PANEL 1

The March of Folly: Can Mankind Still Extinguish
The Now-Lit Fuse of Thermonuclear War?

Moderator’s Opening Remarks

Harley Schlanger moderated the first panel of the May 8 conference, which began at 9:00 a.m. EDT. Schlanger serves on the Board of the Schiller Institute. For 20 years he was a national spokesman for Lyndon LaRouche.

Welcome to the Schiller Institute conference, “The Moral Collapse of the Trans-Atlantic World Cries Out for a New Paradigm.” I’m Harley Schlanger, and I will moderate the first panel, which is entitled “The March of Folly: Can Mankind Still Extinguish the Now-Lit Fuse of Thermonuclear War?”

As we meet, the survival of the human race is imperiled as perhaps never before. We face the danger of a new world war, including the possible use of nuclear weapons; of a systemic breakdown of the real physical economy, which keeps more than 7-plus billion people alive, and the collapse of which is bringing with it famine and an out-of-control pandemic.

But these threats do not arise from the so-called “malign intent” of Russia and China, despite the accusation of the leaders of most governments and parties in the trans-Atlantic world who charge them with aggression against the so-called rules-based order. Nor do they come from so-called man-made climate change, which is being used to club nations into giving up their sovereign rights, to submit their nations and citizens to a deadly looting process enforced by a central bankers’ global dictatorship committed to radical population reduction. This is the intent of those who demand a submission to a rules-based order: the use of the U.S. military to impose a unilateral world order which rejects principles of international law in favor of the dictates of arbitrary rules which serve the narrow interests of the City of London and Wall Street.

In our deliberations today, let’s be inspired by the words spoken by President John F. Kennedy on June 10, 1963, shortly after the successful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis which threatened to unleash a nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. In speaking for the adoption of a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, Kennedy said:

What kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and build a better life for their children—not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women—not merely peace in our time, but peace for all time.

He continued, saying that by directing our attention to our common interests, differences can be resolved. “For in the final analysis,” he concluded, “our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

Four years later, Pope Paul VI summarized this view with his encyclical Populorum Progressio proclaiming, “Development is the new name for peace.” Achieving this has been the life’s work of the economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche, and has been the mission adopted by the Schiller Institute since it was founded in 1984 by his wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche.

Today, we have a distinguished panel of speakers representing many nations guided by this common goal. I will introduce them after the first speaker. But it’s most appropriate to begin with a keynote by the Schiller Institute’s Helga Zepp-LaRouche. It is my honor to introduce Helga Zepp-LaRouche.