EDITORIAL

Stand with Humanity!

by Dennis Speed

[Print version of this editorial]

Nov. 26—The Nov. 26 Emergency Forum, “No More War Crimes! Economic Development, Not Depopulation!” sponsored by Humanity for Peace, was held today as the four-day Gaza ceasefire began to draw to a close.

The Nov. 24 actions by the prime ministers of Spain and Belgium in confronting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu directly—calling for, not only an end to the killing, but also a Palestinian state, and immediate negotiations to stop the violence—were the first public major break, from within NATO, with the ethnic cleansing policy that has already made northern Gaza unlivable, and has already wiped out generations of Palestinians killed by retributive justice and collective punishment.

Beside Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi’s call for the same thing, his remarks that he would be prepared to accept a demilitarized Palestinian state, secured by international guarantors, and that “we will not permit the displacement of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. I sensed a genuine and real understanding by the international community on our rejection of the displacement issue,” show that the seed-crystal of a new security and development architecture could in fact emerge right now, by forcing the world to assert the universal, inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all people, for which the Schiller Institute has stood from its 1984 founding document, Declaration of the Inalienable Rights of Man.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder and head of the international Schiller Institute, responded, at the conclusion of the Nov. 24 meeting of the International Peace Coalition, to the final paragraph of a Nov. 23 article written by economist James Kenneth Galbraith, titled “On the Consequences of the Kennedy Coverup,” a reflection on the 60th anniversary of the public execution of the President of the United States, November 22, 1963. Galbraith is the chairman of Economists for Peace and Security, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and the son of economist John Kenneth Galbraith.

Beginning his article, Galbraith wrote:

We know for fact that Chief Justice Earl Warren acted under Johnson’s instructions to squelch suspicions directed at Castro’s Cuba or the Soviet Union—who were in fact uninvolved—and so to defuse pressures for “retaliation” leading to nuclear war. We know that in such a war, at that moment, the U.S. would have held an overwhelming advantage, and we know that U.S. war planners back in 1961 had already plotted such an attack for late 1963, to Kennedy’s disgust.

Galbraith had highlighted, in a 1994 article called “Did the U.S. Military Plan a Nuclear First Strike for 1963?” the then-just-declassified (in 1993) “Burris Memorandum” written for then Vice President Lyndon Johnson, regarding a meeting that took place on July 20, 1961, in the first year of the Administration. Galbraith wrote:

General Lyman Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, stepped in to explain the “assumption” of the 1961 report: “a surprise attack in late 1963, preceded by a period of heightened tensions.” …

Paragraph three records Kennedy asking a hypothetical question: what would happen if we launched a strike in the winter of 1962? Allen Dulles of the CIA responded that “the attack would be much less effective since there would be considerably fewer missiles involved.” …

Paragraph four reports one more Kennedy question: how much time would “citizens” need to remain in shelters following an attack? The President receives a qualified estimate of two weeks from a member of the subcommittee. The group was clearly talking about U.S. citizens protecting themselves from the globe-encircling fallout following a U.S. nuclear attack on the U.S.S.R.

Paragraph five adds to the intensity of the document with Kennedy’s directive “that no member in attendance disclose even the subject of the meeting.”

McGeorge Bundy, National Security Adviser to JFK (and later arch-enemy of Lyndon LaRouche), in his book Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (1988), reported:

In the summer of 1961 [Kennedy] went through a formal briefing on the net assessment of a general nuclear war between the two superpowers, and he expressed his own reaction to Dean Rusk as they walked from the cabinet room to the Oval Office for a private meeting on other subjects: “And we call ourselves the human race.”

Kennedy’s June 10, 1963 American University commencement speech on peace is usefully reconsidered in light of the Burris Memorandum and the subsequent October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

Galbraith’s final paragraph in his just-published article on the consequences of the Kennedy assassination coverup, to which Zepp-LaRouche responded, is the following:

For the United States, at the moment, reality may be breaking through on four fronts. There is disillusion with claims that the economy is in fine shape. There is the realization that China is now the world’s leading industrial and economic power, having overtaken the United States within the past twenty years. There is a dawning realization that Russia is once again a superpower, not to be defeated militarily or by sanctions. And there is the horror of crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip. If these factors and their consequences cannot produce a revolt against elites for whom Big Lies, over 60 years, have become a way of life and a method of government, it’s hard to imagine that anything could.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s response follows.

Zepp-LaRouche Responds to
James K. Galbraith

On this, James Galbraith, that’s absolutely on the mark. The economy in the United States, and Europe for that matter, is [audio loss]…. In the trans-Atlantic financial system we are sitting on a complete powder keg. The American banks alone are sitting on several hundreds of billions of unrealized losses which they keep in the books because if they would start selling these Treasuries and bonds, they would have to write off these hundreds of billions of dollars, and that would set off a chain reaction collapse. So, the U.S. indebtedness is now reaching $33 trillion, with $2 quadrillion in derivatives exposure; that is the time bomb, which is why all of this war danger is escalating.

The powers-that-be in Wall Street and other places—the City of London, and I’m afraid also Frankfurt—would rather go to war than allow cooperation with the rising powers of the Global South, most of all, China. That’s, for sure, absolutely true.

Secondly, China is by far leading; and I think that what startles me the most is that rather than looking at China and saying this supposedly is a Communist dictatorship, but their economy is doing well—they are rising. Not only are they rising—but they are lifting 150 developing countries out of poverty that are cooperating with them in the Belt and Road Initiative.

So, why is the Western establishment not capable of doing what normally a manager would do whose firm is having difficulty? In a functioning firm, they would get together, have a business meeting, and say, “We had obviously the wrong business model. Why don’t we correct it and give our firm a new business model and then it can take off again?” They are not doing that; they are clinging to the old model which is that you can run the world by military means, by security arrangements with all other countries, but not providing development. China is providing development, so why are the United States and European elites not smart enough to look at what China is doing right, and then join them? The world is so full of problems. We can basically solve these problems together, but we cannot solve them against each other.

So, for me, this really puts the question of the intelligence of the present establishment with a big question mark.

Thirdly, Russia is again a superpower; that is true without any question. Not only are they militarily ahead of the United States and NATO, because they have hypersonic missiles which are not yet matched in the West. They could potentially sink the entire aircraft carrier fleet and other Navy ships in a few minutes. There is no question. The sanctions against Russia did not function. Russia had a third-quarter 5% increase [over the third quarter of 2022 —ed.] in their economy, as compared to a shrinkage of many percent in Germany for sure, and paper works in the United States.

The sanctions and attempt to “ruin Russia” as [Germany’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Annalena] Baerbock is calling it, did not work. They actually had a beneficial effect, because it gave those nationalist forces inside Russia who wanted to get more emphasis on domestic production a wind at their back, and weakened the forces inside the central bank and elsewhere who wanted to stick with the neo-liberal system. That forced Russia to go more for its own production and to reorient toward Asia. As a net result, Russia is much stronger than before. Again, in view of your business model, maybe it’s not so smart.

Fourth, I think what is happening in Gaza is an absolute heartbreaker. It absolutely causes everybody who ever thought that the principle of “Never Again” should be what would uphold humanity, that that is being violated. I’m not without sympathy for the victims of the attack on Oct. 7, but the out-of-proportionality of the Israeli response is just exactly what all these human rights organizations, including UN Secretary General António Guterres, who is otherwise a very mild-spoken person, are saying.

This is genocide. I fully agree that if we do not mobilize that into a larger change in the paradigm, the danger is that it will continue once this present deal is over. I can only appeal to you, please help us to mobilize the world population for a real change in axioms. To be against the war is not enough. You have to change the reasons why the world is in this incredible situation. The alternative is there, because all we would have to do is join hands with all the other nations on the planet and say we open a New Paradigm in the history of mankind of cooperation. Then, every problem could be solved. So, join our movement and get your neighbors, your relatives, your colleagues all on board. We need every soul to accomplish this.