We want to welcome all of you from around the world to the June 18-19 Schiller Institute international online conference, “There Can Be No Peace without the Bankruptcy Reorganization of the Dying Trans-Atlantic Financial System.” This two-day conference will devote itself to formulating, as well as proposing, a comprehensive solution to today’s conjunctural crisis.

A recent editorial in the German publication Handelsblatt described the present crisis in these terms:

All over the world, and not just in Russia, economies are now under stress. Apart from the arms corporations and oil companies, there are no winners. Putin alone could never have triggered this global energy, food, and economic crisis.

The invitation to today’s conference features Lyndon LaRouche’s Triple Curve collapse function. This triple curve was developed by LaRouche to describe in graphic terms the divergence between investments in the real physical economy, which had been collapsed, and the hyperinflation of both financial and monetary instruments. This is the very process we see today, a process that has been underway for decades and which Lyndon LaRouche forecast would lead to not merely a monetary, but a physical breakdown of economy.

There is no longer anything that can stop that collapse, including even a so-called “financial nuclear war” between the Anglo-sphere—sometimes also called NATO—and China, Russia, India, and many nations in Africa and South America. What is happening today was not inevitable, and was not unknowable. It was foreseen. The events of the past months did not catalyze this process. Those that still oppose that realization must now, against their will as well as perhaps their knowledge, continuously propose courses of action that will actually result in the direct opposite of what they intend. They are self-doomed by what they call the rule of law. They are ruled by the law of their own wrong, but addictive, axioms. The absurd triumphalist sanctions policy now destroying Europe and the United States, and which may even be strengthening those against which it was aimed, is an example.

Classical composer Robert Schumann’s setting of Heinrich Heine’s poem, “Die Grenadiere” as “The Two Grenadiers” is a most accurate, current history news report about our present war mania.

A performance by the late William Warfield, who had been a board member of the Schiller Institute singing “Die beiden Grenadiere,” with English subtitling, was played for the live audience, and is available on the archived video.

We need not be so tragic as the deluded grenadiers were, in our time. But in order to avoid that fate, the trans-Atlantic nations must reject the axioms of empire. How can those axioms be changed? Lyndon LaRouche, who forecast this moment, both named that empire and identified how it could be defeated. Let us listen to a short excerpt from his commentary at a 1996 conference:

So, the way the British Empire functions is like the Persian host. Inside the Persian host, you had an inner core of fighters, who were called the “immortals.” These were the sons and daughters of leading Persian families, generally oligarchical families, whose sons and daughters would take up a military profession as the Achaemenid fighters’ core. But the Persian Empire had a limited number of the so-called “immortals,” with their basket-work shields. Most of the Persian Empire was composed of a host of auxiliaries, like Napoleon’s horde marching into Russia, in 1812. An army of, not French, but mercenaries! Auxiliaries!

The power of the British, at the core—they’re very powerful, at the core. Very tough. At the core. Of course, you’ve got a lot of haw haws, and goof goofs, and so forth, around there, but you’ve got a few in the inner core who really know what’s going on. They’re dangerous. But, like the Persian Empire, the British Empire is a Babylonian host, ruled by the Whore of Babylon, reincarnated in the form of the mad cow who sits on the throne over there. So, therefore, when you get into a period where all of these auxiliaries, admirers in the financial community, and you ought to see these goofballs that run the trust funds in New York City these days. They’re absolute goofballs! Read the Wall Street Journal. There isn’t a brain in the joint! They’re all babbling idiots.

But the British depend upon their auxiliaries. Their auxiliaries in every country, the prostitutes, who are owned by the British, who suck up to the British, who would think that the greatest thing in the world would be to stand within 6 meters of the Queen!

Now, these are the auxiliaries. These are the Persian host. Come a financial crack, all of these idiots start jumping out of windows and doing other wild things. They are routed. Self-routed by the breakdown in their dream, their delusion. So, at that point, the inner core, while it’s still tough and dangerous, its auxiliaries aren’t functioning so well. That is the time you defeat them.

Such a victory cannot be successfully accomplished however, unless an international group of thinkers resurrects an earlier form of international association that was founded prior to the American Revolution and was actually responsible for it. France, Germany, Poland, Spain, Italy, and importantly Catherine the Great’s Russia were all very involved in making the American Revolution possible. Ironically, recently Russian President Vladimir Putin’s references to Peter the Great, whose great northern expedition was comparable to the search in America for the Northwest Passage, may point to a natural area for strategic engagement of Russia, the United States, and China of an utterly different nature than the disastrous geopolitics pursued by today’s United States State Department.

Back in 2007, Lyndon LaRouche wrote:

[A]s the government of Russia’s President Putin’s search for cooperation with the U.S.A. illustrates the point, the dying out of the generations of relevant patriots from among the veterans of the 1939-1945 war has left the U.S.A. with governing strata which are far more poorly equipped, culturally and intellectually, to cope with the most crucial challenges of our planet now, than were the relevant veterans of the last great war….

Russia and the U.S.A. [alone] could not decide the outcome of the present global crisis; but, without their appropriate cooperation, no solution for the world at large exists. The Bering Strait transport tunnel-project is an excellent illustration of the practical point.

The map, prepared by the Schiller Institute’s Hal Cooper many years ago, shows the World Land-Bridge from the vantage point of the Bering Strait project, which was first proposed by Danish explorer Vitus Bering, and inspired by Peter the Great, whose 350th anniversary is celebrated this year. The World Land-Bridge proposal was devised by LaRouche and associates in dialogue and consultation with China, Russia, India, and many other nations of the world over a period of 30 years. This is the path forward, the economic development basis for a new world security architecture; not NATO, and not geopolitics.