On this morning of the Schiller Institute Conference To Establish a New Security and Development Architecture for All Nations, consider the situation that confronts the citizen of the trans-Atlantic world today, and the citizens of any nation confronted with the moral and intellectual decline of the policy-making establishments of the trans-Atlantic world. Consider, in particular, how a young person, born perhaps just before or after September 11, 2001, twenty-one years ago, would view the world into which we seem to be about to be plunged, in which war beyond comprehension is about to be ignited, largely without the knowledge of billions. What method of thinking should be proposed to that vast group of people, most of whom see themselves as powerless to change “the big picture,” believing, erroneously, that what they say, and do, “can’t matter that much?”
These thoughts of the economist, statesman, and thinker, Lyndon LaRouche, taken from his 1995 speech, “How To Tell If The News Is Newsworthy,” are timely and pertinent.
“So, we’ve come to a situation where the system is doomed. The banking system is doomed. The financial oligarchy has carried its success in ruling this planet to catastrophe. That is certain. The question is then: can we survive it? That’s the first question. If we have the power to influence the course of history, as individuals, and the choices between the doom of civilization and recovery from the grip of this crisis, then each of us has a corresponding, moral responsibility to muster within ourselves those capacities which enable us to do our part in shaping the course of civilization.
“Now, under that rubric, I say, the question is, what kind of news is newsworthy? Because if what I’m saying is true, that you represent as an individual person a force which can change the course of history under conditions of crisis, then what kind of news do you need? And the kind of news you need to do your job as an individual, first, to understand what’s going on, what’s happening to the world, and to locate yourself in such a way that you can say, ‘Well, here’s what it is I can do under these circumstances.’”
What are “these current circumstances,” the circumstances of current history?
Yesterday, Dmitry Peskov, the press spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin said, “This whole story is about (the) future. It’s about guaranteeing our future. Just imagine a situation when a member of NATO—Ukraine—thinking about returning Crimea, attacks Russia. It attacks Russian Crimea and is using Article 5 of the NATO Charter. NATO countries, possessing nukes, will have to defend Ukraine. It should be a third world war. And what is being done is to save us from any potential threat of such a war.”
Foreign intelligence chief Sergei Naryshkin, in an article posted to the National Defense magazine, said, “In fact, the issue of the day is the architecture of the whole world order. Guessing its shape in the current situation is very hard, but it can be stated with certainty that there will be no return to the past.” Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said, as cited by his ministry, “there is a need to follow the principle of indivisible security and recreate a balanced and effective security mechanism in Europe. This is the only way to establish lasting peace and stability in Europe.”
That is the stated view of Russia and China, increasingly defined as the “primary adversaries” of “the Anglosphere,” those that, using the pretext of Ukraine, would plunge the world, not merely into poverty, depopulation and perpetual conventional war, but into sudden, “uncalculated” planetary annihilation, as once nearly happened in 1962 but for President John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and their Russian counterparts. What, today, can and must be the reasoned response to China and Russia from the trans-Atlantic world? A new security and development architecture for the whole world, as for example proposed by Lyndon LaRouche in his still-prescient “Earth’s Next Fifty Years.”
This is the subject of today’s conference.The method of deliberation proposed is that of the “Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites,” catalyzed two years ago by Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa introduced that approach at the 1439 Council of Florence. It was revived at the 1644-48 Peace Treaty of Westphalia. It was also the secret, in fact, of the 1776-1789 deliberative process that created the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States. The intellectual tradition which founded the United States came from Cusa, through Gottfried Leibniz, the inventor of the science of physical economy, and through Leibniz’s intellectual descendant Benjamin Franklin—not the Royal Africa Company’s John Locke. Their method is the winning method, the way out, the path forward.
Geopolitics, globalization,"unipolarity,” “multipolarity,” “cyber-warfare” can all be discarded as distractions by people of good will that decide that the “newsworthy news” of our time is that this great moment of crisis has descended upon citizens throughout the world, who elect to act, for the General Welfare of all mankind; that they, by changing their wrong ideas and assumptions, were greater than that crisis; and that they thereby demonstrated the moral fitness to not only survive, but bring prosperity to the whole human race, rather than descend, through fear and hubris, into a thermonuclear inferno.
