Unlike the vast majority of events, articles, documentaries and commentators on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the United States, the Schiller Institute did not waste time on the cover stories about that event and the 20 years of chaos and bloodshed imposed on the world by the U.S., British and NATO forces under false pretenses regarding that event. Rather, the conference, titled “The Path Forward From September 11, Afghanistan and the Surveillance State,” began with the playing of the live radio broadcast from that fateful morning by Lyndon H. LaRouche, who by chance was being interviewed by Jack Stockwell on a Salt Lake City radio show. LaRouche’s immediate response to news of planes hitting the Twin Towers was to warn that it would be blamed on Osama bin Laden, to prevent the truth from coming out. He said that the global financial crisis had to be considered, and the fact that al-Qaeda had been created by Zbigniew Brezezinsky and his British mentors in the 1980s to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. LaRouche had forecast in January of 2001 that the Bush/Cheney Administration would create a “Reichstag Fire” as an excuse to dispose of the Constitution and impose police state measures on the nation and war around the world.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche then addressed the frenzy created in the U.S. following 9/11, stirring up bloodlust for revenge against the claimed culprits in the caves of Afghanistan, leaving out the Saudis and their British masters who had planned and implemented the assault. What followed, for 20 years, she said, was the utter failure of the combined military forces of all NATO nations to subdue 65,000 Taliban warriors, while reducing that nation, and several other nations in the Arab world, to ruin. William Binney, the former Technical Director at the NSA (see below), pointed out later in the conference that the military-industrial complex had run out of excuses for their existence with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, but after 9/11 they were back in business.
There are two possibilities in responding to the withdrawal from Afghanistan, Zepp-LaRouche said: revenge, in the tradition of Madeline Albright saying that the death of 500,000 Iraqi children was “worth it,” or Hillary Clinton gloating over the assassination of Libya’s Qadaffi. “This is barbarism,” she said. Or, we as a human race can reflect on the failure of the system which brought us to this disastrous situation, and agree to change it, ending the geopolitical divisions of the world into warring tribes, and uniting to solve the problems facing humanity as a whole, as her late husband Lynidon LaRouche had argued all his life. She reviewed the horrifying condition of the Afghan people after 40 years of war, documented by the UN: 72% in poverty, with another 25% falling rapidly, 10 million children undernourished — and yet the western countries and banks have refused to allow the new government access to the nation’s funds, and have imposed sanctions preventing food, medicine, electricity and more into the country. Are we barbarians? The nations and institutions of the world must act, she said, “or we would be showing that we are morally unfit to survive.” The wars in Iraq, Libya and Syria were based on lies, lies which have been acknowledged as lies by those who made them — Tony Blair, Colin Powell, and Nancy Pelosi, among others.
There is a human way to resolve this, she concluded. Gandhi defeated the British Empire through non-violent resistance, helping to create the five principles of peaceful coexistence, now codified in the UN Charter as international law. Martin Luther King understood that, and should have been President. With the divisions and strife taking place in the U.S., she said, we must look for a higher principle which addresses the common aims of mankind, nationally and internationally. Think of humanity first, not any one nation first, over others. The Peace of Westphalia, and every historic moment of resolution of conflict, was based on that principle.
The immediate challenge, she insisted, was the necessity to create a modern health system in every nation on Earth. As we now can confirm with the mutations causing havoc in the world, largely because vast regions of the less developed nations have been denied both adequate public health facilities and access to vaccines, which are being hoarded in the advanced nations. The pandemic will not be defeated unless it is defeated everywhere, she said.
Bill Binney, the former NSA Technical Director who blew the whistle on the fact that the system he and his team had designed to root out crime and terrorism from the mass data of the world was usurped and used to create the greatest surveillance state in history during the Bush/Cheney administration. He said any hope this would be reversed when Obama came in was dashed when Obama said he would not look back, only forward — and no one was held accountable for the crimes against the constitution, but they simply continued. Binney said he fully supported Helga Zepp-LaRouche in calling for international unity for the common aims of mankind.
Terry Strada, the heroic leader of the “9/11 Families and Survivors United For Justice Against Terrorism,” addressed the Conference, as she has earlier Schiller concerts and conferences, describing the important victory she and her organization had achieved in finally recruiting members of Congress to present her proposed bill to declassify all the 9/11 documents — especially the 10 year FBI investigation into the role of the Saudi regime in facilitating the 9/11 attack, which has thus far been held secret from the world. This move by the Congress then persuaded President Biden to issue the Executive Order to release all the documents over the next six months. We will see if it happens, she said, but the world deserves to know the truth.
Ray McGovern, who served for 27 years in the CIA, responsible for Russian intelligence, then gave a powerful address on the necessity to reverse the false demonization of all things Russia. He first made reference to his friend Julian Assange, still held in a British dungeon, and recited a poem, in Russian, by Russian poet Alexander Pushkin while he was in prison, about a prisoner and a crow outside the cell, dreaming of freedom. Then, to address the fanatical misconceptions in the west about Russia, he described his visit to Crimea in 2015, in memory of the meeting of U.S. and Russian forces at the Elbe in 1945. He recited another Russian poem to a group which included Russian war veterans, called “Regarding the Horrors of War,” by Nikolai Nekrasov. When a soldier is killed in battle, the poet writes, the person worthy of the greatest sympathy is not to the wife, or the friend, who may recover from their grief, but to the mother, who can never forget, just as a weeping willow can never lift up its branches. He explained that Russia had suffered over two centuries of occupation under the Mongols, invasions by the Swedes, by Napoleon, by the Nazis, losing more than 26 million souls in that Great Patriotic War. He closed by observing that the vast majority of American leaders have never fought in a war, nor even wore a uniform, and that trite phrases like Russia being a “third-rate power,” or a “gas station posing as a country,” do not help humanity. Did Pushkin pump gas, or Tchaikovsky, or Dostoyevsky?
Helga Zepp-LaRouche picked up on McGovern’s moving presentation, insisting that if you want to understand a country, read its poetry, to know their deepest thinking. We have lost our way, especially over these past 20 years, she said, not only by ignoring the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, but by giving up the dialogue of civilizations. The Creator created many different cultures because they are beautiful. Lyndon LaRouche was admired as a true patriot of the United States internationally because he was never arrogant, but wanted to communicate with their cultures.
Harley Schlanger, who through his daily blog on The LaRouche Organization website has become a hero to thousands of people in every part of the world, described that the vast majority of the activities going on in commemoration of 9/11 are simply banal. One commentator, he said, made the correct point that the event stirred up the call for revenge, which fit comfortably with the policy desired, for other reasons, by the elites. As a result the U.S. sent 7,000 of its own to their death. Those like Lindsey Graham and Nikki Haley who are arguing we must go back to Afghanistan for more blood and revenge are crazy, he said. We must look to poetry, music and history to break from revenge.
Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche closed the conference by saying that even the China-hater Tucker Carlson has considered that Xi Jinping is doing something right when limited children to three hours per week on the mind-numbing internet video games, as part of the effort to orient Chinese youth to the love of knowledge. The horrible mediocrity across the West, she said, is seen in the confusion of “liberty” for “freedom.” Friedrich Schiller knew that freedom is found through necessity, while the “everything goes” mentality pervading the West is the opposite of freedom. We must go back to the great figures in our culture, our scientists, our poets, our musicians, and then reach out to the great minds in other cultures — the Classical music of each culture, especially, as music is a universal language, reflecting the universality of the human mind. “Start reading again, thinking again, about natural law, reflect on the creative process,” she said. “China and Russia are doing a lot of that .”
Dennis Speed, who moderated the conference, concluded by encouraging everyone to read Dante Alighieri’s Commedia as the dedication to the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death in exile on Sept. 14, 1321. In the Commedia Dante describes “losing his pathway” in midlife, and travelling with the poet Virgil, first through the Inferno, then Purgatory, and on to Paradise, in each reaching a higher state of mind. If we were to make the lives of the people that died both at the time of 9/11 and then subsequently because of those events, then imagine a restored, developed, and vibrant Afghanistan, and other, surrounding nations, as a product of a restored, and vibrant United States, and other nations, that become better because they see this new pathway. That is the legacy we should try to make sure that history can record that we left this time.
