MANHATTAN CONFERENCE
‘Inspire Each Citizen To Act for the Future’
by Dennis Speed
Jan. 17—An unusual two-day “congress” took place in New York City over the Jan. 14-15 Martin Luther King Day weekend. The mission of the gatherings, and of the discussions and interventions made therein, was to upshift a two-year process, termed in November 2014 by Lyndon LaRouche “the Manhattan Project.” LaRouche, economist, statesman, and former candidate for the United States Presidency, had made clear from the inception of the Manhattan Project that he wished to intervene into the Presidential system process by reinstating the idea of the federal republic of the United States, as Alexander Hamilton had constituted that United States in his four famous reports on manufacturing, credit, and the national bank.
LaRouche composed Four Laws which both summarize and advance that Hamiltonian Presidential system to a new level, insisting that the General Welfare of a society can only be advanced by developing its human creativity, leading to an increase in the productive powers of labor. A new technology, even a fundamentally new source of power that changes a society’s productive basis, is not enough in itself to develop it. It is rather the individual minds of the population as a whole and their development, which are, properly speaking, the only real “natural resources” of a human economy, and the true source of the increase in a society’s physical wealth. The universal cultural development of human creativity is the bedrock of all economic progress and wealth, not “natural resources.”
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EIRNS/Robert Wesserr
John Sigerson conducting the Schiller Institute Chorus Jan. 15, at St. Joseph’s Co-Cathedral in Brooklyn, New York. The concert was part of the Jan. 14-15 Manhattan Conference held in New York City over the Martin Luther King Day weekend.
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Creating the New Paradigm for Mankind
In her keynote address to the Saturday Conference, “Inaugurating A New Paradigm: the Dialogue of Cultures,” Schiller Institutes founder and head Helga Zepp-LaRouche said:
Once every nation knows the best expressions of the other one, I’m absolutely certain that all conflicts will disappear, and we will have a rich, universal culture consisting of many national expressions and traditions—but still being united by universal principles of art and science.
Now, the other dimension which must come to this dialogue of cultures, or dialogue of civilizations, is a look into the future, not only back to the best traditions, but a look to where mankind should be in 100 years, in 1,000 years from now. There, it is very clear that the natural next phase of evolution is space: travel, research, cooperation, and colonization of space. If you think that in the long arc of evolution, life developed from the oceans with the help of photosynthesis, to land. You had higher forms of species developing with higher forms of energy-flux density in their metabolisms. Eventually, man arrived. Man started to move from the rivers and ocean coasts inland, with the help of infrastructure, and opened up the landlocked areas. Now, we are at that point where the New Silk Road, becoming the World Land-Bridge, is completely at that phase of evolution.
So, the natural next phase of human evolution is the development of nearby space in the first period, and then further space travel as we develop the technologies to do so, with the help of fusion energy and similar technologies. Man will expand in space, and then we will no longer be just an Earth-bound species, but we will be a cosmo-political species, if you wish. That will then lead to a completely new knowledge about the identity of the human species.
We are in that period of a real epochal change, a New Paradigm, where I am absolutely certain mankind is about to become adult.
The Schiller Institute and Helga LaRouche in particular have insisted that a “new cultural platform must simultaneously come into existence with a new economic platform.” This is an important conception to highlight. The “New Silk Road” is not only a system of railways and waterways, but involves the revolutionary idea of developing the interiors of continents through the creation of transcontinental “development corridors.” On 50-100 km of either side of the “trunk lines,” cities and factories are to be located, shifting population centers inland and away from exclusive concentration along coastlines of continents. This is a fundamental, decisive shift in human culture—the beginning of the end of the imperial model of society.
The populations of these development-corridor urban centers will be increasingly heterogeneous, as were the populations that traveled and lived along the ancient Silk Road, which stretched throughout Asia, Africa, and Europe. To prepare to cooperate with China, Russia, India, and other nations (for example Brazil and South Africa, the other two BRICS nations), a corresponding “new cultural platform” must also be erected. This is not mere “cultural exchange.” It is a sense of a corresponding human identity, identical in all people, which is displayed in their greatest cultural achievements.
For example, consider Albert Einstein’s passionate outlook on creativity, as exemplified by his personal devotion to the performance of Classical music on the violin. Einstein contended that he often did his most important thinking by playing his violin. It was the spiritual preparation made available though the internal daily dialogue with Mozart and Bach that allowed Einstein to compose his greatest achievements in science. And Einstein’s participation in singer/scholar Paul Robeson’s campaign against the lynching of African-Americans in the South in the 1940s and 1950s, including his famous 1946 address at Pennsylvania’s Lincoln University, flowed from that same creative source.
Shifting the “popular,” that is to say, totally wrong, view of the historical role of the Classical artist—meaning the poet, or composer, or creative scientist—is an essential task if the United States citizenry expects to “seize the moment” now offered by the Presidential transition process, and the possibility of renewed human relations with Russia and China in particular. The great ideas of Schiller, Shakespeare, Beethoven, and others, and the artist’s personal role, must shift from that of being what Percy Shelley, in his “A Defense of Poetry,” termed “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” to that exemplified by Alexander Hamilton’s role: an acknowledged, self-conscious creator in the forefront of the invention, together with George Washington, of the American Presidency.
 LPAC TV
Founder of the Schiller Institutes, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, addressing the Manhattan Conference Jan. 14.
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Speaking earlier in her Saturday keynote, Zepp-LaRouche had stated:
Naturally, if the United States would cooperate with Russia, and have a decent relationship with China, then naturally the entire game plan to have this unipolar world—or call it globalization, which is just another word for Anglo-American financial empire—would go out of the window. So, that is why they are trying to undo this election of Donald Trump, and you can see very clearly it is a direct intervention by the British.
So, therefore, it’s not a question of party against party, or it’s not a question of nation against nation. It is the old dying paradigm of the British Empire—which is synonymous with globalization—clearly reacting to the emergence of the New Paradigm. Now that New Paradigm, however, is already very strong, and it is moving very rapidly.
Chinese Culture and the American Mind
A “culture shock” of the most friendly and salutary variety was delivered to the audience of 120 persons by Ben Wang, a pre-eminent lecturer on—and translator of—Chinese Classical poetry. An audience member offered this assessment of what transpired:
 EIRNS/Jason Ross
Ben Wang, Senior Lecturer in Language & Humanities at China Institute, addressing the Manhattan Conference Jan. 14.
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Ben Wang’s talent is that he can put you in stitches laughing with a few words, and keep your attention for hours as he leads even the most ignorant of audiences to understanding and appreciating the greatness of Chinese Classical literature. He gave a short but impactful lecture on Saturday, excerpting two heptasyllabic couplets from two poems by one of the most famous and revered poets in Chinese history, Li Ba (701-763), who earned the reverent sobriquet of “the Celestial of Poetry.” The first couplet, from “Tune of Clarity and Serenity” (761-763), praises the beauty of woman, in this case, one of the most famous in Chinese history, Yang Gui Fei (the favorite imperial consort of the most powerful Tang Dynasty emperor). As Ben said, Li Ba’s poetic words are entirely metaphorical and filled with subtlety. He followed that with a second heptasyllabic couplet from “Passing Parrot Isle,” an island on the south Yangtze River, which sank in the 14th Century. This couplet, about nature, again showed the musicality and beauty that lies in Chinese poetry. Last, Ben showed us a Literati Painting by one of the most famous Literati Painters, Shi Tao (1642-1701), whose took Li Ba’s poetry and rendered it in painting. Ben showed us how in Literati paintings, poetry, calligraphy and painting came together into a blend that is uniquely Chinese.
The audience was so intellectually aroused with the intellectual life exhibited in the two presentations, that they were provoked to think, and think deeply. No one left at the official conclusion of the event. Many talked for nearly an hour afterwards, expressing their astonishment at having “never been exposed” to this depth of thinking before.
Presidents Lincoln, King, and LaRouche
The United States Presidential system, and the successful functioning of the Executive branch of government of our republic, demands a culturally literate citizenry capable of holding the Presidency accountable for the General Welfare. The recent actions of civil rights veteran and Congressman John Lewis, and others, miss the point entirely. An insistence that the Glass-Steagall reinstatement measure be passed by the Trump Administration as the first order of business, in the name of Martin Luther King Jr., and in the name of the actions that Lewis himself had taken in the cause of justice in the 1960s, would be the “Lincolnesque”—and Presidential—way to address the new Administration. That action can still be taken, and should be; the mistake can be rectified. The cultural flaw, and delusion, of “partisan politics” can and must be corrected.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whom LaRouche has previously described as “the man who was most fit to be President” in the 1960s, demonstrated precisely this command of knowledge of the intent of the Constitution of the United States. King grasped Alexander Hamilton’s idea of the Presidency and the General Welfare clause, as is best seen in his opposition to the war in Vietnam. His conscience demanded that he upgrade his earlier accomplishments in the field of “civil rights,” to admonish the nation, including then-President Johnson, that the pursuit of the war violated the mission of the American Presidency, and he, King, was speaking out on behalf of that Presidency—not Johnson. On all important matters, King’s theological and literary allusions were an essential part of his mode of thinking, his artist’s view—that is, his higher mastery of the principles of the American Constitution.
What Lyndon LaRouche has termed “Politics As Art,” is a conception and practice that is today foreign to most Americans. Yet, it was not always so. Abraham Lincoln’s habit of reading and quoting from Shakespeare’s tragedies during Cabinet meetings was an essential feature of his successful campaign to provide, from Shakespeare, those conceptions actually necessary to prosecute the war required to advance and perfect the United States republic, thus ending slavery. Therefore, because Lincoln was himself a poet, as can be seen from his Gettysburg Address and his Second Inaugural Address, he could recognize what the abolitionists could not: He recognized that by seeking to perfect the Union, one could end slavery, but by seeking to abolish slavery, one would not perfect the Union. Frederick Douglass agreed with Lincoln on this, which is why Douglass not only rejected John Brown, but successfully collaborated with Lincoln in enlisting 200,000 African-American males into military service in 1863, providing the decisive military component that in fact ended the war, and slavery.
The Martin Luther King Jr. Weekend allowed the Schiller Institute, which has held conferences or commemorations of King’s birthday each year for thirty-one years, to also point out that King, like Lincoln, is an international, not merely American, figure. King’s visit to Berlin on Sept. 13, 1964,—where he addressed more than 20,000 people and said, “Where people break down the dividing wall of hostility which separates them from their brothers, Christ achieves his ministry of reconciliation,”—may be unknown to Americans, but will never be forgotten by the Germans (and the Americans) who were there.
As with Lincoln and King, but in an even more extreme way, Lyndon LaRouche’s launching of the set of ideas which gave birth to what is today called the “World Land-Bridge” or “New Silk Road,” first at the Kempinski Hotel in Oct. 12, 1988, and again on Nov. 10, Schiller’s Birthday, in 1989, is, together with the complete coverup of LaRouche’s role in the 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative, the most suppressed fact of the last fifty-three years of American history, post-Kennedy assassination (and the derivative assassinations of Malcolm X, King, and Robert Kennedy). This topic was discussed by Helga Zepp-LaRouche in the answer to a question posed by John Sigerson, music director of the Schiller Institute. [See accompanying article.]
It is not necessary for an American to actually be elected to the Presidency to affect, in a fundamental way, the Presidential system. Hamilton was never President, nor was Martin Luther King Jr., nor was Lyndon LaRouche. As with Joan of Arc, however, the power of that office can also speak through the voice of the unanointed citizen inspired to fulfill that Presidential mission. That is what makes the practice of American citizenship the most powerful position in the world, when people have the eyes of a Schiller, King, Lincoln, or LaRouche to see themselves thus.
Sending the Best Message
From America To China and Russia
Jan. 17—The following exchange between John Sigerson and Helga Zepp-LaRouche took place at the Jan. 14 Manhattan Conference.
John Sigerson: Hi. For those people who don’t know me, I’m John Sigerson, music director of Schiller Institute.
The hysteria around the Russian hacking strongly reminds me of the situation in 1986, when two LaRouche activists won the Democratic primaries for Lieutenant Governor and Secretary of State in the state of Illinois. That unleashed a furor where every single media outlet picked up the lie, that it was Lyndon LaRouche and his associates who were responsible for the recent assassination of the Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme. And it was truly incredible, the Big Lie that happened then. I just wanted to point that out.
 EIRNS/Jason Ross
John Sigerson, Schiller Institute Music Director, at the Manhattan Conference on Jan. 14.
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But to get to my main question, I was recently in Washington meeting with congressional staffers, and in the process of that, I think I figured out what the big roadblock in Congress is. [laughter] In the remaining banter in the process of these meetings, I pointed out that I would be very interested in,— I was pointing out that it would be very nice to found some kind of a chorus amongst the congressional staffers and maybe the congressmen and the senators themselves; because they really don’t have anything like that. And in every single case, the staffer whom I was talking with said, “Well, that sounds like a wonderful idea, but I can’t sing”!
So I think that in the process of learning to sing, we might be able to make some real progress.
But coming back to these meetings more seriously, what I was doing was briefing the staffers on the two events that we had here in Manhattan and in New Jersey, commemorating and giving condolence to the Russian people for the deaths of ninety-two people, including the large majority of the Alexandrov Ensemble, who were on their way in a jet plane to Syria.
For those people who don’t know, that jet went down on our Christmas Day. A number of days afterward, the Schiller Institute participated in a wreath-laying ceremony at the Russian consulate here in Manhattan, and we sang, in Russian, the Russian National Anthem. And this video went completely viral on Russian Internet media, resulting in nearly 500,000 views and a flood, an outpouring of comments from Russians, thanking us for showing that there are Americans who really don’t believe in this crazy hysteria that’s going on.
And then later, on Jan. 7, which happens to be the Russian Orthodox Christmas, we held a wreath-laying ceremony at the famous Tear Drop Monument [in Bayonne, New Jersey], in collaboration with many organizations, including most prominently the New York City Police Department. This monument had been contributed by the Russians to commemorate 9/11.
I pointed out to the congressmen and their staffers that what is really required, in all of the things that we do right now, including the adoption of Glass-Steagall and other things, is that it’s not so much a question of what we do, specifically—the legislation that we pass—but rather the intention behind what we do, and that the kind of messages that, say, Valery Gergiev gave when he went to Palmyra, to perform in a city in Syria which had just been recently liberated from the ISIS terrorists, and these kinds of gestures, are absolutely necessary in order to send a message to the Russians and to the Chinese, that indeed there is an intention in the United States to collaborate, and that that is actually what China and Russia are waiting for.
And I would like you to comment on that, and on giving any idea of other kinds of messages that the American population and the American Congress can send to China and Russia, to give this sense that there’s really going to be a change and that we can really do this. Thank you.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche: Well, there are obviously many things one can think of. But since you mentioned the 1986 parallel, which is really absolutely to the point, I would like to answer the question in the following way:
What Trump is now experiencing is really what I would call “the LaRouche treatment.” Because, my husband, who is very well known to many of you—he was a Presidential candidate several times—and the way he was treated by the United States, including his illegal and criminal incarceration by the Bush family,—I still think that because of this criminal campaign against him, the American people have been deprived of the most beautiful and most important ideas expressed by any living American in our time. The fact that the United States is today in such terrible condition, with a shrinking life-expectancy, with an increased suicide rate, alcoholism, drug epidemics,—all of this is the result of the fact that because of this campaign committed by the Bush apparatus, the American people could not clearly look at these ideas and adopt them. And the United States would be quite a different place today, if this had not happened.
Now, the difference is, in the case of LaRouche, the British Empire and their British puppets in the United States were able to carry this out clandestinely, in the way that spooks operate, with fake news. What you mentioned about the so-called Palme assassination was a classical case of fake news, but there were many, many other fake news stories around LaRouche as well. And I think the best message to be sent—because there is a different America—would be that if this attack on Trump which is now occurring, not clandestinely, but it is all out in the open!. . . The British Empire is personally showing its hand. Christopher Steele, MI6, former British ambassadors, are all openly speaking.
So it is really the time to straighten out history: You know, America was made against that British Empire. The American Revolution was a revolution against that British Empire which has subverted the American establishment and convinced the elites to rule the world as an empire based on the Anglo-American “special relationship.”
Now the only way people in the rest of the world will have confidence that the United States is again becoming a republic, is if this goes together with the rehabilitation of Lyndon LaRouche. Because I do not think this injustice which was done—and you’ll permit me to say it, because I’m saying it because I’m his wife, but I’m also saying it in the full estimate of his personality—if the rightful place of Lyndon LaRouche were acknowledged by forces inside the United States, it would be the best message for China and for Russia, because it would prove that people are becoming serious.
