Today, Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has promised to give a speech on foreign policy in emulation of the FDR-like declamation—in part, almost a soliloquy—uttered by his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, on the occasion of his appearance at the commencement exercise of American University on June 10, 1963. Candidate Kennedy has, on other occasions, expressed his opposition to the Ukraine war, saying in a May 13 interview with Russell Brand, “The Russians have been invaded three times through Ukraine. The last time they were invaded during World War II, they were invaded through Ukraine. One out of every seven Russians was killed—13% of the population. Russia was leveled.
“My uncle, in 1963, gave his most important speech: the American University speech. In that speech, he tried to do what I’m doing right now. It was a speech to the American people, and he said, ‘You’ve got to put yourself in the shoes of the Russians and understand how they have a worldview. You have to put yourself in the shoes of your adversary,’ and he went through this history of the suffering that Russia had endured during World War II, explaining why they would want to have a legitimate claim to protect its borders….”
On June 16, former President Donald Trump said of the Ukraine war, “Most recently, the warmongers, globalists and deep-state-ers are absolutely livid that I refuse to bend the knee to their next endless war in Ukraine. I want peace. They want money, and they want conflict, even if it means walking us into the brink of World War III, which frankly it is doing and it’s doing it rapidly. I want people to stop dying. I want to end that war. I’ll end that war between those two countries in 24 hours.…”
Ask yourself: What percentage of the American electorate have expressed support for these two candidates for the Presidency? Then, realize that the answer to that question, is far less important than realizing the potential that could be unleashed, were a full-throated opposition to the present “Ukrainian conflict” successfully launched worldwide, using the Kennedy Peace Speech to represent the thinking of a once-sane United States. Note that the leading Republican Party and a leading Democratic Party candidate, each as or more popular than the incumbent United States President, are simultaneously opposing the near-unanimously supported “Ukraine war to stand up for freedom and democracy against the dictator Putin.”
How do we intervene in this process from the top, avoid the cesspool of American electoral politics? If the leading “left wing” and “right wing” candidates for President, and many others, including non-candidates, are caused to “have the courage to change their axioms,” the very Ukraine policy of the War Party, now assumed to be invulnerable, can quickly become “despised and rejected” as the opposite of how statecraft is carried out in time of war. But that would mean making Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s “Ten Principles for a New International Security and Development Architecture,” and their partial expression in the American University speech, “the only item on the agenda.”
The bipartisan “War Party” condominium has or will soon disburse over $130 billion for the war, as millions of Americans go homeless, hospitals close, food pantries are overwhelmed, and five mass shootings occur over two days, as happened this past weekend in the United States. Consider the over $2 trillion spent by the War Party in the 20 years in Afghanistan. Next, consider the loss of lives in that war, and the war in Iraq, over the past two decades. Then, consider how the Taliban has by all accounts successfully nearly eradicated the opium crop over only the past year in Afghanistan, much to the resentment and hostility of the Wall Street/City of London financial and banking establishment. How many lives may that save? Contrast that success to the sanctions policy imposed on Afghanistan as America’s military evacuated it, except for the “stay behind” destabilization capabilities the Anglo-Americans often leave behind to assassinate a nation’s hopes and dreams.
Before thermonuclear war begins, the United States population need a rapid, deep dive into understanding the principles of Classical tragedy. The most efficient way to do that, is to demonstrate the power of the principle of tragedy to them. Under the subtitle “What Is History?” Contained in his 1993 prison writing, “History As Science,” Lyndon LaRouche wrote:
“In those earlier decades, the 1960s and earlier, when the business of respectable schools and universities still was education, the subject of history was introduced by calling the students’ attention to the point, that we must understand the distinction between a mere chronicle of events and the taught subject which we named ‘history.’ In those past decades, in European civilization’s Classical educational programs, we would be readily understood if we had said that the practicing of writing history, as distinct from mere story-telling, or chronicles, begins with the application of the conceptions of composition of Classical Greek tragedy to the study of causes for induced survival or collapse of entire governments, states, or even entire cultures.
“In such professionals’ circles of earlier times, it would have been regarded as admissible to draw up a short list of selected great tragedians, such as the following one: Aeschylus, Marlowe, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Friedrich Schiller. None of them would contest the outstanding relevance of Schiller for such a list. First, as to tragedy itself, Schiller was the only composer to render intelligible the principles employed by all great Classical tragedians. Second, in his capacity as Jena university Professor of Universal History, and otherwise, he was the first to render intelligible the unique connection between the methods of historiography and of composition of Classical tragedy. In the present location, Schiller’s notion of universal history is adopted implicitly.” (https://archive.schillerinstitute.com/fid_91-96/933_hist_as_sci.html )
“In the present location, Schiller’s notion of universal history is adopted implicitly,” says LaRouche. And that is what we have done. The Schiller Institute, through its founder, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, is directly deploying the principle of Classical tragedy in a weekly dialogue, as Plato did that following the death of Socrates. Rather than useless anti-Americanism, from inside and outside the United States, the tragedy personified in the American University speech, is not JFK, but “what we must have lost in ourselves” such that it is barely recognizable as the thoughts of an American President, including to American citizens. No honest politician, no living President, and no thinking citizen can avoid his or her conscience being “tested in the balance and found wanting,” once the American University speech is compared to all that is being discussed as important today.
In this case, to change the subject away from the usual topics, “the pathology of everyday life,” to the topic of peace, is to change the people, to inspire them to make themselves better than they were before they discovered the President and the United States they never knew. Forcing a confrontation with the myth of the Russian and Chinese “enemy image,” through the words of an American President declaring that “No government or social system is so evil, that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue,” is to apply the method of Schiller’s “The Stage Considered as a Moral Institution” to change people’s thinking right now, as a crucial experiment without which the human race is unlikely to survive. America must be changed now, not in November 2024. The fact that small numbers of people are now reading LaRouche’s “Politics As Art” as an “organizer’s manual,” as it actually is, indicates how a rapid turn towards Classical principles of statecraft, the statecraft of Leibniz, Erasmus and Benjamin Franklin, can be effected. That is how the numerically inferior, but far more powerful Athenians won at the Battle of Marathon, and it is how—the only way how—we can win now.
