This article appears in the December 13, 2024 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
At the Forefront of a
New Paradigm, the Schiller Institute
Holds Breakthrough Conference
[Print version of this article]
On the weekend of December 7-8, the Schiller Institute convened an extraordinary conference, “In the Spirit of Schiller and Beethoven: All Men Become Brethren!” in an effort to alter the course of human history. The question posed to all involved was: How did we get here, at the precipice of nuclear war, and does humanity have the moral fiber to change its fate—to pull itself away from the abyss? Due to time reasons, this article is being written at the end of the first day, and will not cover the panels of day two, other than Mrs. Pandor’s presentation.
Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche opened her keynote by stating,
We are coming here together at this international internet conference, in order to send out an urgent call to the world, not only that we may be weeks, days, or hours away from the potentially greatest catastrophe in human history—namely its potential annihilation in a thermonuclear war—but also to emphatically make the point, that there is a solution, a way out of this danger, if people of good will unite all over the world to enforce its implementation. It is my great honor to greet all the distinguished panelists representing the Global South as well as Western nations, at this 40th anniversary of the founding of the Schiller Institute.
The “distinguished panelists,” men and women of good will, came from institutions at the highest levels in and around governments, from West and East, North and South—former presidents and prime ministers, ambassadors, military figures, economists, farmer leaders, and professors. All underscored the fact that humanity is in this potentially fatal mess because of the refusal of the Western elites to let go of the idea of geopolitical hegemony. All urged, in different ways, that the West must be caused to see the inexorable shift in the world order toward equality of sovereign nations and the right of all to develop not as a threat, but as a great good, and the only way forward for all countries.
Importantly, Zepp-LaRouche discussed how the West’s collapse is due to its adoption of fraudulent assumptions about the nature of the universe and economy, and from that standpoint referenced the discoveries in physical science of her late husband, Lyndon LaRouche. “The laws of the physical universe are of an anti-entropic nature,” she said, and a human economy which properly adopts this outlook, as opposed to an entropic and colonial view, is characterized by constant “disruptive” advancements in science and technology. Therefore, she said: “Let us reject the idea, that relations among nations are a zero-sum game, where one will be on top, and the other one loses. We are human and not wild animals!”
Former South African Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, H.E. Naledi Pandor, also joined the conference. Pandor was unable to join the conference during the proceedings of the first day, but did speak at the beginning of panel three on Sunday regarding what the role of the Global South is in the world today. Following her address, Pandor engaged in a highly provocative dialogue with Helga Zepp-LaRouche and Jacques Cheminade on the danger of nuclear war and the crisis in leadership globally allowing this to proceed. Pandor said that the world needs leaders who can hold “mature” and “rational” dialogue on these topics, and called for a new “ethos” which redefines the relations between the Global North and Global South. This exchange, along with her opening remarks, are featured below in this issue.
In the first panel, Zepp-LaRouche was followed by Professor Dmitri Trenin, Academic Supervisor of the Institute of World Military Economy and Strategy at the Higher School of Economics University in Moscow. Trenin declared that “the globalization driven by the West is over…. That hegemony, as it must, has begun to crack and crumble,” he said, characterizing the world as now in an “epoch of transition.” He also noted how, despite loud calls from within Russia to fully mobilize for war, Russia is prioritizing economic development—a lesson worth investigating by others today.
The Economic Dimension
This comparison, between the choice to pursue economic development and win-win relations with others as equals, and the choice to treat other nations as a tool to be used or an asset to be looted, came up repeatedly in the discussion. H.E. Donald Ramotar, former President of Guyana, drew a comparison between the West and China, where the West sees the Global South as an object to be looted whereas China and Russia have seen them as equals. China, with its philosophy that “a rising tide lifts all boats,” and its investment into “transformative” infrastructure projects to uplift the Global South, is the real reason for the West’s hostility toward it. Prof. Zhang Weiwei, Professor of International Relations at Fudan University in China, echoed this in his own way, posing the question of why Europe seems to only experience “lose-lose,” while Asia is experiencing “win-win.” Again, China’s distinct approach, placing economic development as a top priority along with cultural and civilizational exchanges from the standpoint of mutual respect and peaceful coexistence, was highlighted. This approach is winning, Zhang pointed out, while the “end of history” approach of liberalism is not.
Dr. Prof. Manuel Hassassian, the Palestinian Ambassador to Denmark, also elaborated on this concept in his remarks on the “longest foreign occupation in history”—the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Dr. Hassassian discussed the relationship between political solutions to conflicts and the role economic development can play in changing the underlying dynamic. “Peace transcends the absence of conflict,” he said, “it is a catalyst for economic advancement, which serves as a sub-structure for societies for their combined moral imperative, basically offering a future vision for harnessing security and stability.”
This discussion was concretized by Dennis Small, head of the Ibero-America desk for EIR, in the second panel. Small asked what could be done with $1 trillion? Buy up the drugs in the global market? Cover the cost of the annual U.S. defense budget? Pay off the annual interest payment on the U.S. federal debt? Money is not value, and getting out of this crisis today means addressing the real problems in the world, not merely throwing more money at them. The real global unemployment rate is nearly 50% today, he asserted, and 1.7 billion new jobs worldwide will be required, increasing to 2.5 billion by 2050, if we wish to solve the migrant crisis, for example.
A vibrant discussion on food as the cornerstone of sovereignty also took place, identifying this same monetary disease as what has taken hold of the U.S. agriculture system. We’re back in an era of “robber barons,” said one farmer, as the cartels loot and destroy the ability of farmers to “feed their neighbors”—the natural impulse of every farmer. Importantly, Dr. Bedabrata Pain joined the panel, an Indian who recently made a documentary film titled Déjà Vu, which demonstrates that Indian farmers are fighting precisely the same system that was imposed on the U.S. under the guise of “free markets,” which has now led to the destruction of American agriculture.
Diplomacy and the Strategic Crisis
Other panelists took up the broader strategic crisis and need for a new spirit of diplomacy in the West. H.E. Ján Čarnogurský, former Prime Minister of Slovakia, said that the current crisis in Ukraine goes back at least to the fall of the Warsaw pact, when NATO expansion began and the West declared themselves the “winner” of the Cold War. Today the U.S., the UK, and NATO are “the greatest destroyer of democratic order in the world,” Čarnogurský said. Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr., former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, pointed out that, as this crisis between the West and Russia has intensified, arms control treaties have been eliminated and “there are now not functioning mechanisms for escalation control between nuclear-armed belligerents.” He insisted that diplomacy must again be discovered in the U.S. and the West if the world is to survive.
This point was re-emphasized by Dr. Alexander Bobrov, Associate Professor at the Department of Diplomacy at MGIMO University in Moscow. Bobrov said that today’s “crisis in diplomacy” is the “root of all evil” in the world, and that there must be a return to arms control agreements between the U.S. and Russia urgently. Finding common interests requires “walking in the shoes of another, looking through the prism of one’s counterparts,” he said.
Col. (ret.) Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff to the U.S. Secretary of State, declared that the world is experiencing a colossal movement back to where it was 3,000 years ago, when it was centered in Asia, with China being a “fountain of vivacity.” America is currently fighting this “inexorable” shift, he said, and is therefore the nation most apt to bring us to the threshold of destruction. All empires come and go, Wilkerson said, and this one must be stopped from going violently as previous ones before it have.
Scott Ritter, former UN Weapons Inspector in Iraq, put a fine point on this when he said that the situation we face today is the most dangerous mankind has ever faced—even more dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis. Ritter warned that, contrary to some in the Pentagon, there is no such thing as a “limited nuclear war,” and called on the incoming Trump administration to remove ATACMs from the table in Ukraine and de-escalate the conflict.
The question of Iran was taken up by Hossein Mousavian, the former Ambassador of Iran to Germany. Amb. Mousavian discussed the potential for Iran-U.S. relations with the incoming Trump administration, and clarified that Iran wants nuclear energy, not nuclear weapons. He outlined the different scenarios that will face the Trump administration, and concluded by saying that major initiatives are required, such as ending wars and terrorism, as well as development initiatives such as LaRouche’s Oasis Plan.
Zepp-LaRouche, in her remarks, made it crystal clear how a New Paradigm can be created out of the tumult of today’s crisis:
The way out of this existential crisis is actually very simple: We must convince the nations of the collective West to abandon their Eurocentric arrogance, and cooperate instead with the nations of the Global South, who are the Global Majority of 85% of the human population, in building a just, new world economic order, based on the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence and the UN Charter. In order to do that, we have to abandon finally all oligarchical axioms in our thinking and replace them with the philosophy of the Coincidentia Oppositorum, the Coincidence of Opposites of Nicolas of Cusa, which enables us to think of humanity as the higher One, which is of a higher power than the Many.
The Schiller Institute’s conference aimed to establish just that, that there is indeed a “higher One” among humanity, which supersedes all our differences. If that can be re-discovered, as it had been by Schiller and Beethoven, then it truly can be the case that “All Men Become Brethren” and a New Paradigm among nations is established.
We encourage everyone to watch the conference proceedings in full.
