisers, and board members. Bolton’s service in the George W. Bush State Department was rammed through by Dick Cheney personally, and it was Bolton, according to Congressman Henry Waxman, who inserted the false British intelligence claim that Iraq had imported yellow cake uranium from Niger, into President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union speech. Bolton is also chairman of the Gatestone Institute, famously anti-Muslim, anti-Iran, and pro-Israel, funded by Sears heir and Manhattan socialite Nina Rosenwald.

Left: CC/Petra Miller; right: Wikimedia Commons

John Bolton has been a paid adviser to the Rhone Group, co-founded and operated by Robert Agnostinelli (left) and Steven Langman (right).

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Otherwise, Bolton made a mint as a paid correspondent for Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, on speaking engagements for various hardline Israeli and pro-Israel groups, speaking engagements for the Iranian cult MEK, which had been branded a terrorist organization by the State Department, and by writing various articles in the British press.

In 2014, Bolton founded a Super PAC aimed at securing his position as Secretary of State in the next Republican Administration, then presumed to be that of Jeb Bush. His political action committee (PAC) contributed to key Congressional and Senate races in the 2014 Midterms. The main funder of Bolton’s PAC from inception was Robert Mercer, the London and New York hedge fund king, who was also funding Breitbart News under Steve Bannon. Bolton’s PAC contracted with Cambridge Analytica, the British military voter data and profiling firm, which had been bought by Bannon and the Mercers, introducing Cambridge and its voter profiling operations into the American political environment.

Suppressing the American Revolt

Cambridge, the Mercers, Bannon, and Kellyanne Conway initially supported, in 2016, the British Tory favorite, Ted Cruz, for President. It now seems clear that this entire operation was aimed at profiling and containing the revolt of working- and middle-class Americans which expressed itself in Trump’s surprise 2016 election. Pessimism, identity politics, and such psychological warfare pacification operations as Q have been used to distract, divide, and atomize the Trump base. The operation is similar to the profiling and destruction of the Tea Party movement.

When Trump won the election, the Mercers and Bannon campaigned relentlessly to make Bolton Secretary of State. That operation failed when Trump selected Rex Tillerson on the recommendation of former CIA and Defense Chief Robert Gates. Bolton’s inside man, Bannon, was fired after collaborating with the trash-for-cash author Michael Wolff on the anti-Trump novella, Fire and Fury. Bannon, on his way out the door, showed his true colors, declaring the Trump Administration to be “a criminal enterprise,” just like Bolton has done since he was canned. Bannon is now struggling, nonetheless, to reinsert himself into Trump’s 2020 campaign and to turn the campaign toward an incessant “war with China” theme, rather than the optimistic and massive infrastructure and reindustrialization program which won Trump the election in 2016, and would, if realized, do so again.

II. Conference: The Principles of Statecraft

Schiller Institute International Conference

June 27, 2020

Will Humanity Prosper, or Perish?

The Future Demands a

‘Four-Power’ Summit Now

Leaders and Youth Examine Every Aspect of a Crisis Summit for World Recovery

Note: We present here the edited transcripts of the first of three panels of the one-day Schiller Institute conference. Reports on the remainder of the conference will be published in future issues. The videos of the conference are available here.

In a day-long conference with some two dozen presenters and discussants across its three panels, the Schiller Institute on June 27 thoroughly examined the emergency summit process that major nations’ leaders will have to launch, in order for the human species to survive the multiple, reinforcing crises of pandemic disease, economic collapse and famine.

This is the third in a series of conferences that began with an April 25-26 event. Conference host Dennis Speed noted that, “These conferences were devoted to the idea of the creation of a Four-Power summit—Russia, China, India, and the United States,” and the creation of a New Bretton Woods global credit system.

Current and former government officials from Russia, the United States, China and Japan, as well as constituency and youth activists, discussed the many actions to enable humanity to prosper which could come from such a summit process beginning now, and also talked about their own responsibilities to trigger and amplify that process. The full contents of the first panel are presented in this issue of EIR, and a fuller presentation of the remainder of the conference—fuller than the following notes—will appear in upcoming issues.

The second panel focused on the LaRouche PAC “1.5 billion new, productive jobs worldwide” proposal. U.S. farm leader Mike Callicrate, of the Organization for Competitive Markets, emphasized that the entire structure of current food production characterized by huge multinational cartels dominating processing and distribution, must be broken up, both to allow much more food production, and to return farming to prosperity and create many more high-technology farmers around the world. This is analogous to the urgent matter of breaking up the major international banks by Glass-Steagall legislation, one of the supports of a New Bretton Woods system insisted on by Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Former Trinidad and Tobago Senator and political economist Dr. Kirk Meighoo announced that his party is developing a platform of 150,000 new productive jobs in that nation of 1.3 million, and that the Caribbean nations had to become “producers, not just receivers.”

The third panel opened with a video clip of Lyndon LaRouche addressing a group of young people. He said, “You are part of the ‘no future world’ culture that your parents have given you. You know this. Now what are you going to do about it?” Helga Zepp-LaRouche noted that everyone participating comes from different cultures, yet we are all here because of Lyndon LaRouche—calling to mind that among his many qualities, his love for mankind was his greatest. Retired State Senator Theo Mitchell of South Carolina, an honorary member of this movement, briefed the panel on his joining the fight with Lyndon LaRouche many years ago, and the urgent need for LaRouche’s exoneration.

Daniel Burke was the first of the young speakers from all over the world. He compared the idea of an arbitrary “Thrasymachus authority” with the consent of the governed, asking, “But what do you do when your people have become degenerates?” He was joined by other young leaders from Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Tanzania, Morocco, France, Yemen, and the United States. Their presentations all addressed science education, with LaRouche’s emphasis on the Platonic method of Kepler and Vernadsky.

The problems of the unreality of the social media culture as an economic domain—of youth aspiring to become “influencers” just by selling popular consumer products—generated a useful dialogue. One of the questions posed, Why are you so dismissive of the “gig” economy? Is it really immoral for people to try to make money to survive? The panel responses were compassionate and truthful: “You’re worth more than that. When you die, what will you have contributed? We have to redefine mankind.”

PANEL 1

Instead of Geopolitics: The Principles of Statecraft

Opening Remarks by Lyndon LaRouche and Dennis Speed

Schiller Institute

Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. speaking in July 2011 at the Schiller Institute Conference, “Rescuing Civilization from the Brink,” in Germany.

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The conference opened with a video clip from the speech, “Creativity as Such,” delivered by the late economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche to a Schiller Institute conference in Germany in July, 2011.

Lyndon LaRouche: This is truly the most important of all strategic questions we have to face today: the fact that the human species is absolutely unique in its capabilities. There’s no other known species in the universe, ever known to have existed, or could exist—even though we have not fully explored, of course, the Crab Nebula or similar parts of the great galaxy which we’re involved in, called the Milky Way. There may be many species with cognitive powers out there. Because the Solar System of which we are immediately a product, although always under the control of the galactic processes—and we know a good deal, today, about those kinds of things: Our organization in the United States has spent a good deal of effort on concentrating, inclusively, on just this question: How old is life? How long has life existed in this galaxy, or within some place in it? What is the nature of mankind, who’s been on this planet only for a few million years? There was no human being on this planet, to the best of our knowledge, until a few million years ago.

And yet, we’re talking about billions of years of this galaxy, during which all living processes known to us have come into existence. And all life is creative, but there’s a sad part: that over 95% of all known living species have been rendered extinct, as failures, in their time. The question, therefore: Why, in these times, when we have entered a period in which there will be more great kills of living processes, at this phase of the movement of the Solar System through the galaxy, why should we be so presumptuous as to imagine that human life is not about to disappear as the dinosaurs did in the last great kill?

What is there about human beings that says they’re not just another animal species, ready to get to the chop in the course of their time?

The answer is a very little-known question. Most people don’t have an inkling of what the answer is! As a matter of fact, our societies are run on the basis of people who have no inkling what the human species is! All they can come up with is an explanation of some kind of an animal, with animal characteristics of pleasure and pain, and things like that, that might control the behavior of this animal.

So why should we expect that we have a right to claim that the human species is going to survive the approaching point of a great kill in the course of the movements of the Solar System up and below and around the galaxy we inhabit? How do we know that this 62-million-year cycle is not going to take the human species away, as it’s taken so many away before? And then, before that, and then before that?

And here you have all these people talking about politics; they’re talking about issues of politics; they’re talking about “practical opinion,” and public opinion, and differentiations in customs, and all those kinds of things! And here we are: We’re approaching the time of the great kill, where everything about us may suddenly disappear; so what are we worried about? If we’re going to disappear, why do we worry? Why do we fight it? [laughter]

What is there in us, that is not in other living species known to us? That might, somehow, miraculously, pronounce a destiny for our human species which we grant to no other living species? The name for that specific quality, which we know in the human species, which does not exist in any other known living species: There’s a quality of creativity, which is absolutely unique to mankind. And if you’re not creative, and if you don’t understand creativity, you haven’t got a ticket to survival yet! Because creativity won’t save you, unless you use it. [end video]

Schiller Institute

Dennis Speed

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Dennis Speed: Before we go to our keynote speaker, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, let me say a few things about the Schiller Institute and what we’ve been doing with this process of conferences, which began back in April of this year. On April 25th and 26th, we held the first of now, three conferences. These conferences were devoted to the idea of the creation of a Four-Power summit—Russia, China, India, and the United States. There are various processes that have been able to move in that direction already, and we are in such a process today. In fact, among many of the things we’ll be talking about today is a new proposal that has been put forward by President Vladimir Putin of Russia to that effect.

Let me also say that for people in the United States, in particular, the crisis that has been on people’s minds as exhibited in the social and political crises in the streets of America, is merely one predicate of a broader international process. And that’s why we’re starting today with this first panel, to give that broader overview, and to allow you and others to become part of an international operation to reverse those circumstances.

Let me say one other thing concerning the words you just heard from Lyndon LaRouche, from 2011. LaRouche’s conception concerning the idea of thinking about strategy from the standpoint of a galactic process, and then looking—and only then—at the various political episodes occurring on Earth, was a way of trying to actually look at what he often also referred to as intelligence. He was the founder in 1974, of Executive Intelligence Review.That publication, which is still published to this day, specializes in trying to make his method of intelligence and investigation available generally in American and all international analysis.

This was very successful, in particular, in the drive for certain policy changes that occurred in the United States; most notably, that of March 23, 1983, with the creation of the Strategic Defense Initiative, the product of a process of negotiation that LaRouche carried out as a back-channel negotiator with the then Soviet Union, and with the knowledge of the National Security Council and then President of the United States, Ronald Reagan. That policy, and the creation of that policy, and that dialogue with the then Soviet Union, is, in one sense, while not a model for now, it is the same sort of process that must needs be allowed to continue and happen between President Donald Trump, President Vladimir Putin, President Xi Jinping, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, among others. The idea of the Four-Power summit is not exclusionary. It doesn’t say that other powers are not to be involved. In fact, recent proposals have amplified or expanded the number of nations that might, in fact, be involved.

What is important to understand is that, as LaRouche once said in another document published in 1980, addressed to Brezhnev who was then the head of the then Soviet Union, and he said it in its very title, “An Open Dialogue with Leonid Brezhnev: The Content of Policy Is the Method by Which It Is Made,” —the content of policy is the method by which it is made.

So, in LaRouche’s excerpt presented here, is the idea of culture and the idea that the quality and nature of culture are strategic matters. In the case of the United States, and in the case of the present-day United States, these matters of a cultural paradigm-shift are actually often far more important than the particular political issues that people talk about.

For example, looking at today’s United States, the issue is our having gone away from being a productive culture, in fact the most productive economy in the world’s history, between the period of the 1933 resurgence of America that occurred under Franklin Roosevelt, through 1945, and then the subsequent period of 1945 through 1971 with the Bretton Woods system. It’s been the need to return to that, and to return to those ideas that had come into currency under Franklin Roosevelt’s Presidency—that is the template for what we are saying should be the character of discussion between President Trump, President Putin, President Xi, and Prime Minister Modi.

I want to make one thing clear to everyone as we are about to transition to the keynote. In thinking about what we are all involved in today—namely, that given the global pandemic condition created by the coronavirus, clearly, there is a need for all of us to change our axioms. International cooperation among sovereign, independent nation-states is necessary, for the purpose of creating a worldwide alternative to what’s otherwise going to be, perhaps, the destruction of civilization—not because absolutely everybody would die of the coronavirus or something like that. But the cascading effects and the interconnected effects of this global pandemic condition that we don’t really medically understand, plus the ongoing problem of the financial virus that has plagued humanity particularly since the time of the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, this combination has created a circumstance in which only with all nations working together, can we possibly achieve an actual reconciliation of this process.

We will now hear from Helga Zepp-LaRouche. She is the founder of the Schiller Institute—that was back in 1984. She is the wife of the late economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche, who passed away in February 2019. She played a crucial, decisive role in a set of conversations and dialogues with the government of China during the period of 1993 to 1996, launching the process that became what we now know as the New Silk Road.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche

The Alternative to a Dark Age and a Third World War

Schiller Institute

Helga Zepp-LaRouche

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Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche presented the keynote speech to the Schiller Institute International Conference, on June 27, 2020, “Will Humanity Prosper, or Perish? The Future Demands a Four-Power Summit Now,” on Panel 1: “Instead of Geopolitics: The Principles of Statecraft.” This is an edited transcript of that speech.

Even if most people cannot imagine that a new Dark Age can occur, it is absolutely true that unless we, in the very short term, implement a New Bretton Woods system, exactly as Franklin D. Roosevelt had intended it, to create an instrument for forcefully overcoming the underdevelopment of the so-called developing sector, the current orientation of the world towards ever more conflicts, both internal conflict in many states, but also conflict at a strategic level, threatens to escalate into a Third World War which, because of the existence of thermonuclear weapons, would mean the annihilation of the human species—the “great kill,” even if it is meant in a slightly different way than we just heard Lyndon LaRouche talking about it in the video clip just played.

Although it is absolutely astounding how many misguided people still believe that the COVID-19 pandemic is either no worse than the flu or a just conspiracy of Bill Gates, the much more likely perspective is unfortunately what epidemiologist Dr. Michael Osterholm has said: namely, that we still have an incredibly long journey ahead of us.

Until now, 10 million people have been infected, half a million have died from COVID-19, and we have still not reached the peak of the first wave. The almost non-existent health systems of many developing countries are already hopelessly overstretched. The pandemic has ruthlessly exposed the fact that the neo-liberal economic system not only depends on cheap production in the so-called Third World, but has even created slave-labor conditions in the United States and Europe, as can be seen in the outbreak of the virus in the many slaughterhouses in Europe and the United States.

The Ravages of COVID-19

The economic shutdown has thrown a spotlight on the fragility of what is called “globalization.” In the U.S., around 40 million jobs were lost in three months; the central banks pumped an unbelievable amount, over $20 trillion, into the financial system, and various government support programs could just barely cover up the time-bombs still ticking until the expiry of the short-work programs. The IMF currently expects global production to decline by 4.9% this year, and only China is expected to have an increase in production of 2%, which is much less than it used to be, but nevertheless it is growing.

Sectors such as air traffic, catering, tourism, the car industry, have suffered massive declines, some of them long-term, but also a large number of medium-sized companies fear they will not survive a second wave and another economic lockdown. The result would be a huge additional increase in unemployment, poverty, and price deflation, while at the same time the central banks’ liquidity pumping is creating hyperinflationary bubbles. Bail-outs of large international corporations and banks, as well as politically explosive bail-ins would be further desperate options for governments to implement. But such measures could not prevent a collapse of the global financial system. A plunge into chaos and anarchy would follow.

In the meantime, a continuation of the current policy will not only lead to increased death rates as a result of the pandemic, but will do absolutely nothing to counter the hunger catastrophe, of which David Beasley of the World Food Program is warning, that it will soon take the lives of 300,000 people a day.

Whoever may have thought that a dark age could be ruled out in our modern times, is in for a reality shock. And last but not least, the hedonism acted out by demonstrators who confuse liberties with freedom, is reminiscent of the flagellants and the descriptions of the 14th century as found in the writings of Boccaccio, and the paintings of Brueghel.

The Ravages of the Coup Against President Trump

Against this background, it is to be expected that the attempt, originally instigated by the British secret services, to oust President Donald Trump from office by a coup, impeachment or assassination—such was the headline of the British publication, The Spectator, on Jan. 21, 2017—or by a “Maidan” coup, as President Putin warned in 2016, these will intensify.

The instrumentalization of the outrage resulting from the murder of George Floyd, by violent groups funded by George Soros, is part of this campaign. The reason for the relentless hostility of the neo-liberal establishment and the mainstream media on both sides of the Atlantic against Trump after what, for them, was his unexpected election victory, was, and still is, the intention he expressed at the beginning of his term, to establish good relations with Russia and a good relationship with China. And of course, Trump’s promise to end the “endless wars” of his predecessors, to bring U.S. troops home.

What followed was a three-and-a-half-year witch hunt against Trump. The war cry “Russia, Russia, Russia,” based on grounds for which not the least shred of evidence exists, was followed by an attempt at an impeachment, followed by the no less malicious war cry “China, China, China,” although there is just as little substance to the charges against China as there was for Russiagate.

During all that time, the representatives of the neo-liberal system have not for one second been ready to consider that it was the brutal consequences of their own policies for the majority of the population worldwide, that had triggered the global wave of social protest, which included the Brexit and Trump’s victory, as well as the mass protests worldwide, from Chile to the Yellow Vests in France. But this establishment is never interested in discovering the truth, only in controlling the official political narrative, in compliance with Pompeo’s principle, as he explained in his speech in Texas: “I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole ... we had entire training courses for that.”

Geopoliticians Direct NATO Against China

NATO’s official narrative about Russia’s allegedly increasing aggressiveness, which accuses Russia of “redrawing Europe’s borders by force,” fails to mention the broken promises made to Gorbachov that NATO would never extend its borders all the way to Russia’s borders; or the color revolutions, which can be described as acts of war; or the coup in Kiev with the open support of Victoria Nuland, which triggered the referendum in Crimea in reaction.

China’s “crime” is not only that it has lifted 850 million of its own citizens out of poverty, and has become, with an economic policy based on scientific and technological progress and a population of 1.4 billion people, the second most powerful economic nation, and in some technological areas, such as high-speed rail systems, nuclear fusion, aspects of space exploration and 5G telecommunications, already the number one. In addition, China’s offer for cooperation on the New Silk Road, and the Belt and Road Initiative, is the first real opportunity for the developing countries since the time of colonialism, to overcome poverty and underdevelopment by building infrastructure.

NATO’s response to China’s regaining its role as a leading nation in the world, a role it played during many centuries of its 5,000-year history, has been expansion into the Indo-Pacific region. This is the stuff of which world wars can be made. And yet, that is exactly the direction that NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has indicated in his outline for “NATO 2030,” which he just presented in a video conference with the Atlantic Council and the German Marshall Fund.

German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer took part in another webinar last Wednesday with Anna Wieslander, director of the Atlantic Council for Northern Europe, who, in opening the event, quoted Lord Ismay, NATO’s first secretary general, who said that the purpose of NATO is “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” But AKK (as she is nicknamed) did not even seemingly realize the insult in these remarks.

The geopolitical scenario of a globalized NATO, openly designed to instrumentalize NATO for the purposes of the British Empire (based on the Commonwealth), would also rope the EU into playing the same role, and is also aimed to position India against China. This must be totally rejected by all those who have an interest in maintaining world peace.

A Truthful Prehistory of World War II

President Putin has just written, on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II, a striking article on the pre-history of the Second World War and the course of that war, and has called on all nations to publish all the up-to-now classified historical documents from that time, so that by studying the causes of the greatest catastrophe in the history of mankind up to that point, the lessons will be learned for avoiding an even greater catastrophe today.

Putin writes in a very personal tone; he speaks of the suffering of his own family, of the immense importance June 22nd has for the Russian population, the day on which “life almost comes to a halt,” and why May 9th, the anniversary of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War in which 27 million Russians lost their lives, is Russia’s most important holiday.

But the indirect message is also that just as the Soviet Union defeated Hitler’s Germany with a gigantic effort, the Russian people will never surrender to renewed threats. Just as Napoleon was led through a long line of defense into the inhospitable Russian winter, and his army was finally as good as wiped out, the evacuation of the people and industrial capacity to the east from 1941 on, allowed the Soviet Union to surpass the military production of the Nazis in only one and a half years.

But also the short-sightedness of the Versailles dictate, the support for Hitler from members of the aristocracy and the Establishment on both sides of the Atlantic, and above all the Munich Pact, which is simply called in Russia the “Munich betrayal” or “Munich conspiracy,” is considered the real trigger for the Second World War. Because it was there, where not only the appeasement of Hitler, but also the joint divvying up of the booty took place, as well as the ice-cold geopolitical calculation, that focussing Hitler’s Germany on the East would inevitably lead Germany and the Soviet Union to tear each other to pieces.

A Summit of the World’s Greatest Powers

What does Putin say is the main message of the study of the Second World War for today? The failure to take up the task of creating a collective security system that could have prevented this war is the most important thing! Putin’s article ends with an urgent reminder of the summit of heads of state of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, which he has been proposing since January, and which should precisely address these principles of how to maintain world peace and overcome the world economic crisis.

The most important aspect of that, is that this format will put the United States, Russia, and China around the same table to negotiate the principles that must be the basis of international policy if mankind is to avoid wiping itself out!

Yesterday after a long phone call between Putin and French President Emmanuel Macron, Macron said that he stands for a Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok, which opens not only the perspective of an integration of the European Union, the Eurasian Economic Union, and the Belt and Road Initiative, but also the establishment of a common security architecture based on common economic interests.

However, if we are to meet the gigantic challenges of the pandemic, the global economic crisis, and the profound social shocks that have destroyed the trust of large parts of the population in their institutions in many countries around the world, further steps are necessary. Obviously, cooperation between the United States and China, as the two largest economies, is indispensable. Even if this currently appears to be an insurmountable hurdle, the extremely tense relationship between the United States and China must be replaced by cooperation on the common aims of mankind.

Who, if not the governments of the strongest economies, the countries with the largest populations and the greatest military potential, should solve the problems? The Boltons must be removed from these governments and replaced by responsible people who are able to find, in the cultural phases of their respective cultures, the starting points for cooperation on a higher level. Benjamin Franklin’s admiration for Confucian philosophy and Sun Yat-sen’s orientation to the ideals of the American Republic are better advisors than Gene Sharp’s How to Start a Revolution or Samuel Huntington’s various scribblings.

One has to define a plane on which the solutions for these quite disparate problems become visible. There is one philosopher, born in the 15th century, known in Russia as Nikolai Kusansky, Nikolaus of Cusa, who developed exactly that method of thinking: the coincidence of opposites, coincidentia oppositorum. This concept expresses the fundamental quality of human creativity, which is able time and time again, and at increasingly more developed levels, to find solutions on a higher plane, where the conflicts that have arisen on the lower levels, are dissolved.

LaRouche’s Contributions to Global Economic Development

This solution can only be the immediate implementation of a credit system, that provides the global economy with credit for industrialization, and thus the real development, of all nations on this planet. The entire life’s work of my late husband, Lyndon LaRouche, was primarily devoted to achieving this goal. He drew up his first plan for the industrialization of Africa in 1976, the Oasis Plan for the industrialization of the Middle East in 1975; then followed the 40-Year Plan for India in collaboration with Indira Gandhi, Operation Juárez with then Mexican President José López Portillo for Latin America; a 50-year development plan for the Basin of the Indian and Pacific Oceans; and then finally, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Eurasian Land-Bridge, as a peace plan for the 21st century.

Many of these projects—all coherent with the idea of the World Land-Bridge—are being implemented today thanks to China’s New Silk Road, and all nations of the world are called upon to contribute to this World Land-Bridge! This is the blueprint for the creation of the 1.5 billion jobs that are necessary today to overcome the crisis! It should begin with the establishment of a modern health system in every single country, in order to combat the current and future pandemics. This step will not only benefit poor countries, but also the so-called developed countries, both of which can only avoid new waves of infections in this way. Most countries have a large number of unemployed or poorly employed youth, who can be trained as medical personnel and deployed to build up such health centers.

When millions of people are threatened with starvation, as the World Food Program warns, why can farmers not double their food production and be paid a parity price that guarantees their existence, including with regard to the expected increase in the world’s population to over nine billion by 2050? Can we not consider ourselves as one single human species, and help to build mankind’s common construction sites with the same solidarity that the entire Chinese population helped the people in Wuhan and the province of Hubei? Is it not time that we stopped wasting trillions on military build-ups—as President Trump said he would soon take up, together with Putin and Xi Jinping—when we could use those resources to overcome hunger, disease and poverty, and to develop the creative potential of the current and future generations?

I think it is time for us, as mankind, faced with an unprecedented disaster, to take the qualitative step of making the 21st century the first truly human century!

Thank you very much.

Dr. Jin Zhongxia

The Fundamentals of East-West Philosophic Relations

Schiller Institute

Dr. Jin Zhongxia

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Dr. Jin is the Executive Director for China, at the IMF (Washington, D.C.). He gave this presentation to the Schiller Institute International Conference, on June 27, 2020, “Will Humanity Prosper, or Perish? The Future Demands a Four-Power Summit Now,” on Panel 1: “Instead of Geopolitics: The Principles of Statecraft.” This is an edited transcript of that speech.

I would like to thank Schiller Institute for the invitation to attend this important conference. And also thank Madame Helga for her excellent keynote speech.

The year 2020 is a very special and challenging year. The trade war, the eruption and spread of the coronavirus, the riots in the U.S., world economic recession, and escalated geopolitical tensions, I just name a few major ones. Global growth is projected by the IMF at negative 4.9 percent this year.

In the following discussion, some of my observations and comments are kind of thought in research and of academic by nature, I will speak in my personal capacity only.

Global challenge should be handled globally with a multilateral approach. No country will be safe until every country is safe.

When we start to discuss the multilateral approach in dealing with the pandemic and the global crisis, I recognize that there is a debate on the value of multilateralism and multilateral institutions. Some people are talking about economic decoupling, a cold war, and even a conflict of civilizations. Since I am Chinese, I ask myself: Is there any fundamental conflict between civilizations in the East and West?

China Is not Fundamentally Different from the West

Chinese civilization is unique in many aspects, but is not fundamentally different from Western civilization. One example: In the 6th century B.C., China had the Taiji or Yin-Yang concept (the co-evolution of two opposite forces). I was surprised to discover that this was also a core concept in physiological theory in Greek medicine in the same period of time. Another example: A core concept of Confucianism is the “middle course approach,” which also corresponds to the “doctrine of the mean” that was explored extensively by Hippocrates, Plato, and Aristotle in ancient Greece.

In sixteenth century, the brilliant Jesuit missionary, Matteo Ricci, recognized the striking parallels in Confucius and Mencius to the Christian concept of man in the image of God and devoted his life to building an “ecumenical alliance” between China and the West.

During the evolution of trade tension between the USA and China, some opinions expressed in the media have demonized China as an evil trade partner that is systematically engaged in illegal subsidizing, cheating, and stealing. That reminds me of the overwhelming public opinion in the media against Jewish people in some parts of Europe before World War II. The truth is that after more than 40 years of market-oriented reform and opening-up, China has already been transformed into a market-based economy. In fact, the share of fiscal resources in GDP mobilized by some European governments is higher than that in China due to extensive social welfare arrangement, but nobody in Europe complains that this welfare has distorted the market.

China has a profound tradition of market economy both in theory and practice. In the 6th century B.C., Laozi, a famous philosopher, and the founder of Daoism, advised his government to “rule without intervention,” which is an ancient version of the invisible hand of Adam Smith. Another famous economist and philosopher Guanzi, in the 7th century B.C., suggested that in the years of economic depression, government could increase expenditure to implement seemingly wasteful projects for the purpose of creating employment. That is the ancient Chinese version of Keynesian economics. Financially, China was also highly developed. As early as in 11th century, China introduced the first official paper currency in the world.

Decoupling the U.S. from China Is Not a Good Idea

On the issue of economic and technology decoupling, the attempt to block a major people and civilization from competing fairly with other countries and getting access to new scientific and technological knowledge is morally wrong and will help China to win sympathy around the world.

On the other hand, China has the largest pool of educated labor, a workforce that includes the largest pool of engineers now. That will enable the country to be more innovative, professional, practical, and rational.

Compared with other multi-country free trade zones, China has already become the largest single-country retail market by itself. It is more than equivalent to a free trade zone with a highly integrated infrastructure network, centralized fiscal and monetary policy, and a deep and liquid labor and capital market. The authorities have also determined to further open its economy, greatly enhance intellectual property protection, and implement structural reforms, including introducing competitive neutrality for State-Owned Enterprises. In the end, it is the effectiveness and efficiency of China’s domestic resource allocation that will determine China’s international competitiveness.

I am not a specialist in geopolitics. But I have learned that the scenario of decoupling and a new cold war is based on an old strategy called “divide and conquer,” or “offshore balance.” It is very smart from the offshore players’ perspective. But it will benefit the offshore manipulator at the expense of onshore neighbors. I wonder whether those equally smart onshore players are willing to buy this, and how high a price the offshore player wants to pay to convince so many countries to engage in long-term conflict with their major trade partner.

Relations with India, Japan, Russia, and the U.S.

It is not objective to exaggerate China’s conflict with India at the border. It is important to recognize that the current border is largely a stable equilibrium. The common interest of these two ancient civilizations is to cooperate and develop their economies and achieve a joint historical revival. The two countries should benefit from their common culture heritage based on centuries of peaceful and friendly cultural exchanges, particularly the exchanges in the form of Buddhism.

The historic issue between China and Japan often looks deadlocked, but a forward-looking approach is the key. China has largely recovered its self-confidence, and it is very clear that China’s revival does not mean revenge. When new generations from China visit Japan as tourists, most of them feel they like Japan. Japan is China’s only neighboring country that has maintained a lot of Chinese characters in their written language, and they use chopsticks, eat rice, use soy sauce, and practice calligraphy—all of which are typical reflections of East Asian culture.

A healthy and stable Sino-Russian relationship can be much more sustainable than many people imagine. Their stable cooperative relationship can be attributed to many factors. It is not coincidental that their combined territory maps the historical Mongol Empire. Toward the end of last century, China and Russian leaders reached a wise and visionary agreement to delimit and confirm their common border. Their mutual respect and support for the core interests of each other can go a long way.

The biggest loss the USA could incur from decoupling and a new cold war is that many of the 1.4 billion Chinese people, who are otherwise very friendly toward America, could turn into opponents. By contrast, a friendly and cooperative China will definitely be America’s greatest fortune in Asia.

The Positive Role of the IMF and China

I believe constructive competition and cooperation between China, the USA and other countries under a rules-based multilateral system should be the right choice. Fortunately, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is still functioning normally and has played a constructive leading role, which is also supported by the World Bank and other Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs).

In just a few months, the IMF has implemented debt relief to more than 27 countries, supported by contributions from a group of better resourced members. The Fund has augmented its lending instrument to low-income countries by more than SDR10 billion, and has approved Emergency Financing by Region (EFRs) and a Rapid Credit Facility (RCF), along with Rapid Financing Instruments (RFIs) worth SDR47 billion for more than 74 countries. It has created a new Short-term Liquidity Line (SLL), and is pushing for approval of New Arrangements to Borrow (NABs) of SDR365 billion, and is preparing for a new round of Bilateral Borrowing Agreements (BBAs) of SDR138 billion. China has actively participated in all the above efforts and has made its own contributions.

The Fund and the World Bank jointly proposed a Debt Service Suspension Initiative that has been endorsed by the G20. China has further called for an extension of this initiative to 2021. A fair burden-sharing and full participation of all creditors is critical for a successful implementation of this Initiative.

China has made additional efforts outside the multilateral framework, including (1) Making $2 billion in assistance grants to most affected countries, especially developing countries to combat COVID-19 and recover social and economic development. (2) Establishing a Sino-Africa hospital cooperation program covering thirty hospitals in Africa. China has recently sent five emergency professional medical teams to Africa, in addition to the existing 46 Chinese medical teams already there. (3) In addition to implementing the G20 debt moratorium initiative, China will provide more assistance to countries that have been most heavily affected, together with other stake holders. (4) China has promised that once it completes the development and testing of its own vaccine, it will provide it to developing countries as global public goods. (5) China will establish a comprehensive storage and transportation hub to support global medical supply, under the direction of the United Nations.

The merit of multilateral assistance is that it is rules-based, approved by a collective board representing all its member countries, and the recipient countries are facing a multilateral institution, rather than a particular country or group of countries. Therefore it can reduce, although not eliminate, geopolitical sensitivity. Although there are different views on many different issues, and even bilateral tensions between some member countries, the majority of the Fund’s membership has been able to find common ground on many issues.

The Bretton Woods institutions could do two more things in my view.

First, a general allocation of the Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) that will increase the supply of international reserve assets, reduce the burden of any single country to supply its reserve currency excessively, and provide low-income countries necessary resources to alleviate their debt distress.

Second, the MDBs should greatly expand their lending to include not only developing countries, but also developed countries, including the United States itself. That will fully utilize the low interest rate environment, greatly stimulate global demand, and pull up growth rate in receiving countries.

In conclusion, I wish the post COVID-19 world will be a more cooperative and peaceful one.

Boris Meshchanov

Russia’s Relations with the African Continent

Schiller Institute

Boris Meshchanov

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Mr. Meshchanov is a Counselor at the the Russian Federation Mission to the United Nations. This is the edited transcript of his presentation to the Schiller Institute International Conference on June 27, 2020, “Will Humanity Prosper, or Perish? The Future Demands a Four-Power Summit Now,” on Panel 1: “Instead of Geopolitics: The Principles of Statecraft.”

Dear Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche, dear colleagues and friends from so many countries, the problems posed in today’s discussion are of high importance. We welcome the highlighting of acute questions of international relations through the prism of development, building physical infrastructure, and cooperation between major powers in the interests of the poorest and most vulnerable, in accordance with the United Nations Agenda 2030. We fully share the crucial significance of industrialization, eradication of poverty, reforming of international credit-generating institutions, and ensuring food security. Those questions are in the spotlight for the whole global community. We emphasize that the right to development persists as a basic human right. Development defeats inequality, contributes to peace, and is an indispensable condition for building just, peaceful, and inclusive societies.

I would like to start my presentation citing the report by the UN Secretary General as saying, “As we are facing multidimensional and multifaceted impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, global solidarity with Africa is an imperative. Ending the pandemic in Africa is essential for ending it across the world.”

In the context of this challenging crisis we all seek to re-assess the model for development with the needs of the most vulnerable at its cornerstone. I would like to address this issue with respect to how our country deploys in our relations with the African continent.

It is justified that today more than ever before, our eyes are directed to the regrettable fortunes of populations in remote corners of the world where governments are grappling with a triple crisis of health and finance, trying to avoid widening social disparity and future economic distress. Aware of its historical responsibility for the formation of the modern system of international relations and its further improvement, the Russian Federation considers international development assistance as an effective mechanism to solve global and regional problems, and to respond to new challenges and threats.

Our priorities have been the eradication of poverty and promotion of sustainable socio-economic development of partner states; influencing global processes in order to form a stable and just world order based on universally recognized rules of international law and partnership relations among states; as well as responding to natural and man-made disasters and other emergencies.

In doing so, as it can easily be seen in the ideals of Russian philosophers and artists and classical Russian literature, assisting our friends abroad has always been based on the respect of the other’s dignity. It has been reflected in our national policies and priorities; technical and humanitarian assistance has always been delivered at the request of the recipient side. We have proceeded from the assumption that any approach in the spirit of colonial rule, like the General Act of the Berlin Conference of 1884, bringing about the principle of “effective occupation” prejudices the freedom of the Africans themselves; attempting to come to agreement behind one’s back and acting solely from the standpoint of mercenary calculation, will most likely not be accepted by the peoples themselves.

On the contrary, we value equitable partnership in the international arena, upholding the principles of truth and justice, respect for the civilizational identity of each people, the path of development chosen by each people.

As Russian President Vladimir Putin recently emphasized, the development of relations with the countries of the African continent and their regional organizations is one of the priorities of Russian foreign policy. Links between us are based on the friendly relations between the Russian Federation and African states and the traditions of the joint struggle for decolonization and achieving the independence of African states, as well as on the rich experience of multifaceted and mutually beneficial cooperation that meets the interests of our peoples.

Dear colleagues and friends, one of the main lessons learned from this pandemic is an urgent need for international solidarity and cooperation, without exclusions and exemptions. In line with this objective, we have committed to giving Russian-African interaction a truly systemic and integrated character. African states are confidently gaining political and economic weight, affirming themselves as one of the important pillars of the multipolar world, and are taking an increasingly active part in working out decisions of the international community on key issues of the regional and global agenda. We need to respect their right to benefit equally from globalization, whatever shape it will take after the impact of the pandemic.

In our strong opinion, the world needs Africa not just like a pantry of valuable minerals or a bread basket, but as a strong and sovereign region, developing an equal dialogue with its partners in accordance with the norms of the national legislation, based on the multilateral nature of the world order. Today, when proposals are made to reform the global governance system, we consistently uphold the need to include the role of Africa in those structures that are engaged in global governance.

Our fundamental outlook is not only to ensure the wide global participation of African states, but also to resolve conflict situations on the principle of “African solutions to African problems.” Together, we are able to counteract political dictatorship and currency blackmail in the course of international trade and economic cooperation, in order to put pressure on objectionable countries and unfair competition. Introduction of unilateral coercive measures not based on international law, also known as unilateral sanctions, is an example of such a practice. Joint efforts are needed to promote trade, investment, and sustainable development in order to make the global economic system more socially oriented, to oppose any manifestations of a unilateral approach, protectionism and discrimination, and to support world trade based on the rules of the World Trade Organization.

Under this paradigm the first Russia-Africa Summit and Economic Forum took place in October 2019 in Sochi with 92 agreements, contracts, and memoranda of understanding worth $12 billion signed, addressing trade, investments and banking, industry and construction, transport and logistics, energy and high-tech, and other economic matters.

We paid special attention to identifying promising areas of the economic, trade and investment partnership of the Russian Federation, as a member of the Eurasian Economic Union, with the African Union as well as with the leading regional organizations of Africa—the Arab Maghreb Union, the Sahel Five, the Southern African Development Community, the Common Market for East and Southern Africa, the East African Community, Economic Community of West African Countries, Economic Community of Central African States, and others.

In our movement towards Africa we need to be creative and promote new mechanisms for partnership, encourage active participation of business in exhibition, fair and congress events, and develop the practice of exchanging business missions.

Moving towards Africa in this new old world would be impossible without learning each other better, taking into consideration the many local customs and traditions, as well as Africa’s rich cultural and linguistic variety. In Sochi-2019 we committed to developing cooperation in the field of education, implementing vocational training and academic exchange programs to promote social stability by protecting people, especially youth, women, and persons with disabilities, and expanding their capabilities by increasing the availability of education, technical and vocational training. Participants in the Russia-Africa summit confirmed that obtaining quality education and developing skills by young men and women can become a driving force for structural economic transformation and industrialization in African countries, as well as the basis for strengthening the industrial potential necessary to diversify the economy.

It so happens that our country has already contributed to the development of the African continent in particular in industry, infrastructure, and energy security—areas promoted by the Schiller Institute as the fundamentals of the so-called physical economy—so I will focus on them briefly.

So far, Russia has been involved in the creation of the Russian Industrial Zone in Egypt. Among the key competencies of Russia for Africa, one cannot overestimate the role of rail infrastructure for the development of Nigeria, Egypt, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Angola. Under current conditions, it is important that the use of technologies such as “medical trains” in Africa will help prevent the spread of infectious diseases and fight epidemics.

In energy, we count on the future construction of the first nuclear power plant in Egypt and the Russian Center for Nuclear Science and Technology in Rwanda, facilitating the development of integrated solutions in the field of nuclear energy in agriculture, health, education, science, and industry. Those two are not the only countries in Africa that intend to develop nuclear energy. Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Sudan, and Zambia are also on this growing list. Most African countries suffer from severe electricity shortages. Accordingly, in the near future they should double their generating capacity to meet current needs. The current pandemic-caused crisis, has aggravated this challenge.

In saying this we should not forget about stepping up efforts to combat climate change in Africa, transfer relevant technologies, build the capacity of African states. Meanwhile, general greening of the economy, in our approach, needs to be based on responsibility, consistency and realism. Key to that is technological progress. Serious efforts are being deployed to improve energy efficiency in industry, agriculture, housing, and transport. In our country we have launched national project “Environment” to create incentives for Russian business to implement best “green” technologies to ensure the environmentally friendly low-emission development. And we will proceed to provide assistance to developing countries, including African countries, to help them meet their own climate goals without prejudice to the objectives of ensuring inclusive and sustainable economic growth, industrialization of their economies, and leaving no one behind.

The pandemic is spreading across the world, threatening to undo the efforts applied so far to build a more resilient architecture. It is high time for humanity, responsibility, and the spirit of partnership to be demonstrated. A truly systemic issue with reference to today’s discussion is food security, which holds a special place among Russia’s priorities in its efforts to achieve sustainable development globally. First of all, we believe that it has to be addressed at the level of supplying the world with enough high-quality food to stabilize international markets and make it more accessible and affordable for a maximum number of people. At the same time, the zero-hunger goal must be addressed as a matter of urgency for those countries that are food insecure.

To that end, over the last twenty years, Russia has been steadily and consistently increasing its own production and export of food—grain, cereals, pulses, meats, poultry, oils, milk, and dairy products, etc. Russia has become one of the world’s largest exporters of food. During the pandemic, food supplies were transferred to the Union of Comoros and Madagascar.

Apart from tackling the problem of food security, Russia donated hundreds of KAMAZ trucks, together with the necessary parts, equipment, and technical support for key World Food Program (WFP) operations in Africa, starting in 2020, with $10 million being reserved exclusively for Africa. It is the first time that Russia assigned a geographic priority for its voluntary contribution to WFP.

In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, East Africa is experiencing its largest invasion of desert locusts in decades, and our country is making a $10 million contribution to support Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) operations in Ethiopia, Kenya, South Sudan, and Uganda.

In connection with the coronavirus pandemic, Russia received requests from a total of 29 African countries, as well as from the African Union, asking for assistance in combating the impacts of COVID-19. To date, units of laboratory supplies and personal protective equipment have been provided to the Democratic Republic of Congo; multi-purpose medical modules, tents, and accessories to Djibouti; and test systems to South Africa and Guinea.

At the same time, we believe that helping a sick person with a virus is paramount, but that only solves part of the problem. A fundamental factor is the availability of an effective system of prevention and education in the countries affected by the epidemic. As an example, I refer to the example of the Republic of Guinea, where Russia has deployed two mobile hospitals, and where mobile laboratories based on KAMAZ vehicles were transferred and medications delivered. With the participation of Russian experts there, more than 800 specialists have passed specialized training since 2015. Russia is making a significant contribution to the scientific research on the Ebola virus. With the support of one of the flagships of Russian business, the united RUSAL company, the Russian-Guinean Research Center for Epidemiology and Prevention of Infectious Diseases was established in the Guinean city of Kindia.

Last but not least, long and intensive discussions are ongoing concerning the unbearable debt burden of African states. Russia actively contributes to alleviating it under the debt-for-development program intergovernmental agreements. Those between Russia and Madagascar, Mozambique, and Tanzania are being implemented. For instance, as part of these arrangements, the Government of Mozambique, in cooperation with the WFP, has launched a multi-disciplinary national school food and nutrition program. It provides for the conversion of a part of the county’s debt to Russia, amounting to $40 million, during 2017-2021 into activities that address malnutrition among children and fosters primary education in Mozambique.

With that I thank you, and look forward to your questions.

Dr. Joycelyn Elders

ALL THE WORLD IS AT STAKE, AND ALL THE WORLD IS IN NEED

A New World Healthcare Platform

Schiller Institute

Dr. Joycelyn Elders

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Dr. Elders served as the Surgeon General of the United States. This is the edited transcript of her presentation to the Schiller Institute International Conference, on June 27, 2020, “Will Humanity Prosper, or Perish? The Future Demands a Four-Power Summit Now,” on Panel 1: “Instead of Geopolitics: The Principles of Statecraft.”

I hope, as I am sure you all do, that humanity prospers. Ironically, a lethal disease, the coronavirus pandemic, may be the only way to unify the world, to reverse what might otherwise appear to be a sure slide into disaster.

We are here to discuss a new paradigm for the whole world—not just for the richer or more well-off nations. Helga Zepp-LaRouche has proposed that a world healthcare platform must be constructed to respond to the present crisis. She has circulated a short memo to this effect, calling for a Committee of the Coincidence of Opposites to be formed to implement it. I would like to respond to one passage of that memo in particular. Here is what it said.

A very large number of youth in the U.S. and the European nations, coming from the economically disadvantaged segments of society, are presently looking without a perspective into the future and are therefore exposed to an entire spectrum of perils. These young people could be educated through a training program in the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s CCC program to become medical auxiliary forces and could be deployed together with doctors and medical professionals in the building of first, temporary, and then permanent hospitals and hospital wards in African and other developing sector nations. For the countries of the Southern Hemisphere the support from the industrialized nations is existential.

Therefore it will be possible to find cooperating institutions, such as governments, religious and social organizations, as well as youth organizations, who can help to set up such facilities and win the trust in the population for such an approach. In the industrialized nations, for example, hospitals could set up partnerships with existing hospitals in the developing nations, which then could be used as affiliates for the construction of an expanded health program. One can also draw in nongovernmental organizations with experience in so-called conflict areas, such as the Peace Corps, catastrophe protection organizations, and various relief organizations.

In the U.S. and European nations retired doctors, helpful individuals, and social and religious organizations could work in a Committee to put together teams of medical personnel and apprentices for the deployments.

Now, I think that this can be done, but we must think about how we would do it. It will be especially important, for example, in the countryside of Africa, just as it is important in the cities of the United States, for people from the neighborhoods and communities to be involved in this process. Therefore, young people from Africa should be paired with young people from America and be trained together from the beginning. We should remember that there are significant communities of African-American youth in the United States whose parents came from Nigeria, Sudan, Ethiopia, Senegal, and many other nations.

Importantly, historically black colleges and universities could be used, as well as high school campuses in the urban centers, as central coordinating points, to assemble volunteers that want to participate in such a program. More broadly, various land-grant colleges, community colleges, churches, and other organizations already deeply involved in such outreach, need simply be encouraged by young people who want to assist in doing what perhaps only they can do—save the lives of their peers in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and elsewhere, through demonstrations of hope and health.

Many Community Healthcare Workers

First, we will need many community healthcare workers. We can take a page out of what was done in the American Civil War in 1861 in New York City, with what was called the Sanitary Commission. We just take some people in the community, give them some basic health education, and develop them as medical assistants and medical technicians. Most importantly, they will be very well known in their communities. They can communicate very well with the people in their communities. You can have supervisors of these community healthcare workers, who are also trained, and of course coordinate with nurses, nurse practitioners, and doctors. But this gives you a far larger force to work with, which is what we need.

We can’t teach what we don’t know, and we can’t lead where we won’t go. We have to have tiers of people who are from the community, healthcare workers who understand the community and know the community, as well as immediate supervisors, up to people with enough medical training, all the way up to nurse’s assistants, practitioners, doctors, and others, right up to the level of super-specialist. We often do too much special care, and not enough public health. We are not doing enough basic public health. Public health, done this way, would do far more to maintain the health, more than 100 surgeons.

This is not an attack against specialization, but it is an assertion that we are in a condition like that of a world war, which requires something that Martin Luther King and others have often talked about—creative, nonviolent directed action, but in the field of health. And we need volunteers, just as the American civil rights movement had volunteers. They will be the backbone of this effort. In this case, we need to establish brigades and battalions of courageous young people, who may even risk their lives, but in a responsible way, to save the lives of others, both here and in other countries.

This is not, by any means, completely new. Many nations have tried elements of such programs, which have worked relatively successfully in the past; and members of the African Union, and the World Health Organization, are well aware of these measures. This, however, is a circumstance that requires the equivalent of a wartime alliance, but this is truly a wartime alliance for progress. Here we can count successes, not in the numbers of enemies killed through combat, but through the numbers of lives saved through healthcare. We will also be aided by the omnipresence of certain social media capabilities that can provide means of close coordination that would otherwise be unavailable.

The Fight Must Have a Human Face

The fight against this virus must have a human face. There is no section of our population we can afford to ignore. For example, our already-overcrowded, and often abusive prisons, will see an explosion of infections. Should such people who have been accused of a theft or other non-violent crime, or anyone else, for that matter, be given a de facto death sentence, or be put in harm’s way, solely because the rest of us have decided to forget who they are? What about the families that visit them? What about the children, or spouses, or parents attached to these people? And I believe that this can be a mobilization that replaces the image of young people as a problem, or a potential source of unrest, with the image that they are the healers, those dedicated to preserving life, not destroying it.

There may be more than two million American young men currently held in prisons for non-violent offenses who could be more than willing to become part of this solution, to help bring health both in their communities here, as well as to other nations. And it is only in such an emergency as this, that this sort of bold thinking would be attached to an urgent, dire, but resolvable crisis.

I pray that this moment may find us equal to this challenge to our normal way of thinking. All the world is at stake, and all the world is in need. Thank you.

Dr. Ding Yifan

The Epidemic Demonstrates That Humanity is a Community of Common Destiny

Schiller Institute

Dr. Ding Yifan

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Dr. Ding is Deputy Director, Research Institute of World Development, China Development Research Center, China. He gave this presentation to the Schiller Institute International Conference, on June 27, 2020, “Will Humanity Prosper, or Perish? The Future Demands a Four-Power Summit Now,” on Panel 1: “Instead of Geopolitics: The Principles of Statecraft.” This is an edited transcript of that speech.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caught the whole world by surprise. Not only has the economy been paralyzed, and human life threatened, but people’s living habits have also changed. Moreover, in many countries, people have not been able to effectively curb the spread of the virus because they have no experience. Although many institutions are trying to produce vaccines, I am afraid that the vaccine would be short-lived, because the virus evolves so quickly.

In the face of the epidemic, we humans are very vulnerable. If we are not united and do not work together to overcome the epidemic, the time for the virus to spread will prolong, and the longer we will suffer.

So here I’d like to highlight four points.

First, when China’s epidemic broke out, many countries helped China, providing China with various materials to prevent and combat the virus, including masks. Countries such as Japan chose phrases from ancient Chinese classics and wrote those on boxes for transporting materials to show the close relationship between East Asian countries. When the epidemic situation in China was brought under control and the situation intensified in Japan and South Korea, China sent a large amount of materials to Japan and South Korea to help the people there fight the epidemic.

Second, many such touching stories can also be told about cooperation between Chinese and American companies in combating the virus. When the epidemic situation in the United States worsened, many Chinese companies provided the United States with a large amount of materials, including masks, protective clothing, protective glasses, ventilators, and even reagents for nucleic acid detection. So that cooperation showed that our human society is really a community of common destiny.

My third point is that unfortunately, the political chaos and the political split in the United States has intentionally made China a scapegoat. Radical congressmen and senators have tried to compete with the hawks in the Trump administration to show their toughness toward China. This attitude cannot help Americans combat the epidemic, but only exacerbates the mistrust between China and the United States, even making most cooperation impossible between the Chinese and American governments during and after the epidemic.

Fourth is the fact that the world economy has not completely recovered from the last financial crisis begun in 2007. And then a new crisis happened. The pandemic may make this crisis deeper and more difficult to deal with, because we are faced with a dilemma: restoring the economy and preventing the virus from spreading. The largest economies in the world need to expand cooperation and jointly take measures to combat the virus and to boost economic growth. We have to use “stimulus packages” not only to alleviate the problems of the population in trouble, but also use such stimulus packages to invest in infrastructure. Not only in traditional infrastructure such as highways, bridges, and communications, but also in the development of new infrastructure, such as the means of mass prevention of epidemics and mass treatment during a pandemic, also including remote means for mass temperature checks of people.

Only by rebuilding trust among the big powers can we unite together to successfully fight the coronavirus. Then we can bring humanity back to a harmonious development path again. So, I think we have to unite our forces, our strengths, in the middle of the fight against the coronavirus pandemic. And then we could try to find a way of common development after the pandemic. Thank you.

DeWayne Hopkins

A View from the Iowa Farm Belt:

The Muscatine-China Cultural Connection

Schiller Institute

DeWayne Hopkins

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Mr. Hopkins is the former mayor of Muscatine, Iowa. This is the edited transcript of his presentation to the Schiller Institute International Conference, on June 27, 2020, “Will Humanity Prosper, or Perish? The Future Demands a Four-Power Summit Now,” on Panel 1: “Instead of Geopolitics: The Principles of Statecraft.”

I’m the former mayor of a small community in eastern Iowa located right on the Mississippi River. And I have a story to tell you. But in order to tell this story from where it begins, I’m going to have to move the clock back in time to 1985. Back in that timeframe, the country of the People’s Republic of China sent four individuals to Iowa. These individuals had never been in the United States before, but through the Sister Cities and Sister States organization, these individuals came right directly to Muscatine, Iowa. One of these individuals was Xi Jinping, and of course at the time he was pretty young, and he was a provincial official in Hebei province.

They came to Muscatine, and they toured some of our plants around town, and so on and so forth. They even enjoyed a barbecue with spareribs and corn on the cob and things of that nature. In any case, they spent three days in Muscatine, and then moved on to Des Moines, Iowa, where they met with the then Governor of Iowa, Terry Branstad.

Now, I’m going to fast forward a little bit to 2012. Our governor was on a kind of an agricultural mission trip to Beijing in the People’s Republic of China in September, 2011. And he was meeting with Xi Jinping, who at the time had moved up in the ranks to the position of Vice President. Xi Jinping just happened to ask Governor Branstad—because he had known him for that length of time, from 1985 to 2011—he asked him how his friends Sarah and Roger Lande were. Well, Sarah and Roger Lande are residents of Muscatine. Roger is a retired attorney. Back in 1985, Sarah was the President of the Sister States organization here in Iowa.

Schiller Institute/Robert Baker

Sarah Lande being interviewed by Xinhua upon the release of her book, ‘Old Friends’: the Xi Jinping–Iowa Story, Des Moines, Iowa, May 2018.

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Well, Governor Branstad responded that they were in good health and everything was fine, but that’s what started the wheels in motion about a revisit to Muscatine from then Vice President Xi Jinping. That happened on, I believe it was February 15, 2012. He was on a trip from Washington, D.C., then to meet President Obama in Los Angeles, California. He thought he would have time to stop by Muscatine, Iowa, which he did. We all greeted him on the porch of the Lande residence. We all went inside and enjoyed snacks and conversation; sort of rehashing old times, thus assuming the title “old friends.” So, a great number of his old friends—that is, Xi Jinping’s—were in attendance at the Lande residence, and they all had just a marvelous time. Xi Jinping’s time came when he had to leave, and that was OK.

Schiller Institute/Robert Baker

Celebrating the Muscatine, Iowa–Zhending, China sister cities relationship. Left to right: Mayor Hopkins, Sarah Lande, Mayor Yang. And, Mayor Yang and Mayor Hopkins.

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But a short time after returning to China, Xi Jinping suggested via email to Sarah Lande, that we engage a community in China about having a sister city relationship. So, that’s what started the wheels churning for that adventure. That city in China became Zhending. The rest is kind of history. I went to China and visited with the folks in Zhending; their mayor, Mayor Yang, came to Muscatine and visited with our folks. We sat down and signed a letter of intent to become sister cities. So, that’s kind of how that went. As time went on, Xi Jinping became the President of the People’s Republic of China, and Sarah Lande is still in Muscatine, and they stay in contact every now and then. But it’s a relationship that started I will say that we have moved hopefully into the future, and we now have in our high school four years of Mandarin language. We also have an orchestra that is fairly well-versed in the usage of Chinese instruments, which as you may know, are all stringed instruments. They have sent us some of these instruments, and we’ve learned to play them. And of course, every year here in Muscatine is a concert put on by an orchestra either from Beijing or from Shanghai. I believe we’ve done four of those already. And when we’re done with this pandemic coronavirus, I look for more of those kinds of events to be scheduled.

Schiller Institute/Robert Baker

The China Broadcasting Chinese Orchestra in Muscatine, February 24, 2016.

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I’d like to talk a little bit about the Chinese orchestras that visit Muscatine. As I said, there have been four of them; they’re all from Beijing or Shanghai. Not one of them has been here twice, so that’s just another element to the relationship that we have with the People’s Republic of China. They’re outstanding musicians, and they communicate with those in attendance at their concerts very well. So, it’s a pleasure to have them here, it’s a pleasure to know that they’ll be coming in the future, and we enjoy having them very much.

I guess what I’m saying to you is, we’re a small community, and we have a friendly relationship with the People’s Republic of China. That isn’t going to change, and we really don’t care a lot about what they do in Washington, D.C., or what they do in Los Angeles, California. We have a relationship with the People’s Republic of China. They’re great people; they have a good sense of humor, and I wouldn’t mind having one of them as a neighbor.

Daisuke Kotegawa

A Personal Recollection of Economic Assistance in Africa

Schiller Institute

Daisuke Kotegawa

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Mr. Kotegawa is a Research Director at the Canon Institute, and former Executive Director for Japan at the International Monetary Fund. He gave this presentation to the Schiller Institute International Conference, on June 27, 2020, “Will Humanity Prosper, or Perish? The Future Demands a Four-Power Summit Now,” on Panel 1: “Instead of Geopolitics: The Principles of Statecraft.” This is an edited transcript of that speech.

In the mid-1980s, when I worked as a staff member of the World Bank, I had an opportunity to complain about the slow development of African countries despite a large amount of aid to Africa, to a British and a French staff, both of whom had devoted their lives to economic development in Africa. Their answer was amazing:

Mr. Kotegawa. It is wrong to expect fast economic growth in Africa which can be compared to those in Asia and Japan. Because Africa is trying to achieve what humanity has done in 2,000 years within 100 years.

Japan’s Attempt to Create a ‘Japan in Africa’

When I returned to Japan in 1987, I became the budget examiner in the Ministry of Finance, in charge of the budget for foreign economic assistance. We reviewed Japan’s basic policies regarding economic assistance to Africa, and we started to try to create a country that would become a model for development in Africa, that is, a “Japan” in Africa. I was convinced that it was very important to create a Japan in Africa, because at my days at the World Bank, I realized that Asian countries found Japan as their model and hope, having come to believe that Asian countries could reach the level of Western countries if they work diligently like the Japanese.

The first step was to select the target country. The target country had to have a moderate economic scale, but small enough not to have internal contention such as tribal conflict. We chose Ghana, Cameroon, and Malawi. As for Ghana, the young and clean leader Jerry Rawlings was also a major factor. We poured all three kinds of economic aid into these three countries: concessional loans with a focus on the construction of economic infrastructure, grants focused on construction of social infrastructure in the medical and educational sector, and technical assistance with the aim of technology transfer through dispatching experts and inviting trainees.

A backlash from the former colonial powers was expected, and Japan, which had historically little relationship with African countries, lacked the know-how to build aid projects there. So, we made an arrangement with Crown Agents, a British aid agency, for consulting on our projects in Africa. As a result, about one-third of Ghana’s total annual income in the early 1990s came from Japan. Ghana, in particular, achieved great economic growth, and if we had continued to do so, a “Japan” in Africa could have been realized in the 1990s.

However, having watched the success of such Japanese aid, the British and French began to be vigilant. Ms. Édith Cresson, who became French prime minister in 1991, made remarks such as, “Japanese are yellow ants,” and “The Japanese are enemies and are plotting to conquer the world without obeying the rules,” and repeated such remarks as “Japanese economic assistance is Jurassic.”

Against such criticism, Japan was forced to review its aid policy and had to reduce aid to Africa before Ghana became a Japan in Africa. Since then, proposals for UN Millennium 2000 targets, including the debt relief, which mainly targeted Japan’s yen loans, have been drafted mainly by the U.K., and Japan’s presence in the world of economic assistance has gradually been lost.. I think that there is a fundamental difference between the Western concept of economic assistance and that of Japan. The underlying idea of Western aid is that of charity. This leads to the emphasis on “humanitarian aid,” and the idea of the possible economic independence of the recipient country is rare.

The basic idea of Japan’s aid, however, is the recipient country’s economic growth and independence. This is the idea that flows from the roots of modern Japan since the Meiji Restoration, which marks the intents of Japan to catch up with and overtake the West, having witnessed the plight of Asian colonies under imperialism.

On the issue of economic assistance policy, I had to fight with the Western countries, with wannabe scholars, critics, and mass media at home, as well as those abroad, along with my friends in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs who shared the same sense of mission. Mr. Ishikawa, who wrote several books at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was my greatest collaborator.

Japan’s Aid Increases Employment by Building Infrastructure

One day, a Japanese journalist came to me and started to criticize Japan’s aid policy. His argument was not original; it echoed the well-known Western criticism of Japan. For example, he said that Japan had built hospitals in developing countries, but only some wealthy people in those countries can use such hospitals, not the general public, which is impoverished; that Japan was building telephone networks in developing countries where most people do not have telephones; and that Japan has built international airports in capital cities in order to advertise its aid, but that these airports do not benefit at all the general public in the developing countries who have no chance of going abroad. He gave the Philippines as an example, claiming that it is wrong that Japan has built a hospital for the rich in Manila. Sweden built apartments for the poor in the slums of Manila.

I asked him, “By the way, what would you be most worried about if you were asked by your company tomorrow to go to Manila next week?” He replied, “Whether I can call up Tokyo smoothly, whether the airport there is fine, and whether there is a proper hospital.” So, I told him, “What you said is exactly what foreign companies which make investment in the Philippines are concerned about. If there are no problems on such matters, overseas companies will build factories in the Philippines in search of cheap labor and hire people with low wages with minimal education. In this way, employment increases, and the gap between the rich and the poor decreases.

I have visited the Smokey Mountain in Manila, which is the core of a slum where Sweden built apartments. The place is a garbage dump, and residents sleep on benches on this pile of garbage and they protect themselves from rain by roofs made by tablecloths. It stinks very badly. People living there dig out what can be used from the pile of garbage and sell it in the city. The apartments built by Sweden became a slum in less than six months, because its residents don’t have regular employment, no income. It is not possible to maintain the apartments, no matter how splendid the dwelling.

Japan’s aid helps companies increase employment by building economic infrastructure such as railways, ports, airports, roads, power plants, and telecommunication networks with yen loans, creating preconditions for overseas companies to enter the country, and help provide facilities for basic education as a social infrastructure. Gradually, technology will be transferred from the foreign companies to the local companies, and industries will grow in the developing country.

Just as we were providing economic assistance to various Asian countries with this way of thinking, the value of the yen doubled as a result of the Plaza Accord, and the relocation of factories to Asia began by Japanese companies that were no longer able to stand up to labor costs in Japan. The relocation began in Malaysia, where politics were stable and the power generation capacity built by yen loans was firm, and proceeded to Thailand, Indonesia, and China, and the so-called geese-type economic growth started in Asia. This steady economic development continued until the Asian economic crisis of the late 1990s.

Trilateral Cooperation: Japan, China, the U.S.

I advocated joining the Belt and Road Initiative as proposed by China, to my Japanese colleagues, especially when China proposed the establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and also with the United States, because I thought cooperation among these three countries would be the best mix to build up economic infrastructure in the developing countries. In my view, the Chinese have a shortfall in their capacity to build up the new projects, which is actually a major part of the advantage for Japanese bankers as well as American bankers.

So, the United States and Japan can draw up a kind of blueprint for economic development, and China should be in charge of financing and also actual construction of those projects. And after the completion of those projects, Japan would like to take the lead in the maintenance and rehabilitation of those completed projects, if they are needed, because this is the kind of area in which Japanese companies are quite good.

I believe this is the best way of collaborating, for these three countries for the future of this globe.

Thank you.

Ramasimong Phillip Tsokolibane

You Must Help Make the Decision:

It Will Either Be Africa’s Time to Die,

Or To Lead Humanity into a Bright Future

Mr. Tsokolibane is the Leader of LaRouche South Africa. He presented this greeting to the Schiller Institute International Conference, on June 27, 2020, “Will Humanity Prosper, or Perish? The Future Demands a Four-Power Summit Now,” on Panel 1: “Instead of Geopolitics: The Principles of Statecraft.”

From the Republic of South Africa, I offer my greeting to those of you gathered virtually around the globe for this important conference. My name is Ramasimong Phillip Tsokolibane, and it is my great honor to lead the LaRouche movement in South Africa.

The matters upon which you are deliberating will determine whether or not mankind survives our turbulent times. Around the globe, people are in the streets, rising up to protest the intolerable injustice of the dying neocolonial order that has enslaved all of us. It is a deadly monetarist order that values pieces of speculative financial paper above human life.

The collapse of this global British financial empire is certain. What will replace it, is not. What must be brought into being is a new world economic order based on the unleashing of the greatest power in the universe, the power of human creativity, to build on this planet a world of hope, peace and prosperity, where we will be truly, finally, free.

We shall extend our dominion beyond Earth into the vast expanse of the universe beyond. This was the mighty dream of the great Lyndon LaRouche, who taught us that the final conjunctural crisis of the old, evil British Empire was coming, and that we must, as revolutionaries, be prepared to seize this moment to shepherd the great change for the good.

As we deliberate today, we must remember the teachings of Mr. LaRouche. It is now truly his time, a time in which troubles can be turned into opportunity. To do otherwise, would be to allow those evil people who lorded over us, as the masters of the old Empire, to continue their rule in an even more brutish and deadly form, a global fascist order, whose policy intention it is, to kill more than three-quarters of all people on earth—that is, if they don’t stumble into a general thermonuclear war that kills all of us.

As the COVID-19 virus slashes its deadly path across my continent—which will leave tens of millions dead in its wake, if not more—we see the results of the Brutish Empire policy of enforced underdevelopment. Combined with equally deadly famine, and attempts to stir up wars here and around the globe, we can count more millions murdered through the Empire’s policy.

It does not have to be this way!

LaRouche’s policies and programs for development and jobs point the way to the future. For Africa, it’s “Go with LaRouche, or die with the old neo-colonial empire.”

Africa wants to live, and we have, with some help, the means to survive and prosper. My country—the only full-set economy on the continent—can help produce both the machinery and the machine tools required for the industrialization of Africa. We can help train the hundreds of millions of new productive workers that will be needed.

We have one of the most advanced nuclear energy industries on the globe, which is under constant attack from London. It is our future, and the future of billions of Africans to come, that this conference is discussing.

Best wishes for the success of your deliberations!

Panel 1: Discussion

Schiller Institute

Clockwise from upper left: Dennis Speed, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Dr. Kildare Clarke, Diane Sare, Dr. Joycelyn Elders, Boris Meshchanov.

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Discussion followed the main presentations of Panel 1 at the Schiller Institute International Conference, on June 27, 2020, “Will Humanity Prosper, or Perish? The Future Demands a Four-Power Summit Now,” and included questions submitted from all over the world.

This is an edited transcript of the discussion among panelists Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institute; Dr. Joycelyn Elders, former Surgeon General of the United States; Dr. Kildare Clarke, a long-time New York City emergency room director; and Boris Meshchanov, Counselor, Russian Federation Mission to the United Nations; with co-moderators Dennis Speed and Diane Sare.

Panel 1 was titled, “Instead of Geopolitics: The Principles of Statecraft.” Zepp-LaRouche opened the discussion.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: We wanted to have this conference to show a way for governments to work together; to show how people can support that, and in this way help to create an environment in which the urgent need for a new world economic order, a new financial system, can be put on the table.

I’m very encouraged, because what Dr. Jin did is very much our approach. You need a dialogue of cultures; you need to look for those ideas which resonate in the other culture even if the predicates are different. I think he did an excellent job in doing that.

I think the fact that Mr. Meshchanov chose to focus on Africa is a sign of the times. The fate of the African continent will decide if we are morally fit to survive. We must work together as nations to help to overcome the dangers affecting all of us: the new locust plague, growing famine, and the pandemic. Can we put aside all kinds of geopolitical and contrary interests and really work together in the common task of getting humanity into a different era?

I was very happy with what Dr. Elders said. This idea of calling on the youth is right. They must play an important role: It’s their future, it’s their world. Young people always like to talk to other people from other countries and work together. That is leverage we can use to influence governments to go in the direction that they need to.

Very delightful was what Mayor Hopkins demonstrated, because it really beats back the idea that small communities can’t do much. He has demonstrated that it can be done, and the fact that the great community of Muscatine has a relationship to Xi Jinping, is just a very bold and very good example. At the end, when he blended in these musical performances, it touched off exactly what needs to be touched off—namely, love between different cultures. Different cultures are not a threat, they are actually an enrichment once you start to know them and to encounter them.

I also want to thank Mr. Ding Yifan and Mr. Kotegawa, both of whom are long-term acquaintances of ours. This was a powerful, and useful, demonstration of how you can work together on different levels and set an example.

Dennis Speed: Counselor Meshchanov, please give us your reflections on this question that came in: “What is President Putin’s thinking in calling for a P5 summit [a summit of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council], and how does this compare with Mrs. LaRouche’s proposal?”

Boris Meshchanov: Thank you for the opportunity to speak and deliberate on these acute and intelligent problems of the current moment. And thank you for your question.

At the United Nations, we have been involved in organizing the summit even before the pandemic. We’re still looking forward to having it under the new circumstances. We proceed from President Vladimir Putin’s own statements earlier this year from Jerusalem, where he proposed a summit of the United Nations Security Council’s five permanent members. The rationale for organizing the summit is to [avert] new sprouts of hate and discrimination between people and peoples.

The United Nations, and the permanent members of the UN Security Council, [share] the responsibility for preserving civilization. These countries are expected to set an example for other states in this regard. So, such a summit would demonstrate loyalty of countries to their responsibilities—countries that combatted Nazism and fascism, 75 years ago.

This is how we see it, and how we see the objectives of this summit. We believe that this current moment has, unfortunately, contributed. Borders and discrimination and inequality between countries are getting worse. That is why we selected the issue of Africa for our presentation at this Schiller Institute event. We are strongly convinced that, as one of the previous speakers has stated—it’s a commonplace saying at the UN—no one is safe, if someone is not safe.

Reflecting on my colleagues’ presentations, I was highly impressed by our friend from Muscatine’s [Mayor DeWayne Hopkins’s] presentation on the cultural links between the peoples of the United States and China. My previous consular posts in Greece and Mongolia were associated with promoting direct links between people, between human beings. It’s very timely now to speak about culture, about eternal values that unite peoples, which can overcome the politicizing trend in international economic relations.

To conclude, to speak of Africa, many thanks to [Ramasimong Phillip Tsokolibane], our colleague from South Africa, a member country of the BRICS association, an association that we’re trying to build on principles of dignity and respect for sovereignty, and promoting independent ways of making decisions. That is the only way: a new multipolar world, capable of saving humanity from new conflicts and new wars.

Dr. Kildare Clarke: I agree a lot with Dr. Elders. The problem for me is that I recognize that we’ve got to fundamentally change the educational system in this country if we really want to get out of the problems we are facing. We cannot continue to have groups upon groups, planning groups and proposals—we’ve got to act emergently.

We’ve got to change educational systems; we do not have to wait until he tries to get to high school or college, before he knows that he’s going to go to medical school. These things can begin in the elementary school. You’ve got to expose people. When people are exposed, they get interested. We are selectively excluding a large part of the population who can become excellent healthcare workers. They might not start in medical school. They could be assistants, learn, understand what it takes to get there, and go back to school. But if we do not expose them now, we’re going to lose a whole generation of excellent physicians, nurses, and other healthcare professionals, because we don’t think it is okay to educate them now.

Dr. Joycelyn Elders: This conference has been excellent in bringing up some problems that we all have. One of the things we all have to know is, whatever we’re talking about doing, you can’t do it unless you’re healthy. So, I feel very strongly we’ve got to have healthy populations, and we’ve got to start early.

I agree with Dr. Clarke. I always tell people that children are half as tall as they’ll ever be, by the time they’re three. They know half as much as they’ll ever know, by the time they’re four. Hope, will, and drive has been determined by the time they’re five. So, we’ve got to start early. Children can’t be what they can’t see. So, we’ve got to make sure that they’re exposed, and we can start them early. They don’t have to start out being a brain surgeon, but they can start out being what they can be.

Most of all, we’ve got to keep them healthy. We need to make sure people are healthy, educated, motivated, and have hope for the future. That’s where we can start. Every country can start with that. We’ve got to start with health. And we’ve got to educate them. You can’t keep an ignorant population healthy. So, we’ve got to start with educating the population, and we’ve certainly got to start with doing everything we can to keep them healthy. We have to know that we’ve got to have trust and global solidarity. If we don’t trust each other to do the things we need to do, we can’t get it done. We have to go out and work in the communities. Find out what the communities need, rather than giving them what we think they need.

I especially enjoyed the talk of Mr. Kotegawa, from Japan, on the things they were doing. Sometimes you think you’re doing exactly what a country needs—going into Africa and doing what they needed—but maybe they needed something else. Involve the African nations to find out what the nation feels that they need, and help them develop what they think they want and need. We may have to start in our small communities, starting out with the young people; training them to be community health workers. Later, they grow up to be nurses and nurse-practitioners, physicians, and then to being super-specialists.

We want to improve the health of the world, because we all know this coronavirus has taught us that any time one country is not healthy, all the rest, we’re all, at risk. So, we’ve got to make sure that we help every country to be healthy and improve their health. We’ve got to start with the young people who are going to determine what the world’s going to be. We have to do everything we can to train them to be the best that they can be.

I never fail to go to an old Chinese proverb, “The society grows great when old men and old women plant trees under whose shade they know they’ll never sit.” The Schiller Institute is trying to pull nations together in solidarity, globally, so that they can plant trees for the bright young people of the future to sit under.

Zepp-LaRouche: My heart is moved by what you are saying, because it is that kind of human spirit which is needed now to move mountains. And these mountains need to be moved quickly, because the dangers are many. So, I’m very happy that you are saying what you are saying.

Diane Sare: Mr. Meshchanov has been involved in cultural affairs. St. Petersburg was the location of the premiere of Beethoven’s sublime work, the Missa Solemnis. I know the chorus there must have been excellent, because our chorus is working on it, and it’s very difficult. This being the Year of Beethoven, and Beethoven being a composer who I think really embodies the love of mankind as a whole, I think it would be something if we could figure out how to commemorate it, if not this year because of the COVID, then as soon as possible.

Ambassador J. Ayikoi Otoo, High Commissioner of Ghana to Ottawa, Canada: I think the suggestion for four leaders to meet to brainstorm on the effects of the pandemic in order to find universal solutions is a brilliant one. But, with President Trump reeling under pressure for not having taken the pandemic seriously, and with this leading to several deaths, with President Trump pushing the blame on China and making derogatory remarks about China—can you see these two leaders working together? Considering the fact that President Trump recently withdrew from a Zoom conference organized by leaders of the EU and China on the subject of the raising of money to fight the pandemic worldwide, what are the prospects for the four leaders, whom you cite, to come together?

Zepp-LaRouche: I want to make one important correction in your question. It may be true that President Trump didn’t pick up on the warnings coming from China quickly enough, but neither did the European countries. They also lost precious time. But I want to emphatically make the point that this pandemic would not be a pandemic had there been a good health system in every country. That is a provable fact because, in Wuhan and Hubei province, the Chinese imposed a strict quarantine, and after two months it was under control. That approach, if you had a similar health system in every country in Africa, in Latin America, in Asia, in Europe, could have stopped this epidemic from becoming a pandemic.

Therefore, I think it’s very important to lay the blame for all this on the neo-liberal system which has prevented the buildup of infrastructures and health systems in the whole world.

This was a point made by my late husband already in 1973. He warned, and set up a biological holocaust taskforce to investigate the effects of the IMF policies at that time. In the following years, the so-called IMF conditionalities prevented developing countries from investing in their health systems, as they were forced to pay on their debt burden first. These conditionalities created the conditions for the pandemic to arise. Trump’s predecessors, the two Bushes and Obama, did much more to contribute to create the conditions than President Trump in his admittedly slightly delayed reaction. So, I just wanted to correct you on that, because it’s very easy to say it’s the guilt of Trump, but he definitely did not cause the problem fifty years ago.

Unfortunately, this situation will get so much worse. Surges are now occurring in more than two dozen states of the United States, in Brazil, in India. In general, it is estimated that this is not even a second wave; this is still the first wave which has not yet peaked. Several American epidemiologists and virologists have said there’s no point in talking of a peak in cases and deaths; the peak is not yet here.

I fear that the collapse we are seeing right now in terms of the effects of the economic shutdown, is also just the beginning. I think the situation will worsen in the short term, long before the election takes place in November, and the social ferment which exists right now—in part due to the murder of George Floyd and others, but it’s also manipulated and taken over by people who just want to create the kind of social trouble President Putin warned Trump would be faced with—a “Maidan.”

The demonstrations definitely have elements of that. I think this will get worse, and that means our intervention in the United States but also around the world will be crucial. It is my conviction that we could use more examples like that of the Mayor [Hopkins] of Muscatine—people who just start relationships and create an environment which counters the malicious lies in the mainstream media and the crazy talk by such people as Senators Marco Rubio or Bob Menendez, or people who just are completely irresponsible in what they say. There should be a standard of truth that you shouldn’t say things which are made up; but some of these people have lost all hesitations to just, for their own purposes, lie.

It’s very important that this be countered by a lot of citizens. If we can get the initiative going, which I proposed with this taskforce, to find solutions on the level of the coincidence of opposites, that can become an important factor, because the idea that you have to replace geopolitical confrontation with cooperation to solve this pandemic and all the other problems together, must become a steamroller in the population.

I also think that if there is a chorus of countries—from Africa, from Latin America, from other places—and from individuals in high positions, who realize that the problems of humanity are so big that they only can be solved by the leading countries—the most powerful economically, the most powerful militarily, those countries with the most population—who then demand that these leading countries get together, it will happen. Where else can the solution come from?

I think if we all work together, we can orchestrate an environment where these ideas are picked up, and all the advantages which lie in them may convince even those countries which seem to be at loggerheads right now, to come together and work together, because it will benefit them more than keeping the confrontation going.

Isaiah K. Koech, Counsellor in the Kenyan High Commission [embassy] in Ottawa, Canada: Whereas there is advocacy for the world’s powerful countries to meet in a Four-Power Summit to discuss solutions that would mitigate global crises, how sure are we that the powerful leaders will incorporate issues that directly affect African countries?

Meshchanov: I will try to briefly focus on several questions posed before, starting with a positive conversation of our colleague referring to cultural links. We would like to reiterate our deep understanding that culture is stronger than politics. I take this opportunity to thank the Schiller Institute for performing the brilliant chorus song Tri Tankista in Russian, associated with Victory Day in May, which we would highly encourage everyone to see—a brilliant and bright presentation of cultural links and culture bridging gaps between our countries. We are deeply appreciative of this work by the Schiller Institute.

And of course the Year of Beethoven deserves to be commemorated. Our embassies, consulates, and missions all over the world are open, especially in these difficult times, to any proposals of collaboration in the cultural sphere. So, thank you very much for your remarks.

As for the four leaders’ summit proposal by the Schiller Institute, we believe it’s a great idea, and does not contradict President Vladimir Putin. I would like once again to reiterate that the idea of five countries, specifically the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, was proposed in association with the 75-year anniversary of victory in the Great Patriotic War—the Second World War, talking globally. It addresses the idea of recollecting the common responsibility of our countries to prevent discrimination and hatred on the borders between countries, bearing in mind the responsibility of these specific countries, which are founders of the United Nations and the winners in the Second World War.

That was the rationale for my reiteration, but that doesn’t prejudice against deliberating on any alternative forum. I’m speaking in my personal capacity of course now, but that reminds me of the rationale behind the establishment of the BRICS association, which started back in the 1990s from the ideas of our outstanding and well-known academic, diplomat, and former Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, Yevgeny Primakov, who put on the table the idea of Russia, India, and China collaboration and systemic cooperation, meetings, and summits. That was sort of an idea that could also be taken into consideration, because our great predecessor Mr. Primakov foresaw the rising role of India, and the rising role of African countries, as a natural process of moving forward the multipolar world after the collapse of the bipolar system. That is why we strongly believe in multilateralism, multilateral fora.

Coming to the third question: of the United States and China, and the possibility of cooperation, with all the controversies and conflicts that we see now. We do not have very smooth and easy relationships with the Western world and the United States, as you are, of course, aware. But still we try to find mutual interests. We did so even under the Cold War situation, going back many decades.

Now, something that contributes to finding solutions is the pressure of business circles, investors, diasporas, cultural links, parliamentary relations. Even being oppressed by coercive measures by several Western countries, we stick to the policy of cooperation and collaboration with our Western partners. China is also objectively interested in developing relationships with the United States. As well, the United States cannot do without China in the modern economic system. That is why we are sort of optimistic on a U.S.-China reconciliation.

To focus briefly on African countries, we believe that the development of the African continent recently, not only in terms of economic growth, but also in diversifying trade and investor partnerships, and maturing political collaboration between African countries, will contribute to their capability of speaking in one voice. That probably opens good perspectives of African countries joining the global governance system which is going to be revisited and reformulated. As I also stated in my presentation, our country has always spoken positively on raising involvement of African countries in any global fora. It should be inclusive, not exclusive.

Zepp-LaRouche: There is probably no problem globally, neither regionally, economically, nor otherwise, which cannot be solved if the geopolitical confrontation between the United States, Russia, and China in particular, is eliminated. The entire game plan of what we call the British Empire—which is really the City of London, Wall Street, the financial institutions behind the neo-liberal system—its entire ability to keep the rule over the world’s institutions, depends on the geopolitical game to divide the United States and Russia and China. People don’t realize that it is exactly the same forces—financial, media, and political—behind the coup attempt against Trump, who are behind the anti-Russia campaign, and who are behind the anti-China campaign. Once you realize that, you have a completely different view.

My husband, many years ago, in picking up on the idea of Prime Minister Primakov, added the United States to the combination of Russia, China, and India. He recognized that you need a combination of states which is powerful enough to be stronger than the City of London and Wall Street. Once these four, or especially Russia, China, and the U.S., get together, then you can solve any other problem.

I have said many times, this summit is not going to be only one summit. Because the problems are so deep and many, you probably need a summit process, where you start to put the mechanisms like for a New Bretton Woods system into motion; you start to take care of the cultural question, and the health system.

The way I look at it, once you have this format, once the presidents of those countries start to cooperate to solve the common problems of mankind, it can be developed to become an integrative process where other countries, other continents, other states are absolutely welcomed to support the process. But I think it’s important to first put together the core of power which can actually change the world, and not just have it like many conferences where you have a democratic kind of back and forth and nothing gets accomplished. I think this is also why President Putin wants to keep the veto power in the Permanent Five countries so that it doesn’t degenerate into just a debate where no results can be accomplished.

The summit process should be open; we are organizing to include countries such as Japan or Germany, Italy, France, countries from Africa. They should absolutely support that. The best thing is to do it now; to add your voice that such a summit must take place. I think it can be done. I think it’s absolutely doable, but we need a worldwide mobilization to accomplish it.

Dr. Abdul Alim Muhammad, Washington, D.C.: How can the rest of the world learn and benefit from the Chinese and Cuban collaboration in flattening the curve of the epidemic centered in Wuhan? How can those lessons be applied here in the United States and elsewhere, like Brazil and countries in Africa, to flatten the curve? Why isn’t Cuba’s interferon alpha-2b available to save American lives? Should there be an international standard of criminal public health neglect?

[Referencing the infamous 1932-1972 Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male] Was the deliberate withholding of known effective treatments done to suit a racist agenda? Is history repeating on a global scale?

Dr. Elders: I think we all realize that we have a global pandemic now. But as in all pandemics, we’ve got to have the right leaders if we want to come out of this, and I think what the Schiller Institute is doing, we’ve got to have the kind of leaders who are willing to lead. And they have got to make the sacrifices and do the things that they need to, in order to lead and move forward. Our public health system has not been well funded. We’ve got to invest more in our public health, but when we think of public health, we’ve got to always remember, that public health is not just about individuals. It’s about the whole community; it’s all of us. We’ve all got to be involved, and you can’t keep our people healthy if we don’t educate them to be healthy. I think that that’s an important issue that all of our communities have to be aware of.

The reason? I won’t say the reason, I don’t know the reasons. Some of the reasons why our curve is not flattened in the U.S. as it has in China and some of the other countries is because of our culture and the education of our people. We’re not willing to do the things we need to; we know we need to do them, but we just aren’t doing them. Like social distancing, which we could do. Handwashing. Wearing a mask. But everybody wanted to start socializing again. So, these are things the Chinese were willing to do and did. They enforced it, and we did not. That was partly related to our leadership, that we’ve not done it.

About the Tuskegee Institute study, I think that was a public health, leadership mistake. We’ve worked through that now. I do not feel in any way that anybody was trying to take anything away or trying to not provide therapy or treatment. And I do not feel that we’re not trying to do everything we can now to make sure we do what we can to eliminate the coronavirus. But we do not have a vaccine; we do not have adequate medications. All we have are the public health measures we know we need to follow. We’ve got to educate our people. The reason why we’re seeing more problems in our very low-income, less well-educated people is because of what’s happened. We know that we’ve got to address those issues if we’re really going to make a difference.

I think the same is true for Brazil. I think Brazil is behaving much like America; we’re not doing the things we know we need to do.

Zepp-LaRouche: In January, when China started to take very strict measures—quarantining people, tracing contacts, cutting out social contact by allowing families to go shopping only once every three days and only one member of the family—all of these things, there was a huge freakout in the West: “This is a dictatorship! See how horrible! They’re violating human rights again.”

In reality, helping China to contain COVID-19 is a deep cultural difference between Western and Chinese culture. In the West, it was a big accomplishment that the rights of individuals were held high. This is a good thing, but unfortunately, this individuality became excessive. People mistook freedom for liberties and hedonism, what Dr. Elders just spoke about—people wanting to go back to the beaches, wanting to go back to partying. These really insane behaviors are an expression of such exaggerated individuality.

While the Chinese culture—and all Asian cultures, for that matter—have traditionally focussed much more on the common good as primary, the individual right was subsumed under the right of the community and the cultural good. The individual cannot prosper if the community does not prosper.

This cultural difference very much deserves our study, because we will come out of this pandemic with the need to adjust some of our values. They may not be exactly what people tout to be the so-called “Western values.” Western values—that’s a whole other subject. We have to think hard to come up with principles for humanity’s durable survival. That is part of what we are trying to do with these kinds of conferences—that people start to reflect and say, “How can we become a species of rationality and creativity, and not compete with some piggies who are trying to get to the trough the quickest?” It’s a fundamental question of identity, of moral values, which has to be addressed.

Dr. Katherine Alexander-Theodotou, Anglo-Hellenic and Cypriot Law Association:

1. What do you suggest doing to bring the European nations together to reflect on democracy, basing the institutions on democratic lines, creating a real democratic union, including Russia? The vast culture of the civilization of Europe will be the fortress of prosperity and peace.

2. How can the Schiller Institute assist? The Schiller Institute can assist by continuously advocating unity, cooperation, education, and preventing the undermining of nations’ sovereignty of Europe by others ruled by undemocratic institutions such as Turkey, threatening the sovereignty of its neighbors such as Greece and Cyprus.

3. There is a need for European health policy and coordination of the health authorities in order to have common standards of health policy and the provision of competent healthcare to the peoples of Europe.

4. There are populations living in slavery throughout Europe, especially in the U.K., where almost a million people have been living for almost 15 years with no identity, as they are immigrants [with no legal identity] whose voice is being suppressed by the immigration laws. There are also others in other European countries. How can we stop this system of slave labor?

Zepp-LaRouche: The current EU needs to be changed, because it has developed into a gigantic bureaucracy which is very little in touch with the interests of its member states. I could cite you a whole list of examples. We have to work out integration of Russia. I think one of the lessons Putin writes of in his article was that there was a failure before World War II to develop an integrated security system.

I’m quite interested—I’m putting it carefully—I’m quite interested in the report that, in a long phone conversation yesterday between Putin and Macron, Macron said that he stands for a Europe “from Lisbon to Vladivostok,” which would mean integrating the Eurasian Economic Union and the Belt and Road Initiative into one body. I’m a firm believer in the principle of sovereignty. In this present crisis the EU has done nothing. It was its member nations that recognized the need for food security and sovereign control over production of medicine and health equipment.

Nicholas of Cusa, who I quoted earlier, was the first to explain why only a sovereign nation-state with a reciprocal relationship between the government and the governed, can guarantee defense of the common good, especially under conditions of crisis. Today’s EU, which is trying to attach itself to a NATO globalization scheme, playing all kinds of geopolitical games, is not necessarily the vehicle with which Europe should be reformed. Maybe that should be the subject of another webinar, because this is a very complicated issue. But I think an alliance of sovereign nation-states in the spirit of Charles de Gaulle would make much more sense to represent the interests of all the people.

As for the slave labor, this present neo-liberal system depends not only on the exploitation of cheap labor in countries like Bangladesh and other countries, but slave labor conditions exist inside the Western countries themselves. In Germany, for example, seven or eight slaughterhouses employ Romanians and people from other East European countries, who are living in horrible conditions. They have become the breeding ground for COVID-19, because there is no health system, no social distancing possible. I think taking care of the health system is the precondition for everything to function, exactly as Dr. Elders says. If you are not healthy, you cannot do anything. So, protection of the health of the citizens has to start in every country, not just in some.

Dennis Speed: I want to thank all of our panelists who were with us today. We’ll now conclude this first panel with concluding remarks from each panelist.

Meshchanov: I see in an optimistic way what is happening. Up-ending has happened in every crisis in history. The word “crisis” derives from the Ancient Greek word krisi, which means making a decision, making a choice. So, we need to make the right decision, the right choice. I fully support Mrs. Helga LaRouche’s statement on changing values after this crisis. We believe that in this crisis, constructive forces such as the Schiller Institute and many others in our country as well, are heard better. That’s probably one of the systemic significances of this crisis.

Speaking on our President’s article, to which you have repeatedly referred, Mr. Putin underscores in his article devoted to the 75th anniversary of the war’s end, the Munich conspiracy. That is something that he starts with, but he finishes his article by underscoring the significance of cooperation, collaboration, and shared responsibility of great powers. That is why we are optimistic on a future cooperation to which sometimes crises and great systemic catastrophes can contribute.

Dr. Elders: This has been one excellent conference. We talked about how in all conferences we need to trust each other, that we need to learn to work together, and that our cooperation and trust is going to do more to overcome this virus and promote the health of our people than anything else. The more we squabble with each other, the more this virus grows, divides, and spreads.

So, the first thing is, we want to improve our economy, educate our people. We’ve got to first do everything we can to keep them healthy. We can’t develop an excellent working society unless we have a healthy society. We know how, and it’s time we began to use the knowledge we know and make our leaders stop squabbling about where, when, and how it started. Let’s look at what we can do to make a solution. We need to get all nations that we can, involved, so we can all work together to try and make a healthy global world. That’s how I feel we’re going to also address our economy.

Zepp-LaRouche: I would like to bring people’s memories back to what we saw in the beginning—the video of Lyndon LaRouche—who very much focussed on the fact that we are the creative species, at least the only one discovered in the universe so far.

I think if we strengthen that quality of our species—our creativity—which distinguishes us from all the others, then trust will be easy. A human being who relates to the creativity of another human, doesn’t have prejudices. At best, you have a wish to increase the creativity of the other one for the common good of all of humanity: to make people better people, to make them do more good, to really get rid of all of this hedonistic decay of our culture which prevents people from being creative. If people just want to go partying and get drunk and have dope, they are ruining that which makes them human.

Hopefully one of the outcomes, will be a renaissance of cultural values, of Classical culture. When we learn to think like Beethoven, and to think like Lyndon LaRouche, we are best equipped to deal with this and any other problem.