The Schiller Institute conference, “The Age of Reason or the Annihilation of Humanity,” now transitions to a second phase. This will involve various forms of international actions, from demonstrations to “Zoom call teach-ins,” from letter-writing to lobbying. Most importantly, however, it will involve new, unexpected alliances, “coincidences of opposites” that will make people uncomfortable, in the way advocated by St. Paul: “Be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by renewing your mind.”
Remarks by Pope Francis regarding his quest for peace, during his return flight from South Sudan, and the Schiller Institute demand for the lifting of Caesar sanctions in the aftermath of the Türkiye-Syria earthquake (see below), flow from the same conceptual source, expressed in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King. “I refuse to accept the cynical notion that Nation after Nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.”
When Lyndon LaRouche wrote his “How To Lick a Depression in a Single Day,” more than 51 years ago, in response to the taking of the dollar off the gold standard on August 15, 1971, he was responding to something that he had seen, and vowed to fight, that had begun more than a decade earlier. LaRouche identified this in an interview he gave on March 18, 1991, from his prison cell in Rochester, Minnesota:
“The policy issue is the same as it’s been for me, in fact, for 30 years, particularly 25 years: The United States, as I feared would be the case 30 years ago, is going fascist. And, not only is it going fascist, but it is headed toward establishing a fascist, one-world empire, which George Bush calls a new world order. That’s just his name for it.
“But I recall what I wrote back in 1961 for publication on this subject. And, since then—or, say, 1971, ten years later, the result of the Nixon crisis of October 1969, with the collapse of the gold reserve requirement and the introduction of what was called Phase I there, and the announcement of Phase II to come. This is pure fascism, economically in the sense that Hjalmar Schacht introduced fascism into Germany, or that Volpi di Misurata, who was the patron and financial minister for Benito Mussolini introduced fascism into Italy.
“What Bush is proposing—as Dukakis was actually proposing, in 1988—is fascism, domestically. And then, on a matching basis, what they’re proposing globally, as I feared ever since I saw the operation against the former Belgian Congo, against Lumumba, is the same thing in our policies toward the developing sector and other parts of the world. That for which we’ve been called conspiracy theorists, saying that there is an Anglo-American plot, so to speak, including the backers of Henry Kissinger, who is a self-admitted British agent, to establish an Anglo-American world empire, with the Soviets as, ostensibly, a junior partner. That’s all happening.
“Look at the world: it’s evil and desperate. Look at what’s happening to people in the United States. It’s an evil and desperate situation. People are terribly frightened. Fewer people are standing up to resist. It is a moral obligation of all of us who will stand up to resist, who still have the courage to resist this evil, to stand up, each in our own way, that is. The most effective way I can stand up inside the United States, is by running again for President.”
Note that the Lumumba assassination, a topic in the last two Schiller Institute conferences, played a central role in Lyndon LaRouche’s personal commitment to act, no matter what the cost to himself. It was this commitment which drove, and inspired, the continual breakthroughs by LaRouche on physical economy, leading to his 1990s proposal for a World Land-Bridge, a complement and higher statement of the principles of economic development that undergird the Belt and Road Initiative. In a 1997 seminar, he said:
“The crucial thing, to all of these parts of the world, whether it’s Africa, South Asia, East Asia, is to provide to these sectors of the world, the right to development. The right to development involves education, infrastructure development, and, above all, the machine-tool design capability, without which you can not have continuous, sustainable development.
“You can not simply go into a barren desert, and set up a factory, and expect to have a productive economy. You must, first of all, provide infrastructure. You must provide economic transportation, water-management, power, and so forth. You must have educational systems, health systems: all of these infrastructural elements which are necessary for a successful modern economy in that locality. That is, you must measure the density of infrastructure, in terms of per capita of labor force, in terms of square kilometer of relevant area.
“This ability to transfer technology, and to develop it, depends upon the ratio, of the number of persons employed, productively, in a machine-tool-sector industry, to the total number of persons employed in the economy. That is: the ratio of the rate of technological progress, per capita, in the machine-tool sector, as compared with the projected rate of technological progress per capita in the labor force, as a whole.
“This is the key, the indispensable key, to economic progress: Without it, you can’t have it. Thus, that was the principle…: that, by developing land routes of efficient, high-rate, high-speed transportation, throughout Eurasia, and using these routes, not only to support trade and industry, but to support the transmission, at a high rate, of the machine-tool-design sector, into these countries, then and only then, would it be possible to lift the greatest part of the world population, which is concentrated in South and East Asia—and also in Africa, secondly—to lift these parts of the world, out of the legacy of 19th-Century imperialism, and the legacy of second-class citizenship in world affairs.” [https://larouchepub.com/eiw/public/1997/eirv24n44-19971031/eirv24n44-19971031_052-the_usa_china_strategic_partners-lar.pdf]
We will stop the self-destruction of civilization only by pursuing this narrow, “global” path. Luckily, Lyndon LaRouche always advised, and practiced, viewing things, as did Martin Luther King, from the mountain-top. Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s post-conference Monday discussion, featured here, outlines, using her Ten Principles, a single concept of intervention into the immediate conjuncture of global crises, by means of which humanity can supersede geopolitics, before geopolitics annihilates humanity.
