While the July 11-12 Vilnius NATO conference will, in all probability, constitute a self-blinding exercise in arrogance, incompetence and hubris—continuing what historian Barbara Tuchman called “the march of Folly” into the jaws of an “unthinkable” thermonuclear Hell—today’s Strasbourg, France Schiller Institute Conference offers a form of Promethean “forethought"—an alternative to that self-destructive path. The world need not be tragic; neither wealth, nor power, nor force of arms, nor murder need triumph over those that believe in the unalienable rights of humanity. Ideas, indeed, when embodied by individuals in touch with the immortality of humanity, are more powerful than weapons—including thermonuclear weapons.
The foolish, fatal choices being offered in the upcoming discussion, such as the “de-militarization of Russia,” putting nuclear weapons into Ukraine, or a joint “European Defense Initiative” to make Ukraine a top production site for weapons (in a country where people are now protesting the lack of graveyard space), managed by the financial ghouls of BlackRock, are each more insane than the other. In reporting these “options” to the July 7 weekly meeting of the International Peace Coalition, Schiller Institute founder and leader Helga Zepp-LaRouche said, “So, I think that if you look at all of these things, it becomes very clear that our task is to make the International Peace Coalition grow, and make it grow also in all the areas which are affected, which is essentially the whole world. It is extremely urgent, in order to get to the point where confrontation is being replaced by cooperation.…”
Between now and the August 6th 78th anniversary of the nuclear destruction of the city of Hiroshima, a Metanoia must be experienced in the trans-Atlantic world—an uncomfortable, perhaps painful recognition, not of past crimes, but of the fact that today, now, it is only our inaction that will destroy, through thermonuclear folly, all the historical work of humanity, and even the very noosphere in which humanity exists. How do we bring this about? Educator Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536) offered this biting exercise in Metanoia. He used the true nature of war, especially religious war, to brutally inform all those who would dare “to see themselves as God might see them,” of the hypocritical character of their exercise of prayer, and of the truly profane nature of their religious fakery. In honor of Vilnius, we include it here:
THE LORD’S PRAYER ON THE FIELD OF BATTLE.
” Let us now, “ says Erasmus, “imagine we hear a soldier among these fighting Christians saying the Lord’s Prayer.
“‘Our Father,’ says he.
“Oh, hardened wretch! Can you call Him Father, when you are just going to cut your brother’s throat?
“‘Hallowed be Thy name.’
“How can the name of God be more impiously unhallowed, than by mutual bloody murder among you his sons?
“‘Thy kingdom come.’
“Do you pray for the coming of His kingdom, while you are endeavoring to establish an earthly despotism, by the spilling of the blood of God’s sons and subjects ?
“‘Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.’
“His will in Heaven is for peace, but you are now meditating war.
“Dare you say to your Father in Heaven, ‘Give us this day our daily bread,’ when you are going the next minute to burn your brother’s cornfields, and had rather lose the benefits of them yourself than suffer him to enjoy them unmolested?
“With what face can you say, ‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us,’ when, so far from forgiving your brother, you are going, with all the haste you can, to murder him in cold blood for an alleged trespass, which, after all, is but imaginary?
“Do you presume to deprecate the danger of temptation, who, not without great danger to yourselves, are doing all you can to force your brother into danger?
“Do you deserve to be ‘delivered from evil,’ that is, the evil being by whose spirit you are guided, in contriving the greatest possible evil to your brother?
“Yet there are persons who, while they pass over altogether the impiety and unchristian character of war itself, are horrified at a battle being fought on a Sunday!”
War, especially “total war,” is something that the human race must now outgrow, or be killed by—possibly in the next weeks or months. Decades ago, economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche discussed the significance of Erasmus, and his truth-yielding, intelligence-increasing method of biting irony, in a short pamphlet titled: “What Really Are The Labor Committees? The Lessons of Erasmus and Franklin.” One idea-dense paragraph from that document states:
“It should be emphasized that the poor fellow who insists that the basic struggle today is between socialist and capitalist factions thereby exhibits the fact that he is ignorant of both the entirety of modern history, and of present-day realities. The struggle within European and European-related civilization since the A.D. 1266 defeat of the heirs of Frederick Barbarosa, and the death of Alfonso the Wise of Castile in A.D. 1284 has been and remains a life-and-death struggle between humanism and nominalism, a struggle of humanists to save humanity from the hell to which nominalism (for example, empiricism, positivism, linguistics) has repeatedly degraded societies, the hell into whose radioactive embrace modern nominalism (for example, monetarism, neo-Fabianism) is impelling humanity at this juncture.”
An example of a world-destroying, “radioactive” nominalism, that has become very popular and will be repeated all over Vilnius, is the formulation: “We are engaged in a war between the democracies and the autocracies.” These terms, especially the term “democracy,” are today wielded as psy-war weapons against hapless citizenries. The United States, for example, was explicitly not founded as a democracy, but as a democratically representative republic. In such a republic, the deliberations of a single individual, in dialogue with colleagues, and even adversaries, have the power to change the direction of the entire government, and under certain circumstances, even humanity.
Indeed, that is exactly what a “powerless” Lyndon LaRouche did in the 1980s, vis-à-vis President Ronald Reagan, with his policy of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Citizen mobilization of the Presidency on matters of policy, was also done by Martin Luther King vis-à-vis JFK/RFK, and was done by Frederick Douglass with Abraham Lincoln 100 years earlier. Conversely, in the above-cited passage on Erasmus, the term “humanism” is used by LaRouche in its proper meaning, as opposed to its modern, atheistic misuse. It is the opposite of a nominalism. We explain.
St. Joan of Arc, Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Charles de Gaulle, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Mahatma Gandhi, and the John F. Kennedy of the American University “Peace Speech” are each very different human beings. They represent different times; they hail from very different origins; they each encountered very different circumstances. What do they have in common? They each show that when the cause of humanity is interiorized by an individual, over and above their individual “station in life,” they implicitly “bend toward the arc of the moral universe,” and the arc of the moral universe, in turn, bends toward them. This is a simultaneous action. It appears from the outside as though the designated individual possesses some great, unique personal power, but they are merely, momentarily, for the duration of their mortal existence, what the poet Shelley called “the awful Shadow of some unseen Power” which “floats, though unseen, among us.”
This power to access the arc—the direction—of the moral universe, is unique to humanity, but is available to all. Accessing it requires that the individual see humanity, not as an aggregate, but as physically primary, as a One. That is what is properly meant by the term “humanism.” This connection to the moral universe (for which there is another name—what Vladimir Vernadsky identified by the term noösphere) is accessible to every individual as an unalienable right, but only as that individual regards her/his life, liberty (freedom) and pursuit of Happiness as identical to the life, liberty and Happiness of humanity as a whole. It is as much an unalienable obligation, as it is an unalienable right. The science of Physical Economy is the ongoing, durable realization of this immortal mission for humanity. That was the occupation and specialty of Lyndon LaRouche, a field that is not only unrelated, but opposed to monetarism, that is, the majority of what passes for economics studies in America today, a set of unspeakable practices inimical to the founding of the nation.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s Ten Principles of A New International Security and Development Architecture, starting from the standpoint of happily proclaiming “that man is fundamentally good and capable to infinitely perfect the creativity of his mind and the beauty of his soul; and being the most advanced geological force in the universe, … proves that the lawfulness of the mind and that of the physical universe are in correspondence and cohesion, and that all evil is the result of a lack of development, and therefore can be overcome.” (https://schillerinstitute.com/blog/2022/11/30/ten-principles-of-a-new-international-security-and-development-architecture/)
So, rather than the shadow of doom that already slouches over Vilnius before it commences, humanity can choose the narrow but clear path to human progress that the Schiller Institute has outlined for nearly 40 years, and that now, today, in Strasbourg, refutes the trans-Atlantic and world tragedy that need not happen.
