Schiller Institute Conference on 9/11

The Pathway Forward

by Mike Billington

[Print version of this article]

Sept. 11—Unlike the vast majority of events, articles, documentaries and commentators on the 20th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the United States, the Schiller Institute did not waste time on the cover stories about those attacks and the 20 years of chaos and bloodshed imposed on the world by the U.S., British and NATO forces under false pretenses.

Rather, the conference, “The Path Forward from September 11, Afghanistan and the Surveillance State,” began with playing a recording of the live radio interview at 9 a.m. EDT on September 11, 2001 with Lyndon H. LaRouche, an interview that had been scheduled in advance with host Jack Stockwell on his Salt Lake City radio show. LaRouche’s immediate response on air—upon hearing the news within minutes of the planes hitting the Twin Towers—was to warn that it would be blamed on Osama bin Laden, to prevent the truth from coming out. He said that the global financial crisis had to be considered, and the fact that al-Qaeda had been created by Zbigniew Brzezinski and his British mentors in the 1980s to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.

LaRouche had forecast in a January 3, 2001 webcast that the Bush/Cheney administration would create a “Reichstag Fire” as an excuse to dispose of the Constitution and impose police-state measures on the nation and war around the world.

After hearing that recording, Helga Zepp-LaRouche addressed the frenzy created in the U.S. following 9/11, stirring up bloodlust for revenge against the claimed culprits in the caves of Afghanistan, leaving out the Saudis and their British masters, who had planned and implemented the assault. What followed, for 20 years, she said, was the utter failure of the combined military forces of all NATO nations to subdue 65,000 Taliban warriors, while reducing that nation, and several other nations in the Islamic world, to ruin.

William Binney, the former Technical Director of the World Geopolitical and Military Analysis and Reporting section at the National Security Agency (NSA), pointed out later in the conference that the military-industrial complex had run out of excuses for its existence with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, but after 9/11 they were back in business.

There are two possibilities in responding to the withdrawal from Afghanistan, Zepp-LaRouche said: revenge, in the tradition of Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State (1997-2001), who said that the death of 500,000 Iraqi children was “worth the price,” much like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gloating over the assassination of Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi. “This is barbarism,” said Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche. Or, we as a human race can reflect on the failure of the system which brought us to this disastrous situation, and agree to change it, ending the geopolitical divisions of the world into warring tribes, and uniting to solve the problems facing humanity as a whole, as her late husband Lyndon LaRouche had argued all his life.

She reviewed the horrifying condition of the Afghan people after 40 years of war, documented by the UN: 72% of the population in poverty, with another 25% falling rapidly; 10 million Afghan children requiring humanitarian assistance to survive; 1 million facing acute malnutrition—and yet the Western governments and banks have refused to allow the new government access to the nation’s funds, and have imposed sanctions preventing food, medicine, electricity and more into the country. Are we barbarians? The nations and institutions of the world must act, she said, “or we don’t have the moral fitness to survive.” The wars in Iraq, Libya and Syria were based on lies, lies which have been acknowledged as lies by those who made them—Tony Blair, Colin Powell, and Nancy Pelosi, among others.

There is a human way to resolve this, she concluded. Mohandas Gandhi defeated the British Empire through non-violent resistance, helping to create the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, now codified in the UN Charter as international law. Martin Luther King understood that, and should have been President. With the divisions and strife taking place in the U.S., she said, we must look for a higher principle which addresses the common aims of mankind, nationally and internationally. Think of humanity first, not any one nation first, over others. The 1648 Peace of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Year’s War, and every subsequent historic moment of resolution of conflict, was based on that principle.

The immediate challenge, she insisted, was the necessity to create a modern health system in every nation on Earth, as we now can confirm with the viral mutations of COVID 19 causing havoc in the world. That is happening largely because vast regions of the less developed nations have been denied both adequate public health facilities and access to vaccines, which are being hoarded in the advanced nations. The pandemic will not be defeated unless it is defeated everywhere, she said.

William Binney, the former NSA Technical Director spoke next. It was he who blew the whistle on the fact that the system he and his team had designed to root out crime and terrorism from the mass of data of the world had been usurped and used to create the greatest surveillance state in history during the Bush/Cheney administration. He said any hope that this would be reversed when Barack Obama became President was dashed when Obama said he would not look back, only forward—and no one was held accountable for the crimes against the Constitution; they simply continued. Binney said he fully supported Helga Zepp-LaRouche in calling for international unity for the common aims of mankind.

Terry Strada, the heroic leader of the 9/11 Families and Survivors United for Justice Against Terrorism, addressed the conference, as she has earlier Schiller concerts and conferences. She described the important victory she and her organization had achieved in finally recruiting members of Congress to present her proposed bill to declassify all the 9/11 documents—especially the 10-year FBI investigation into the role of the Saudi regime in facilitating the 9/11 attacks, which has thus far been held secret from the world. This move by the Congress then persuaded President Joe Biden to issue the Executive Order to release all the documents over the next six months. We will see if it happens, she said, but the world deserves to know the truth.

Ray McGovern, who served for 27 years in the CIA, responsible for Russian intelligence, then gave a powerful address on the necessity to reverse the false demonization of all things Russia.

He first made reference to his friend Julian Assange, still held in Her Majesty’s Belmarsh Prison, and recited, in Russian, “The Prisoner,” written by Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin while he was in prison, about a prisoner seeing a crow outside the cell and dreaming of freedom.

Then, to address the fanatical misconceptions in the West about Russia, he described his visit to Moscow in 2016, in an American delegation to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. On that occasion (and also for this conference), he recited, again in Russian, “Regarding the Horrors of War” by Nikolai Nekrasov to the Moscow group, which included Russian war veterans and their families.

When a soldier is killed in battle, the poet writes, the person worthy of the greatest sympathy is not the wife, or the friend, who may recover from their grief, but the mother, who can never forget, just as a weeping willow can never lift up its branches. He explained that Russia had suffered over two centuries of occupation under the Mongols, invasions by the Swedes, by Napoleon, by the Nazis, losing more than 26 million souls in that Great Patriotic War.

He closed by observing that the vast majority of American leaders have never fought in a war, nor even worn a uniform, and that trite phrases like Russia being a “third-rate power,” or a “gas station posing as a country,” do not help humanity. “Did Pushkin pump gas, or Tchaikovsky, or Dostoyevsky?” McGovern asked.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche picked up on McGovern’s moving presentation, insisting that if you want to understand a country, read its poetry, to know its deepest thinking. We have lost our way, especially over these past 20 years, she said, not only by ignoring the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, but by giving up the dialogue of civilizations. The Creator created many different cultures because they are beautiful. Lyndon LaRouche was admired as a true patriot of the United States internationally because he was never arrogant, but wanted to communicate with other cultures.

Harley Schlanger, who through his daily blog on The LaRouche Organization website has become a hero to thousands of people in every part of the world, described that the vast majority of the activities going on in commemoration of 9/11 are simply banal. One commentator, he said, made the correct point that the event stirred up the call for revenge, which fit comfortably with the policy desired, for other reasons, by the elites. As a result the U.S. sent 7,000 of its own to their death. Those like Sen. Lindsey Graham and [former U.S. Ambassador to the UN] Nikki Haley who are arguing we must go back to Afghanistan for more blood and revenge, are crazy, he said. We must look to poetry, music and history to break from revenge.

Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche closed the conference by saying that even the China-hater Tucker Carlson has considered that Xi Jinping is doing something right when he limited children to three hours per week on the mind-numbing internet video games, as part of the effort to orient Chinese youth to the love of knowledge. The “terrible mediocrity” across the West, she said, is seen in the confusion of “liberty” for “freedom.”

Friedrich Schiller knew that freedom is found through necessity, while the “everything goes” mentality pervading the West is the opposite of freedom. We must go back to the great figures in our culture, our scientists, our poets, our musicians, and then reach out to the great minds in other cultures—the Classical music of each culture, especially, as music is a universal language, reflecting the universality of the human mind. “Start reading again, thinking again, about natural law, reflect on the creative process,” she said. “China and Russia are doing a lot of that.”

Dennis Speed, who moderated the conference, concluded by encouraging everyone to read Dante Alighieri’s Commedia as a dedication to the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death in exile on September 14, 1321. In the Commedia, Dante describes “losing his pathway” in midlife, and travelling with the poet Virgil, first through the Inferno, then Purgatory, and on to Paradise, in each reaching a higher state of mind.

If we were to make the lives of the people that died, both at the time of 9/11 and then subsequently because of those events, then imagine a restored, developed, and vibrant Afghanistan, and other, surrounding nations, as a product of a restored, and vibrant United States, and other nations, that become better because they see this new pathway. That is the legacy we should try to make sure that history can record that we left this time.