EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR TUESDAY JUNE 13, 2023
In the Shadow of War, Walk in the Footsteps of Cusa
June 12, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)—As of this past weekend’s June 10 symposium, “The World Needs JFK’s Vision of Peace!” the International Schiller Institute conference process has now provided the cultural vantage point and “placement” for a dialogue between real Western civilization, represented by President John F. Kennedy’s American University “Peace Speech,” and the new direction of the “Global Majority,” as expressed in the Feb. 4, 2022, “China-Russia Joint Statement on International Relations Entering a New Era.” With Air Defender 23, the largest military maneuver in the history of the NATO Alliance, as the backdrop, the necessary “higher ground” deliberations must begin in earnest.
This week, for example, the second meeting of the newly-formed Schiller Institute International Peace Coalition will convene. On July 8-9, the Schiller Institute will hold an international conference in Europe. And in the period between now and July 4, the task of LaRouche co-thinkers in the United States is to find the “JFK Republicans,” “JFK Democrats.” and “JFK Independents” who will listen to and spread that American University speech throughout this nation. “Interventionists” must challenge all candidates running for the Presidency, and any elective office, to stand up, be a “profile in courage,” and endorse the JFK peace initiative outlook as the policy the U.S. should immediately follow with respect to Ukraine. (Now may, in a real sense, be the first time that the “Peace Speech” would and could be heard by the majority of the American people. At the time, in 1963, it was essentially suppressed.)
It was a year ago, July 3, 2022, that Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder and leader of the Schiller Institute, presented a revolutionary proposal for the immediate re-organization of the international monetary and economic system, to be led by a collaboration among Russia, China, India, and the United States with other nations. It was referred to as “a New Bretton Woods” system. It provoked discussion of various of Lyndon LaRouche’s economics works, particularly his “Trade Without Currency.” Reflect on what has happened, for example with the BRICS nations, over this past year. In less than a year, the Taliban have virtually wiped out the opium production in Afghanistan. (How might the Helga Zepp-LaRouche proposal, “Operation Ibn Sina,” be used in this new context?) This shows how fast the world can be changed by those with the determination and foresight to do so.
It is useful to remember the words of journalist Patrick Lawrence, writing in February 2022, about the Russia-China Feb. 4 Memorandum. “It is always difficult to understand the present as history for the simple reason that we are living it and cannot see it historically without great effort. But we are living through a passage of the 21st century whose long-term significance is hard to overstate. The future is arriving, to put the point another way. Who would have guessed it would come to us by way of the ongoing morass in Ukraine....” The Belt and Road Initiative, the BRICS process, the “de-dollarization” assault on the international financial mafia and their International Assassination Bureau, presage “A global order most of humanity has awaited throughout the postwar decades—all seven of them. This is immensely positive.”
Instead of destruction, peace proposals, as in JFK’s September 1963 UN proposal for a joint U.S.-U.S.S.R. mission to the Moon, and as in Schiller Institute proposals such as the post-Afghanistan war proposal “Operation Ibn Sina,” must pioneer the deployment of new technologies and new physical principles in a creative war against the common aims of mankind, to eliminate poverty, famine, disease, and war itself. This means a reversal of the de-industrialization of Germany; this means a crash program for the production of modular nuclear power plants involving China, Russia, the United States and several other nations; this means an investment in hard and soft infrastructure, worldwide; this means an educational approach which, using the work of the great Ukrainian/Russian Vladimir Vernadsky, and his American counterpart Lyndon LaRouche, prepares humanity for Earth’s next fifty years.
Instead of merely using the popular, but erroneous approach of “mobilizing mass support to end the war,” which will not work, the world’s leadership is to be challenged from the top down, through the actions of handfuls of international citizens, to accept the intellectual responsibility to give birth to an entirely new world strategic and development architecture, or be incinerated. The Schiller Institute, through the insights of its founder, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, composed Ten Principles to provoke that discussion:
“The new paradigm which will be characteristic of the new epoch, and towards which the new global security and development architecture must be directed, therefore, must eliminate the concept of oligarchism for good, and proceed to organize the political order in such a way, that the true character of humanity as the creative species can be realized. Therefore, I suggest that the following principles must be discussed and if agreed upon be realized....”
Since she made that proposal last year, those who have responded have been drawn into a process that is clearly portrayed in Plato’s Socratic drama, Symposium. Zepp-LaRouche has been, in “real time,” using the method expressed in the late economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche’s writings, such as “History As Science” and “Politics As Art,” to introduce the Classical form of diplomacy used by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa to successfully convene the 1439 Council of Florence. Let it be remembered that Cusa also wrote at that time, in order to assist the deliberations of the discussants involved in that Council, the founding document of modern European science, On Learned Ignorance finished in February 1440. The Council lasted through 1441, and despite setbacks of varying degrees of severity, created the basis for the greatest explosion of human creativity in recorded history, the Renaissance. It now falls to us, to this generation to whom the torch has been passed, to walk in the shadow of Plato’s and Cusa’s Great Symposium. On this road less traveled humanity will find, not merely survival, but itself. Let the “higher peace” discussions now begin.
