MAY 8 INTERNATIONAL DIALOGUE

Our Moral Collapse Cries Out for
A New Paradigm

May 3—“Can we effectively get people alerted to the fact that we are much closer to the outbreak of nuclear war than at any moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis? The Russian Foreign Minister, Lavrov, just gave a long interview in which he said that he thinks that the situation is much more dangerous than during the Cold War, mainly because there no longer is any mutual respect among the nuclear powers,” Helga Zepp-LaRouche pointedly told the audience at a live broadcast of The LaRouche Organization on Saturday, May 1. “This is a very worrisome aspect, because it comes on top of the fact that many of the normal back-channel mechanisms and emergency telephone lines which existed even during the Cuban Missile Crisis no longer really exist; or if they exist, they have become much more dubious and questionable.”

The Schiller Institute’s upcoming May 8 international conference, convened by Zepp-LaRouche, is designed to address precisely that danger and the other processes of devolution feeding into it. She elaborated:

Why are people so absolutely numb? Why are they not worried about that? When you had the medium-range missile crisis at the beginning of the 1980s, it was at a time when you still had NATO and the Warsaw Pact operating as two military blocs divided by the Iron Curtain. In Europe, there were the SS-20s on one side of the Iron Curtain, and Pershing 2 missiles on the other side. If by accident, or intention, the launching of just one of those missiles would have appeared on the radar of the other side, the entire arsenal would have been launched, because the time to react was just a few minutes. So therefore, these missile systems were on launch-on-warning alert the whole time.

Many people were concerned that there might have been an accidental World War III. There were hundreds of thousands of people in the streets, even Helmut Schmidt, who was the Chancellor of Germany at that time, spoke many times about the danger of World War III.

Now, the situation is much more dangerous, because there are much more advanced systems of nuclear weapons. We have the de facto expansion of NATO into the Indo-Pacific. China is arming, according to some sources, with some missiles on launch-on-warning alert, because they are worried that in an emergency, they wouldn’t have enough time. So, we are sitting on a powder keg, but the population is completely indifferent; doesn’t seem to care.

That conference will, in its second panel, address the inexorably linked, and underlying crises that accompany this war threat. Zepp-LaRouche described some of those elements:

We now have the unbelievable outbreak of the pandemic. Look at India; actually, the last figure was more than 400,000 people in one day. The crematoriums are completely full; they have been burning people outdoors just because they had to do something.

We have that crisis and famine. Famine which, according to David Beasley from the UN World Food Program, threatens the potential deaths of 300 million people—this year—by starvation. But has that been an issue of discussion? Where is the public dialogue to consider how we remedy that? How can we address that?

The urgently required dialogue, the debate about solutions, has not been taking place. The very question of human survival, of the survival of civilization is now called into question. That is why the Schiller Institute is holding such a conference, and has chosen to title the upcoming May 8 conference, “The Moral Collapse of the Trans-Atlantic World Cries Out for a New Paradigm.” Participation is open to citizens of all continents, starting at 9 a.m. EST. It will broadcast live on the internet and can be accessed through the Schiller Institute here .