On May 3, on a day dedicated worldwide to the freedom of speech, the freedom of thought, and the freedom of journalist Julian Assange, Helga Zepp-LaRouche issued a statement, “The Freedom of the Press and Freedom of Julian Assange Are Identical!” The statement concluded:” The heads of state who assemble this weekend for the coronation of King Charles can prove their commitment to freedom and democracy by congratulating the newly crowned King for making his first act the freedom of Julian Assange!” (https://schillerinstitute.com/blog/2023/05/03/helga-zepp-larouche-the-freedom-of-the-press-and-freedom-of-julian-assange-are-identical/)
Was Zepp-LaRouche, in her statement, intentionally insulting the morality of world heads of state, by implying that they were capable of committing an “unnatural act”— of real leadership—even King Charles?
Two days later, Julian Assange himself took spiritual leadership of the rallies that had been held in his name, with a defiantly polemical Jonathan Swift-like excoriation of the unjust, “mad, old, diseased and dying” system of injustice against which he stands. He, too, addressed the King of England, extending to Charles an invitation that, while different than that proposed by Zepp-LaRouche, was complementary to hers. “On the coronation of my liege, I thought it only fitting to extend a heartfelt invitation to you to commemorate this momentous occasion by visiting your very own kingdom within a kingdom: His Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh.”
For those that have wondered how to gain the strength to resist and overcome oppression, how to refute “the rule of law,” a language of coercion which is the language of brutes, these two statements illustrate what Lyndon LaRouche called the “Florestan principle” in art, as well as the art of statecraft. It could also be called the “Think Like Beethoven” principle, because of Beethoven’s opera Fidelio, whose two leading characters, Florestan and his wife Leonore, also called “Fidelio,” defeat political tyranny in the form of the tyrannical Pizarro, who represents the real-life William Pitt’s and Britain’s imprisonment and treatment of the Marquis de Lafayette and his wife Adrienne, the real-life Leonore.
Zepp-LaRouche, the 2022 winner of the Freedom of Expression Award of the Journalists’ Club of Mexico, also pointed out that “In reality there is a brutal fight for control of the ‘narrative’ of the ‘rules-based-order,’ where journalism has been degraded to serve as the executioner on behalf of the ruling elites. If this were an exaggeration, Seymour Hersh would have received a newly created Nobel Prize for Excellence in Journalism in Norway, and all the Norwegian media would have excelled in reporting about the role of Norway in the sabotage of the Nord Stream Pipelines.” Julian Assange was a recipient of that same award in 2019. Such ideas demonstrate that while statecraft may arguably not be an art-form as such, the deft application of the irony of harsh, but undeniable truth, through a well-written story or a well-delivered speech, can be as aesthetically satisfying and clarifying as a portrait by Velazquez, or Goya’s Los Caprichos pictorial commentary on the follies of Spain.
In contrast, Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is no artist, but merely an entertainer, a runaway human drone dominated by an ungrateful British intelligence “Mother,” recently told the Washington Post, when asked about reports that the U.S. was spying on him and other Ukrainian officials: “Where I can speak frankly, I do it. But there are high risks,” and so he won’t. When “pretend President” Zelenskyy speaks with China’s President Xi Jinping, the next day, Sir Richard Dearlove, former Chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) comes to Ukraine to tell him what he is going to say and think. That is Anglo-American democracy at work in the doomed nation that was once Ukraine.
There will be no exit, Zelenskyy is told. London has decreed it. In the words of Dearlove, in an interview upon his return from Ukraine, “The other thing I would say, which is absolutely crystal clear, [is] the Ukrainians will not under any circumstances at the moment accept a ceasefire. They will not under any circumstances accept a negotiation which does not meet the terms already laid down publicly by Zelenskyy, which, if you read them, the Russians are not about to agree to. So this talk of peace negotiations, as far as the Ukrainians go, is completely irrelevant at the moment,” whatever Zelenskyy may have momentarily thought he could say or think, in speaking with China. Zelenskyy is not a free man, but a slave in the ill-fitting garb of a tyrant, barely a step ahead of the Azov hangmen of his own regime, themselves a doomed lot.
This is not to say that real adversity does not threaten and afflict real freedom-fighters. There is a price for making policy, and even for free thought. In his 2004 essay, “The Night They Came To Kill Me,” Lyndon LaRouche recalled: “On Oct. 12, 1988, I delivered a memorable address in Berlin, which was taped there for later broadcast, that same month, on a nationwide TV campaign feature. I forecast the imminent collapse of the Soviet alliance, beginning probably soon in Poland, and spreading into other parts of Eastern Europe and the Soviet economy itself. I proposed a course of U.S. action to deal, through affirmative economic action, with the opportunity to uproot the embedded institutions of major military conflict throughout the world.
“I was soon hustled off to the hoosegow by the fastest, if perhaps the most crooked railroad in the U.S.A., the Alexandria Federal Courthouse in the Eastern District of Virginia.”
“I spoke the truth, and chains were my reward,” says the political prisoner Florestan in Ludwig van Beethoven’s opera Fidelio. But is it worth it? Julian Assange spoke the truth. Seymour Hersh has spoken the truth. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, #1 on the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation “Kill List,” along with Scott Ritter, Ray McGovern, and Independent United States Senate candidate Diane Sare, have all spoken the truth. The Founding Fathers of the United States spoke the truth, and admonished all of the citizens of the United States, that it was not only their right, but also their duty to throw off tyranny, should it re-emerge in their newly-formed nation.
On the verge of the possible annihilation of the human race, “speaking the truth boldly without artifice,” is the only way to win against the nihilists and cultural Malthusians for whom killing the mind, through what is called “cognitive warfare” rather than what it is—menticide—is the primary objective in war. As the January 2021 NATO Report, “Cognitive Warfare,” said: “The brain will be the battlefield of the 21st century. Humans are the contested domain. Cognitive warfare’s objective is to make everyone a weapon.”
Therefore, let us joyously respond to the human drones of the State Department, Pentagon, British Intelligence and their various world minions, by thinking and acting with and on behalf of the Global Majority now emerging, whose desire for a new security and development architecture provides the optimism by means of which the cognitive war will be won by those who dare to speak the truth. “Our power is their Love and Reason.”
