Executive Intelligence Review’s Mike Billington reported that at the conclusion of the ninth meeting of the International Peace Coalition yesterday, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the group’s initiator, offered the view that “she had always believed that we must ‘do the work of Providence,’ and that when we do what is ‘necessary’ then we are doing the work of Providence. At this moment, when everything is at stake, we must create a new paradigm which addresses the life of every child on Earth, and all to come.”
That viewpoint is congruent with that of the American July 1776 Declaration of Independence. When that document states “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” it is referencing the idea of Providence—that everything necessary for the survival, growth and development of humanity is provided, as Leibniz states, in this “best of all possible worlds.” (Indeed, the Declaration’s famous formulation, “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” is taken from Gottfried Leibniz, instead of John Locke’s “Life, Liberty and Property.") What must make the “all possible” real, however, is the “universal labor” of human creative discovery and invention, including scientific progress, not only in physical-economic terms, but also in statecraft, and in the arts, as in poetry and music—what economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche called “the science of the human mind.”
On Sunday, August 6, Humanity For Peace will anchor and initiate an international, open-air dialogue, a global “conference of the streets,” a mass discourse on how to eradicate war by building the Providence of mankind. Centered at the United Nations, this effort is what Mahatma Gandhi called “an experiment with truth.” And whoever participates in the many cities and nations that have committed to it is an initiator of that emerging, Socratic dialogue among the Global Majority, in defiance of the doomed “principalities and powers” that have, as the Confucianists say, “lost the Mantle of Heaven.”
It should go without saying, but must, in fact, be made fiercely explicit, to those beleaguered, aspiring citizens of the morally-failed states of the trans-Atlantic world today: No matter what other distinctions and differences may exist, we are all members of one humanity. We are of one human race. If it is true that we are one humanity, should it not also be possible for that humanity to speak and, therefore, act as one, in its true, human self-interest? Beethoven’s musical setting of poet Friedrich Schiller’s An die Freude“—"Ode to Joy“—tells us that the answer is “Yes!”
The Schiller Institute’s mission since its inception is to elevate politics to the standard of practice of Classical art, by emphasizing the best in all sectors of humanity’s cultures. The present political practice of humanity, despite significant and partially successful attempts by nations outside of the trans-Atlantic world, is dangerously failing to express such a unity of human purpose. How might that be achieved? How might politics become art?
Right now if, at the United Nations and in all the nations, one can inspire individual, self-selected representatives of humanity to speak as one, if only for a moment, for peace, rather than for self-destruction, then that would begin a process of truly “building Providence.” Why? Reflect upon “the full sea in which we are afloat.” Consider this portion of the statement, signed a week ago but just released, of the “President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin and the Leaders of the Seven Countries Leading the African Peace Initiative” on the war between NATO and Russia:
“The Leaders called for specific steps to remove obstacles to Russian grain and fertilizer exports, thus allowing the resumption of the full implementation of the Black Sea package initiative of the United Nations Secretary-General as endorsed on 22 July 2022 in Istanbul.
“The Leaders also called upon the United Nations to take necessary action in order to release 200,000 tons of Russian fertilizer blocked in European Union seaports for immediate and free delivery to African countries.
“The Leaders agreed to continue their dialogue on the African Peace Initiative so that a door to peace can be opened.” (http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/71899 )
This “Food For Peace” initiative, reminiscent of earlier proposals made by the John F. Kennedy Administration in 1961, and by the Schiller Institute’s co-founder, the late economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche in 1988, is a statement “above the fray,” made on behalf of all humanity, which is right, just and needed. While the morally compromised will try to get around that fact, there are clearly 2 billion people on the planet who need that food relief now, 700 million of them in a desperate way. The food can be made available; the fertilizer required to grow the food can also be made available. Why should 2 billion people be held hostage any longer to famine, and to poverty, in the name of a war in which they are not combatants?
It is not only the right, but the duty, of each human being on the planet, not crippled by poverty, disease or mental impairment, to participate, to the best of her/his ability, in ensuring the continued, durable survival of the human race and its individual members—who are not distant categories, like “the homeless,” “refugees,” or “immigrants,” but human beings threatened with immediate extinction, not only by total war, but by moral indifference.
What happens when total war and moral indifference coincide? The scene is August 6, 1945, as recounted by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey, in their book No High Gound: “While almost every other urban area in the island kingdom had been seared by the incendiary mixtures dropped by the B-29s, this ancient river-mouth city had felt the concussion of only 12 enemy missiles in three and a half years of war…. In all, about a dozen people were killed. All kinds of reasons for this strange immunity were advanced. Many said the Americans had crossed Hiroshima off their target lists because so many of the Japanese nationals in the United States were from Hiroshima Prefecture…. The strange situation that insulated Hiroshima from the horrible blasts that had torn Tokyo, Yokohama, and other cities worried some people. There were those in Hiroshima, describing themselves as ‘intellectuals,’ who feared as they lay awake at night, listening to the planes overhead, that the Yankees were saving them for some particularly dreadful fate.”
The horrifically painful deaths of 200,000 human beings, the vast majority of them civilians, in the atomic explosions over Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, were a crime, an unnecessary tragedy, no matter what one’s assessment about the “necessity” of dropping the bombs was, or is. The mentality that justified it was also present on October 18, 1962, when Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Curtis LeMay recommended a strike against Cuba to President Kennedy, telling him that “the Russians would do nothing.” (As Major General in 1945, LeMay had recommended Hiroshima and Tokyo for annihilation, but was overruled on the second.) Survivors of the blasts, as has been recently emphasized to some of Humanity For Peace’s organizers, emphasize two things: that the bomb must never again be used, and that forgiveness is the only path forward. Bringing the trans-Atlantic world back into alignment and concordance with the rest of humanity, may require a miracle of Providence—but if so, we have to build it. Let’s begin!
