Jacques Cheminade

We Have No Right To Fail

This is the edited transcript of the presentation by Jacques Cheminade to Panel 2 of the January 14, 2023 Schiller Institute Conference, “Stop NATO’s World War and Dismantle the ‘International Assassination Bureau’.” Mr. Cheminade is President of the Solidarité et Progrès political party in France and has thrice campaigned for President of France.

A video of the Schiller Institute conference is available here.

Citizens of all nations, wherever you are:

Everybody with common sense knows that we are confronted with not only the most important challenge of all our lives, but with the fate of humanity. The immediate question coming to an honest mind is: Why so?

It demands two interrelated answers: Why can it be that such evil human beings are bringing us to the edge of the cliff, and why are they meeting such a poor resistance from their victims? To look at the post–World War II history and understand the failure of even our best predecessors, is a terrible and necessary challenge for today. Not to reach a formal, correct historical evaluation, but to do better than them, thanks to what they accomplished despite their flaws and weaknesses, in order to “sit on the shoulders of our past giants.” It requires from us a bold leadership to provide principles and ideas, not to give orders to do this or that, but to inspire our desperate or blinded fellow citizens to jump on the stage of history. Yes, it is something more difficult to achieve, than to sit on the horse so insanely requested by Richard III and give orders. To inspire others is the only way through which a human mind can address another misguided mind, to see without fear, the reality beyond the shadows of the cave and recover confidence in herself or himself to intervene on behalf of humanity.

Let’s imagine that we are in Paris, France, on May 14, 1960. Charles de Gaulle has organized a conference of the four main apparent powers of those times, the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union and France: Eisenhower, Macmillan, Khrushchev and de Gaulle himself. After Bertrand Russell’s dream to bomb the U.S.S.R. was recognized as insane, even by himself, and Khrushchev’s denunciation of the horrors of Stalinism, the purpose of the conference is to reach an agreement opening the way towards a treaty of common security, stability and world peace: exactly what Putin demanded in December 2021, now!

The four people there were all relatively rational people, but the conference failed miserably. Why? Because two weeks before it occurred, on May 1, 1960, an American U-2 spy plane was shot down by Russian air defense over their territory. The Russian military, and in a sense Khrushchev himself, thought then that they had been cheated, and could not have confidence in a country that spoke about peace, but at the same time was openly sending spies over their heads.

But this is only part of the story. The other is: How could it be that the Soviets detected the U-2 and brought it down just two weeks before the Paris conference? Were their means of detection sophisticated enough in those days? Most of the experts say, “No.” So what happened? The answer is that the U-2 flight was “revealed” to Moscow by Western security agencies with the intention of eliminating an orientation towards peace, in order to continue their containment and intended final victory over the Soviet Union, to obey the policy of permanent warfare from the Anglo-American oligarchy.

Most people would say: How is it possible that state agencies would turn against their own President? Well, remember Eisenhower’s warning against the military-industrial complex in his Farewell Address of January 17, 1961. It was not something up in the air; he denounced the risk of “misplaced power” acting against “our peaceful methods and goals.” He spoke in plain words: “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” It unfortunately did persist, and it’s worsening.

It is such a power that Lyndon LaRouche denounced during his entire lifetime, identifying more precisely the Anglo-American oligarchy, the City of London and Wall Street, in the tradition of the Venetian and British Empires. That power was turned against him on October 6, 1986, raiding his home, trying first to kill him, and then to set him up in two trials—a second after the first one had failed—aimed at throwing him in jail.

“Murder? Set-up trials? How is it possible, maybe you are right on some things, but aren’t you exaggerating? We are, after all, part of the Western democracies,” people would say.

Well, what followed the failure of the 1960 Paris peace conference was a trail of blood. It started with the murder, as Norbert Mbu-Mputu said before, of Lumumba, on January 17, 1961, and the attempts against de Gaulle’s life, from the first one on September 8, 1961, to the better known one, on August 22, 1962, at the Petit-Clamart, from which he escaped out of luck and thanks to the professional competence of his chauffeur. In all these cases, parts of the French and American services were involved, together with their British tutors.

Then, on the French side, after the independence of Algeria, and on the American side, following the election of John Kennedy, [and] Konrad Adenauer in Germany and Pope John XXIII in the Vatican, a new possibility for world peace and security reemerged. It is interesting to note that all of these men were Catholics and socially progressive, which meant, ideologies apart, but with a reference out of the direct control of their respective unipolar forces and lobbies and a common commitment to economic development for all nations as the new name for peace, as Pope Paul VI would later say.

What came after? In 1962, after the failed attempt of the U.S. services organized by Allen Dulles, against the Fidel Castro regime, with the landing on the Bay of Pigs, the Soviet Union set up missiles with nuclear warheads in Cuba, which were soon spotted by the U.S. Air Force.

Obviously, it was an existential threat to the United States. President Kennedy—immediately supported by Charles de Gaulle—reacted, ordering the Soviet Union to dismantle the missiles. Part of Kennedy’s staff, and the British, wanted to bomb Cuba, but Kennedy understood that the options of either leaving the missiles in Cuba or bombing the island, were both ways to unleash a nuclear world war. Courageously, and supported by his brother Robert, he arranged a peaceful agreement with Khrushchev: dismantling the Soviet missiles in Cuba for the dismantling of American missiles then stationed in Turkey. The principle was to stop the respective existential threats, and find a way to meet the conditions for world peace and security.

At the same time, there was the organizing of Martin Luther King, associating blacks, Jews, Hispanics, and progressive white sectors in a nonviolent mass movement to foster the roots of social peace and justice for all, inside the U.S.

What followed was Kennedy’s murder on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, and the coverup by the Warren Commission under the control of Allen Dulles, the same man who, during World War II, was stationed in Bern, Switzerland, and who, in a moment of trust, Pierre Guillain de Bénouville accused of having overseen the murder of Jean Moulin, head of the anti-Nazi Résistance in occupied France.

In their behavior, the murderous endeavors of such people leave little room for imagination: We may justly blame the criminal mafias, but these people are the true perverse brains of organized crime.

After 1963 came the murders of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy, always by lone assassins with unknown sponsors, assassins either killed on the spot by police, or isolated in custody and prevented from speaking.

Then came the “events” of the late 60s, culminating in the year 1968. The path was clear for a deregulation of morals and financial flows of money. And the murder of Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968, and of Robert Kennedy, on June 6, 1968, in the aftermath of the “May events” organized against de Gaulle in France, followed by his final political elimination in April 1969. This is obviously not a set of mere coincidences, but a trail of murders, not only against the best political leaders of those times in the Western world, but against the very identity and principles of their nation-states.

Our enemies are what is known as a financial-military complex, best and humorously defined now by Ray McGovern, as the military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think-tank complex: the MICIMATT.

It is what Michael Ledeen once called “universal fascism,” occupying even the brains of the population with more and more sophisticated virtual reality in a world where evil is a never-ending game. This is something worse than Manichaeism; it is the other side of the force, pure evil. I have no time to enter into what happened after the deregulation of the dollar from gold on Aug. 15, 1971, the victory of unprincipled monetarism, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall, transformed into the opportunity to impose the reverse of what the Fall of the Wall was intended for: it was transformed into the plundering of Russia, the debasement of sovereignty, and a financial-military dictatorship with a democratic pretense in the West, “fascism with a democratic face,” promoting a state of permanent warfare under the pretext of “responsibility to protect democracies.” It brought a new trail of murders, this time in Germany: Jürgen Ponto in 1977, Alfred Herrhausen in November 1989, and Detlev Rohwedder in April 1991, all victims, like Aldo Moro in 1978, for their commitment for a peace through a common development between East and West.

Then what is happening now—the destruction of Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and so many other countries, is part of the same criminal dynamic, including, of course, the proxy war of the Anglosphere in Ukraine. A cowardly war supported by the nations of the European Union at the expense of a manipulated Ukrainian population and a provoked Russian army, after seven years of shelling of the Russian-speaking people in the Donbass, under cover of the lying Minsk agreements, as now cynically acknowledged by Angela Merkel and François Hollande.

How could this have lasted so long, as a chronic disease? The main reason is what Lyndon LaRouche always stressed: The lack of consistency on the part of the more conscious statesmen, of the need to bring together a coalition of forces strong enough to face the enemy, to enforce what the Schiller Institute calls a new security and development architecture for the benefit of all nations of the world. To prevent wars is necessary, but to build the ground for a common, mutual win-win development is the only way to maintain peace. It means what Nicholas of Cusa and Helga Zepp-LaRouche define as a higher-order principle, a solution above the terms of the problem, the Coincidence of the Opposites. The Peace of Westphalia is, of course, an example of it, and its opponents, like Tony Blair, are our enemies. It is the only way to create confidence among the future partners. The current behavior of the so-called West makes it untrustworthy for the East, the Global South, and the very populations of our own nations. The shortcoming of de Gaulle and Kennedy, whatever their excellent intentions, was to not bring India, China or Sukarno’s Indonesia into the new architecture that they foresaw. Indira Gandhi, from the experience of her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, was very aware of that.

Were de Gaulle and Kennedy unaware? No. But their common shortcoming was not to take two things seriously enough: The very nature of their enemy, and the need to clean their own Augean stables, which were indeed very dirty, even if they were somehow a bit cleaner than today. Kennedy, of course, launched the Alliance for Progress and the Peace Corps, “dedicated to the progress and peace of developing nations.” But the legacy of the CIA’s dirty wars remained, and the Peace Corps was often infiltrated by agents of all trades. I had the opportunity to see it with my own eyes when I was in Honduras, and the U.S. Ambassador was Joseph John Jova, not particularly endowed with the Spirit of Bandung.

De Gaulle organized the independence of Algeria and the former French colonies in western and eastern “French-speaking Africa,” but under the form of a French Commonwealth with African Heads of State who were not necessarily the best proponents of sovereign nations, but too often second-rank military, trained in France, who, without opposition from the French government, used their armies to suppress their own people. On May 17, 1961, when dozens of peaceful demonstrators were killed by the French police in the streets of Paris, de Gaulle was unable to launch a fair inquiry into how that could have happened. When Mehdi Ben Barka, a Moroccan intellectual and Third World leader, was kidnapped in broad daylight outside the Brasserie Lipp, on October 29, 1965, and then disappeared, never to be seen again, de Gaulle was unable to clean the French secret services of the leftovers of their colonial past.

Indeed, both Kennedy and de Gaulle would not or could not clean their Augean stables. Kennedy paid for it with his life, when he partially failed to do it. I always remember Lyndon LaRouche telling me that Kennedy should never have gone to Texas in an open convertible, knowing what Texas was, and still is.

The immediate control of the situation by the Warren Commission, under the guidance of the pervert Allen Dulles, followed up. I always remember Jack Ruby killing Lee Harvey Oswald in the midst of the Texas officials, and telling myself, although I was then only 22, “can the American dream become replaced by such a dirty horror story?” More to the point, returning from Kennedy’s funeral in Washington, de Gaulle told his minister and confidant, Alain Peyrefitte:

It’s very simple. What happened to Kennedy is what almost happened to me. It seems to be a cowboy story, but it is an OAS story.... The whole thing was a set-up. They tried to make believe that the man [Lee Harvey Oswald] acted out of love for communism.... They had kept him in reserve.... The police went out to find an informer, who couldn’t deny them anything and was under their absolute control. And this fellow performed his task to kill the fake leader....”

[The fake assassin] was himself killed, but that’s another story.

The key point here is that in both cases—Kennedy and de Gaulle—it was an inside job, and the reference to the OAS (the Secret Army Organization, a French proto-fascist outfit out to maintain Algeria as a French colony) is that the same networks were involved. Reading the book, The Day of the Jackal, hearing District Attorney Jim Garrison, and examining the case of the French turncoat SDECE agent and then CIA Washington correspondent, anti-Gaullist Philippe Thyraud de Vosjoli, make it possible to lift the veil on this criminal French–American connection in both cases.

It is therefore absolutely mandatory—now—to publish all the Kennedy papers! Not only as a matter of knowledge for honest historians, but it is for today a matter of life or death. The mere fact that some are kept secret proves that there are still one or more killer elephants in the room. To reveal the truth would then be a key factor in re-establishing confidence in the functioning of American institutions, a confidence absolutely needed to enter into diplomatic relations with other nations, particularly with Russia, to whom we lied so much. Even part of the French press and most of the experts claim now that the lone assassin story is a scandalous and untenable lie. The truth about Kennedy’s murder is, therefore, going to be key to opening the gates for an indispensable, epochal change. It is a key trump card for world peace.

De Gaulle and Kennedy, despite their flaws, were giants compared to the presently available heads of state. You know about Kennedy, the true follower of Roosevelt. On de Gaulle, I have to stress, first, that while alive, he kept the United Kingdom out of the European Common Market. Then, on February 21, 1966, he announced in a press conference that France was leaving the integrated NATO command, but remaining an ally of the United States. Why so? Because he did not want to be involved in a possible world war starting in Europe by a decision of a supranational power. His decision was made in the name of the inalienable principle of national sovereignty.

It is such a mandate that President Nicolas Sarkozy reversed, reintegrating France into NATO’s command on November 7, 2007, announcing it from the Congress in Washington!

As a result, there are today only four members of the European Union that are not members of NATO: Austria, Cyprus, Ireland, and Malta. That is to say, that the European Union has become a branch of Global NATO, and that France, a member of both, has lost most of its credibility with the rest of the world.

I said a few minutes ago that France can only recover its credibility if it leaves the integrated command of NATO, the euro, and the European Union. Now is therefore the right moment to remember what de Gaulle said on March 18, 1964, at the University of Mexico:

Over the distances that shrink, ideologies which reduce, policies which run out of steam (and unless one day humanity annihilates itself through monstrous destruction), the fact which will dominate the future is the unity of our universe. A cause, that of man; a necessity, that of world progress, and consequently the help provided to all countries that call for their development; a destiny: that of peace—are for our species the very conditions of its life.

A leap, a somersault—a start, as de Gaulle said in French—inspired by such a conception, shared by Kennedy and de Gaulle on each side of the Atlantic, is now needed to bring peace to the whole world.

Let me say that I see the Ten Principles for a New International Security and Development Architecture, as offered to us by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, as an answer to de Gaulle’s call and to the Kennedy speeches given with the same intention. And I see that as an answer—in memory of Lumumba and all the African and Global South world leaders killed by the Western services.

And from Helga Zepp-LaRouche, it is more than an answer. It is food for a new paradigm, eliminating once and for all the concept of oligarchism, and, as she says, to “proceed to organize the political order in such a way that the true character of humanity as the creative species can be realized.” To continue the dialogue, to guarantee the durable existence of the human species, past, present and future, is our challenge, and the mission that she offers to all of us.

If I could add something:

In our times when the cause of women is spread everywhere as something in itself, a woman like her, rising above both the limits of men, who relatively failed in a patriarchal society, and of women, who too often spread mere rancor, a woman asserting that the lawfulness of the mind and that of the physical universe are in correspondence and cohesion, a woman, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, is the best we could expect to break the rules of the game and bring to Earth our inalienable rights written in the stars. Let’s listen to her wise words, do something about them, uplifting the best from our past that all these people who were killed exemplify.