EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR WEDNESDAY MAY 24, 2023

The ‘Peace Speech’: An International Mobilization To Take Back the American Government

May 23, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)—While it has been noted by former British diplomat Alistair Crooke, commenting on the admission, both in the London Telegraph and the Spectator, of the failure of the NATO sanctions policy of “financial nuclear war” against Russia, that “delusionary hubris placed ‘blinders’ on Western policymakers; they could not see what was before their own eyes,” he, in his commentary, failed to compare this doomed outlook to that contained in Classical tragedy—for example, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Crooke, like many academic commentators whose descriptive rendering of the present civilizational crisis may be accurate, tells us nothing of “the way out,” of how to defeat tragedy.

When former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn brought up the actions of South Africa, the Vatican and Brazil in pursuing peace and a cessation of the world war now ongoing in Ukraine, the hapless Prime Minister Rishi Sunak blithely and proudly proclaimed the necessary death of the Ukrainian nation for the greater glory of the Anglosphere—that Ukraine must reject peace. Meanwhile, in answering a reporter’s question yesterday, former President of Russia and current Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev said: “In the West, there is no one to talk to about security guarantees. NATO is not serious about the threat of a nuclear apocalypse. NATO is mistaken in considering a nuclear conflict impossible since events can go according to an unpredictable scenario.” If that condition of Russia-U.S. relations persists, as Medvedev has stated it, thermonuclear war would seem tragically inevitable, given the axiomatic self-doom being pursued by Perfidious Albion and its D.C. henchmen.

The alternative strategic orientation to this lack of creative imagination, available to all that seek it, might be called “Think and Fight Like Beethoven!” What needs to be understood is “the Indispensable Role of Classical Artistic Methods of thinking for humanity’s short-term and durable survival.” Lyndon LaRouche, in his 2000 composition “Politics As Art,” on the eve of the 2000 Presidential election, insisted on the need for a fundamental change in the American citizenry, and proposed person-to person discussion—of a certain type—as the way to bring that about.

“The model you must come to know, to be able to rise to that higher level of deliberation on the subjects of our nation’s policy-making issues, is the model to be found in re-enacting the Socratic dialogues of Plato, viewing those dialogues for what they are: Classical dramas portraying exchanges among characters typifying notable actual figures from the living history of the Greece of that age. It is by re-enacting those dialogues as dramas, that ordinary people, may be pleasantly surprised to touch something of that quality of mind which makes for genius, as they become, through experience, increasingly efficient, even as ordinary citizens, in use of the most important principles for rational selection of political choices. From that standpoint, you will also come to know, that every form of important Classical artistic composition, functions according to exactly the same principle as Plato’s Socratic method.”

The use by Schiller Institute founder and leader Helga Zepp-LaRouche of the speech, and the 60th anniversary of the speech of assassinated President John F. Kennedy at American University—the “Peace Speech”—has already inspired a lawful, if somewhat unexpected optimism among those who have either revisited that speech, or heard it for the first time. It is not only the poetic quality of the vision offered there, but the change in mind-set upon which the speech turns—from the world-destroying brink of October 1962 to the species affirming plea of June 10, 1963, that is most striking: “For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

The Kennedy Presidency is particularly most startling to those born after 1984, who have been encumbered by the living experience of the Presidency after that time, particularly since September 11, 2001. For them, the American University speech is a revelation. Most importantly, however, the Schiller Institute, as with its internationalization of the principles of the American Declaration of Independence in its slight re-write and proclamation of the Declaration of the Inalienable Rights of Man, has appropriated the JFK “Peace Speech” as a weapon for peace today.

Those who are honest know that the population of the United States today needs international assistance in order to take back its government. Those who are honest, know that there are no national measures, in any nation of the trans-Atlantic sector, including the United States, that can save those nations from the doomed financial and banking system that is about to publicly and unceremoniously collapse. A “global Glass-Steagall,” not a one-nation banking reform, is the “baseline” for survival, including the physical survival of tens of millions in the short term. The Anglo-American so-called “security state,” including the Durham report-exposed FBI, the Nord Stream pipeline explosion-exposed Pentagon, and the Russian hack/Russiagate exposed NSA, CIA, etc. must be dismantled—but how?

It must be done by invoking the power of the American Presidency to denounce and undo the present foreign and domestic policies of the United States. But this is a spiritual power, the power of the intention of the Presidential office. As

RFK Jr. pointed out in a recent interview, “my uncle used to say ... Ben Bradlee, his best friend, asked him what he wanted on his gravestone, and he said, ‘He kept the peace.’ He said the primary job of a President of the United States is to keep our country out of war. That is the primary job, and he succeeded in doing that. But no President since him has.”

Lyndon LaRouche in “Glass-Steagall & Beyond: Our Credit System,” said:

“The only legitimate expression of a necessary, general form of warfare has been resistance up to or beyond nuclear defense against a foe whose threat is an expression of a modern technological form of oligarchical interest. All other forms of warfare or its like, are actionably criminal, clearly so if the violator is of the quality of the current British imperially reigning oligarchy and its allied puppets. That evil oligarchical expression must be defeated, and thereupon, excised from position of power, at all necessary risk.”

President Kennedy demonstrated that he believed that, and took the necessary conceptual risk, at American University. Only a citizenry that relives the drama of what that President did, between October 1962 and June 1963, now, can provide the political basis for this nation, and perhaps the world, to survive. The Zepp-LaRouche “Ten Principles for a New International Security and Development Architecture” can only be embraced and implemented by a population that believes and demands that it is greater than the tragic destiny of the failed Anglo-American oligarchs who, though they may to seem to have ruled in these past decades up to this point, have been tested in the balance and found wanting by history, and the just laws of the universe. We who are not so condemned must take back our government using a “politics as art” as our efficient means of securing the peace.