The Lead
There Is a Power in Truth, Which Force Cannot Withstand
by Dennis Speed (EIRNS) — Jan. 28, 2024
Former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray pointed out, in the hours following South Africa’s (and the world’s) victory at the International Court of Justice on January 26, that “it’s getting more difficult” for the Anglo-American establishment to ignore the power of truth, which, in some circumstances, as in Germany, 1989, can overturn despotism by “knocking out the brains of falsehood.” There are consequences that can inexorably follow from a population and a world inspired and aroused to act on behalf of that revealed truth. In a Jan. 26 interview with Judge Andrew Napolitano, Murray said:
“Joe Biden obviously has problems with key parts of his own Democratic coalition, who are extremely unhappy about supporting genocide. And this (ICJ) ruling is going very much to strengthen their arm. And we must remember that this case (of genocide), which the ICJ has now declared is plausible, and is going to be heard—Joe Biden had declared it meritless. And he’s now contradicted by 15 of the most senior judges on the planet.
“So, this gets more difficult for the United States. But I don’t doubt, just given everything in Biden‘s record, it will still be vetoed. Then, it will go back to the General Assembly. And while people say the General Assembly has no force, it should be noted that a key part of today’s judgment was (the ICJ) reading out of a resolution of the General Assembly. And the ICJ has a very close relationship with the General Assembly. The General Assembly asks the ICJ regularly for opinions on matters before the General Assembly. So it will go back there, and there, the United States will be humiliated. Some of its European allies will desert it, because people start to worry about personal liability for complicity in genocide.
“Just to give one example: here, in the U.K., the Genocide Convention is incorporated into domestic legislation, specifically, in the International Criminal Court Act of 2001. And complicity in genocide is an offense in law here. So, if the ICJ rules that this is a genocide, ultimately, those who were shipping weapons to Israel, those who were organizing surveillance flights to assist Israel in bombing Gaza, those who were passing intelligence to Israel, and the senior politicians, who authorized all of that—they’re all potentially at risk of criminal domestic charges for complicity in genocide. And I’m quite sure that will be true in quite a number of countries. So I do think this has the potential to affect the behavior of states.”
Two situations now unfolding in the Southwest Asian theater—both of which are most likely forms of retaliation against the Jan. 26 ICJ ruling in favor of South Africa’s petition—may reveal to the world, in the short term, the institutions and the deeper policy-sponsorship of the Netanyahu government’s present relentless ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Nine nations have suddenly announced that they are suspending the funding of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). That agency, which since 1949 has been central to sustaining whole sectors of the Palestinian population, and has already been reduced from 13,000 to 3,000 personnel, is being de facto shut down, based on Israeli assertions that “some of its employees” were perhaps engaged in the October 7 attack. The United States, Canada, Germany, the U.K., Switzerland, Finland, Italy, and other nations have cut aid. But United Nations Secretary General Guterres has pointed out that “Of the 12 people implicated, 9 were immediately identified and terminated by the Commissioner-General of UNRWA, Philippe Lazzarini; one is confirmed dead, and the identity of the two others is being clarified…. Any UN employee involved in acts of terror will be held accountable, including through criminal prosecution.”
Then, there is the statement by President Joe Biden about the intention of the United States to respond to the killing on Saturday, Jan. 27, of three American servicemen in Jordan. “While we are still gathering the facts of this attack, we know it was carried out by radical Iran-backed militant groups operating in Syria and Iraq…. And have no doubt—we will hold all those responsible to account at a time and in a manner of our choosing.”
From Afghanistan, to Ukraine, to Gaza, to Iran, “the march of folly” by the dying Anglo-American financial establishment is increasingly the target of both derision and intervention, by those that have chosen, as South Africa did, to stand up for humanity, and have re-discovered through the successful South Africa ICJ initiative the power of truth. This increasingly includes forces in the United States. The Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), in search of historical precedents for the head-long careening of the United States into the abyss, said in their Jan. 25 VIPS Memorandum, “To Biden: Avoiding a Third World War:” “On July 13, 2023, you said Putin ‘has already lost the war.’...
“Ukraine has lost the war, and this will become very clear in the weeks ahead. Given the lack of any prospect for negotiations, nothing short of nuclear weapons could stop the measured but inexorable advance of Russian forces. You have said you want to avoid World War III. That’s what nukes (including ‘mini’ ones) would mean….
“At this historic juncture, we might seek what wisdom historians might offer.” We, and particularly Helga Zepp-LaRouche, emphatically agree.
All, be they VIPS members, world legislators, clergy, leaders of institutions varying from trade-unions to think-tanks, are encouraged to read, study, and critique Zepp-LaRouche’s “Ten Principles of a New International Security and Development Architecture.” That document was produced from her extensive study of the diplomacy of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, the negotiations of the 1644-48 Treaty of Westphalia, the composition of the United States Declaration of Independence and the Preamble of the United States Constitution, and the historical studies of Friedrich Schiller, for whom the Schiller Institute was named forty years ago. Poet-historian Friedrich Schiller, whose History of the Thirty Years War, Revolt of the Netherlands, and other studies, along with his plays, have been for four decades since 1984, the basis for the Schiller Institute’s foreign policy proposals, understood better than anyone the difference between force and power. Schiller also, through his letters “On the Aesthetic Education of Man,” illumined how the freedom which all people claim to want, can only be achieved—including in government—through an education of the emotions that elevates the individual soul into a state of beauty, from which it will never retreat. That education, mediated through various “development projects,” is the method by means of which policy must be made. It was the spirit of that aesthetic education of humanity which appeared in The Hague courtroom, in the petition-indictment by the South African delegation, and its ethnically diverse, formidably competent legal team. Friday’s “stride toward freedom” can be the “limit to the tyrant’s power” should we choose to make it so.
Contents
Strategic War Danger
- Scholz-Biden Plan ‘Resolute Support for Ukraine’ Show in D.C. on Feb. 9 (↓)
- Hamas Tunnels Reportedly Largely Intact (↓)
- Vladimir Putin, at Leningrad Memorial, Sends a Message to the West: Is Anyone Listening? (↓)
- Russia's Naryshkin Names MI6 as Training Ukrainian Nuclear Terrorists (↓)
- Biden White House in ‘Pre-Iran War’ Mode? (↓)
Collapsing Imperial System
New World Paradigm
U.S. and Canada
Science and Technology
History and Culture
Harley Schlanger Update
Watch The Daily Update with Harley Schlanger, a short video update available every weekday morning from The LaRouche Organization.
