“The notion of the sacredness of the individual person depends entirely upon that person’s potential exercise of creative powers to discover, and otherwise choose those forms of technological practice and other behavior, which have at least implicit benefit for all mankind.”—Lyndon LaRouche, “Historical Statement of Principles” 1976
In today’s dying Anglosphere, where mass killing by war is touted as the only efficient policy for ending war, it is incumbent upon the Schiller Institute to seize the occasion of this Advent season (the time period spanning the four Sundays prior to Christmas) to reawaken in the trans-Atlantic nations a commitment to the once-celebrated mission of Christian civilization: the voluntary redemption of mankind, without guilt, and without recrimination.
Our intervention to bring about a new security and development architecture by launching a worldwide discussion of the principles and preconditions for a durable and evolving peace, based on returning to the Classical principles contained in the four-year deliberations of the Treaty of Westphalia (1644-48,) is in sharp contrast to the idea of “war crime tribunals” run by war criminals. This was the actual content of the laughable proposal recently made by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, even as, without any shame, she also proposed the theft of $300 billion-plus of Russian assets “to pay reparations to Ukraine,” i.e., NATO, for the war. “Ursula von der Lyin’” also, in the same speech, accidentally blurted out the (probably) true number of Ukrainian military killed in the past nine months—100,000—and then promptly deleted it from Twitter, her speech transcript, and video. Ukraine’s Mikhailo Podolyak later compounded this by claiming the absurd number of 10,000-13,000 Ukrainian dead, embarrassing even a temporarily-awakened Joseph Goebbels with the size of that howler.
No, you will never get a pathway to peace from those that cannot even present the truth, let alone seek justice. A just peace, in this instance in particular, must be brought about in the same way that Jeanne D’Arc (Joan of Arc) brought about the liberation of France. It must be a miracle “wrought by our own right arm.” This idea, what the assassinated German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer referred to as “the cost of discipleship,” and what the liberator of India, Mahatma Gandhi, practiced as “experiments with truth,” must grip us, and become the subject of the next six weeks, from now through the birthday of Martin Luther King, January 15, 2023. In this period, what is required is to create an “epiphany” in world deliberations.
An epiphany is not a mere realization, but is a “divined” manifestation, through insight, into the higher nature of humanity and humanity’s future. Epiphany is experienced as a higher solution to an apparently insoluble dilemma. It is invariably inaccessible to programmed, pragmatic quasi-thinking. It is incommensurate with both “artificial intelligence” and “magical thinking,” particularly of the Utopian “we can win thermonuclear war” variety. How might we cause such an epiphany to come about?
Lyndon LaRouche addressed this question directly. “If one proposed to force existing governments to directly implement (a certain policy), the task must seem formally an impossibility. Yet, if the possibility for a rapid succession of intermediating developments is clearly understood, no such difficulty as initially appears to prevail stands in our way.”
How can we make such a possibility intelligible?
There are three areas of study that the Schiller Institute proposes to engage the largest possible numbers of people in, as an “experiment in truth,” over this period. They are, first, the Ten Principles, proposed by Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche, for deliberation on how to establish a durable strategic and development architecture for the world, without which it cannot survive, even over the very short term; second, another document by Zepp-LaRouche, “Gandhi’s Vision for a New Paradigm in International Relations, A World Health System, and Direct Non-Violent Action in Times of Social Breakdown"; third, the study, practice and performance of the Classical choral piece, Dona Nobis Pacem, en masse, as a “worldwide experiment with truth” and a laboratory application of the first and second areas of study.
We will take a Socratic-Platonic approach to the idea of true mass public education, using the Ten Principles to do so, not talking down to the population, but elevating the general level of the public’s intelligence. We must do this by making the solution to the present “insoluble dilemma of the West” intelligible to its citizens. (This will also be the fastest way to attack and oppose the brainwashing, called “pre-bunking,” now being legislated into schoolrooms around America.) This follows a successful practice that the late economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche used in his assembly of the movement that became the International Caucus of Labor Committees, a “philosophical association assembled as a series of conferences.”
The Zepp-LaRouche Ten Principles contain a statement of a philosophical outlook, expressed in the Eighth and Ninth Principles:
“Eighth: In former times, one civilization at one corner of the world could go under, and the rest of the world would only find out years later, due to the length of distances and the time needed for travel. Now, for the first time, because of nuclear weapons, pandemics, the internet, and other global effects, mankind is sitting in one boat. Therefore, a solution to the existential threat to humanity cannot be found with the help of secondary or partial arrangements, but the solution must be found on the level of that higher One, which is more powerful than the Many. It requires the thinking on the level of Coincidentia Oppositorum, the Coincidence of Opposites, of Nicholas of Cusa.
“Ninth: In order to overcome the conflicts arising out of quarreling opinions, which is how empires have maintained control over the underlings, the economic, social and political order has to be brought into cohesion with the lawfulness of the physical universe. In European philosophy this was discussed as the being in character with natural law, in Indian philosophy as cosmology, and in other cultures appropriate notions can be found. Modern sciences like space science, biophysics or thermonuclear fusion science will increase the knowledge of mankind about this lawfulness continuously. A similar cohesion can be found in the great works of Classical art in different cultures.”
The Ten Principles are not “Ten Points.” This is not a Ten-Point Program. There is a difference between a point, a program, and a principle. Our approach is not one of mere negation, saying what we don’t want, Old Testament “Thou shalt not” style. Besides, we don’t need to worry about negation. As this year draws to a close, the “awful Shadow” of the unseen power of the truth is manifest in the failure of the economic sanctions, in the rejection of triumphalist geopolitics by the majority of the world’s populations, in the tepid non-response to the re-warmed Malthusian proposals expressed at COP27, in the horrific meat-grinder of the now-crumbling Ukraine Eastern Front, in the recurrence of Covid, the appearance of new variants, and in the spread of other deadly respiratory diseases. Contrast the military budget of the United States, $847 billion, to the state of its cities, the declining life expectancy of its citizens, and to the epidemic of despair seen in spreading suicide, homicide, drug addiction and insanity.
Yes, the self-doomed policies of the mad Rumpelstiltskins of Wall Street and the City of London provide more than all the negation needed. All that is befalling them now, and soon, is a manifestation of the power of natural law; their world has “an appointment in Samarra"; there is nothing they can do to change that. We must, instead of worrying about what they think, embrace the necessity for a rapid mass education of the population, now, such that they, through the apprehension, mastery and implementation of the Ten Principles, personally redeem the soul of the nations of the Anglosphere. Nothing less is demanded of them.
Postscript: Dona Nobis Pacem
Why are we singing the Dona Nobis Pacem? In order to understand the Ten Principles, we must ensure that people understand what we mean, and what is meant by the Idea, “principle.” Singing Dona Nobis Pacem is not a mere plea, or even act of protest, or defiance. The piece is a kind of “Rosetta Stone,” a sort of machine tool, which allows its performers to indirectly access even the most advanced compositions of Schubert, Beethoven, and Mozart.
Several other compositions by these and other composers use the identical intervals and notes used in the deceptively “straightforward” Dona Nobis Pacem. Conductor John Sigerson and other members of the Schiller Institute have identified them. They include vocal and instrumental compositions. For example, Mozart’s “Ave Verum Corpus,” his last completed work, uses the first two intervals of the first three notes of “Dona Nobis,” but in inversion.
A list of such pieces is available for those that would want to know more. But it is the spirit of the sung message “Grant Us Peace,” and the spirit instilled by “Grant Us Peace” in those that sing it, all over the world, that matters; they are conscious that they are joining people all over the world, whatever their nation, faith, language or ethnic background, in not merely protesting against war, but speaking as one world-chorus for peace, separated in space and time, but one in intention.
The Ten Principles are, in that sense, a prayer for peace, in the classical sense of the idea of prayer—which is, not to petition God for what you wish, but rather to act in imitation of what was done by Christ in Gethsemane: ask for the strength to commit to the very mission which you have known was required of you all along.
