The Lead

Truth Versus ‘Narrative’

by Dennis Small (EIRNS) — Jul. 07, 2024

If it weren’t so extraordinarily dangerous, the current strategic crisis would almost be comical.

On July 9-11, NATO will hold a summit in Washington, D.C. to coordinate their next escalation of their campaign to wipe out Russia, under the guise of the Ukraine war. The leaders at that gala gathering will include the mumbling and disoriented President Biden, whose cognitive impairment has just been put on full public display before the entire world. Another, France’s Macron, has just received one of the most stunning electoral drubbings in modern history—and yet he will be strutting on stage, possibly mumbling to himself “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche.” And a third, Keir Starmer of the U.K., was swept into office 72 hours ago on little more than the nearly universal hatred of his Tory opponents.

Other than an important group of anti-war dissidents around Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, they will all swear fealty to the “rules-based order,” which has never been defined and in fact doesn’t exist; and they will commit to hundreds of billions of dollars more of deadly military aid to Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine—who is not even the legal President of Ukraine at this point, since his presidential term expired on May 20, 2024, since new elections scheduled for March 31 had been cancelled due to martial law.

The institutions of the ancien régime are indeed crumbling, faster than you can say “we’ll never give up our derivatives bubble.”

It is an edifice of war held together by little more than the “narrative” that “Putin is out to reconstitute the Soviet Union,” and “Putin will invade the Baltics next if Ukraine falls”—patently false assertions that don’t stand up to a straightforward review of the public statements of President Putin over recent decades, not to mention the essential fact of recent modern history.

Speaking to the participants in the July 5 meeting of the International Peace Coalition, Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche issued a broad challenge to take on this so-called “narrative”:

“I think we also need to do some in-depth work. I think what we are experiencing right now is a gigantic effort to replace reality with narratives. And I believe in Plato, I believe in Socrates and the Socratic dialogue. I don’t think anybody has the patent on the truth, but I believe the Socratic dialogue is a method for how you can arrive at the truth. If we are ending up in a world where all sides just defend their narratives, the truth gets lost….

“I think we need to issue a challenge to historians, journalists, investigative journalists, and other people concerned with historical truth to reconstruct how we got to this point of a potential World War III. How did we lose an incredible historical opportunity which existed more than 30 years ago with German unification, the collapse of the Soviet Union—which naturally for the people living there was not a good thing, it was a collapse of their system.

“Putin has said he regards the end of the Soviet Union as the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century, or some formulation like that. That particular Putin quote is always misconstrued to say that he wants to reconstitute the Soviet Union. That is not what he said. He said it because the following years of the Yeltsin period saw the dismantling of Russian industrial capacities from 1991 to 1994, a fall to only 30% of its previous capacity. That led to an incredible collapse of the demographic curve. They lost 1 million people per year, because the death rate went up as compared to the birth rate. That is what Putin referred to; the circumstances under which the Soviet Union collapsed led then to the collapse of the 1990s, and that is what he calls this catastrophe.

“I think everything right now is under the control of the `narrative’: You have to make people believe that peace is impossible; that Russia must be defeated, and therefore a victory on the battlefield is what is important. That is the certain path to World War III.

“In Germany, for that matter, it is not even allowed anymore to say that whatever is happening in Ukraine is not an unprovoked war of aggression by Russia. If you say that, as was pointed out by one of the previous speakers, you can be put in jail or arrested or punished in some major way.

“I think this is the end of democracy, the death of freedom, and I think we have to fight for historical truthfulness. And therefore, I would put it out as a challenge to all the participants in this process of the IPC to help reconstruct what actually happened since 1989, since the Wall came down. What were the opportunities? How were they missed? Why were they missed? What came in their place? Because I think a rational reworking of that history is an important ingredient so that we can come back to a discussion; because only if you look at what went wrong can you earnestly think about what needs to be done to remedy it.”