The Lead

The Role of the ‘Peace Chorus’ in Averting Tragedy

by Dennis Speed (EIRNS) — Oct. 29, 2024

In a Monday meeting, Oct. 28, held to evaluate the history-making events of last week—including the Oct. 22-24 Kazan, Russia BRICS summit; the Oct. 26 symposium/concert “Build a Chorus of Peace Against the Ghouls of War,” hosted by LaRouche Independent candidates Diane Sare and Jose Vega; and the Sunday, Oct. 27 “Operation DAWN, Threat of Nuclear War in the World Today” brunch, organized by former U.S. Marines intelligence officer and whistleblower Scott Ritter—Schiller Institute head Helga Zepp-LaRouche, both contributor to and participant in those events, and earlier processes that made the achievements of those events possible, indicated what she believed needed to happen next. “We have to absolutely make clear that the only way how the danger of a Third World War can be overcome, is that we have to get the collective West—that’s the United States and the European nations—to stop their silly geopolitical confrontation against this new majority of the world. After all, the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, plus other nations) as they are now, represents 4.7 billion people, and 57% of the world’s population, and there are many more countries in line waiting to join. And it would be foolish, to the point of insanity, if the West would continue to oppose that.”

During last week’s Kazan BRICS conference, EIR correspondents in attendance had asked Russian advisor to host President Vladimir Putin, Anton Kobyakov, the question: Even if the BRICS is not anti-West, the West is currently anti-BRICS. If this does not change, we have the risk of nuclear war in the conflicts occurring in Ukraine and the Middle East, and a perpetuation of sanctions. Do you see the potential for activities and successes of the BRICS to change the outlook of the Anglo-American elites, to participate positively in developing a new security and development architecture, as proposed by Helga Zepp-LaRouche of the Schiller Institute?” Kobyakov had responded: “Indeed, we hope very much for that—that they will take part in hammering out, so to speak, peace initiatives. Our President talks about that, always. And we even have a nuclear deterrence strategy. The main thing is that Pax Americana, if it collapses—the main thing is that when they collapse, that they not bury all of us under the rubble.”

These are words that Americans should pay close attention to. The United States, presently on the verge of an expanding and potentially even a thermonuclear war with both Russia and China, is also on the eve of a November 5 Presidential electoral result, which will ultimately be unsatisfying, no matter which candidate wins. Two other candidates, neither of them running for the American Presidency—U.S. Senate independent candidate in New York Diane Sare, and Congressional independent candidate in the Bronx (CD15) Jose Vega—stepped into the Presidential policy vacuum, co-hosting a completely unique “international town meeting” on a new foreign and security policy. With its extraordinary set of experts, it focused, not on who is to blame, but rather, what citizens need to do, and what solutions to the present crisis must be made. In that context, the wars in Ukraine and Southwest Asia were addressed as tragic expressions of the lack of a higher perspective, and they identified the path to that higher perspective.

An international audience heard former American military officers of high rank, journalists, and even comedians, in dialogue among themselves, and with Helga Zepp-LaRouche. “These nations of the Global South are already the Global Majority, and they are determined to end the period of 500 years of colonialism, by building a new world economic system which will allow them to industrialize and overcome poverty and underdevelopment,” she said to the Saturday symposium. “They are building a great, New Development Bank of the Global South, a new Investment platform, a new BRICS grain exchange, and other institutions, which will help them to grow. It is the most urgent task for reestablishing world peace that the United States supports this effort. We must remember that the American War of Independence was the first anti-colonial war in history, by establishing independence of America from the British Empire.”

Her message, and the messages of Ray McGovern, Col. Larry Wilkerson (ret.), Staff Sgt. Dennis Fritz, comedian Jimmy Dore, journalist Garland Nixon, and many others, as well as the statements of candidates Sare and Vega went out, not only to the United States, but to an international audience that, as of late Saturday/Sunday, numbered well over 50,000 people. Most notable and unique, however, was the “commentary” role and usage of Classical musical composition that permeated and ordered the entire proceedings. This included music from Iran, Syria, South Africa, and Albania, as well as the compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach, Antonin Dvorak, and the African-American Spirituals of the United States, the latter of which were conducted by United States Senate candidate Diane Sare. Sare also performed in a brass quintet in the program’s opening.

It was precisely her work to establish amateur Classical choruses in New York State over a decade that was an essential factor that allowed Diane Sare to become, in 2024, the only independent candidate in all of New York State to successfully challenge its criminal ballot access requirements, by collecting nearly 70,000 signatures from registered voters, in order to exceed the 45,000 signature requirement and achieve ballot status—something that the Presidential campaigns of RFK, Jr., Cornel West, Jill Stein, and others failed to do. Sare and Vega’s non-tragic, “Classical” methods of policy campaigning, seen by many as unorthodox, are actually the only way that the United States might possibly break through its self-destructive delusions in time.

Whichever candidate is elected President of the United States, the present posture of the trans-Atlantic system is tragic, and “it will require a miracle to change it.” But, as Helga Zepp-LaRouche has asserted, “The only miracles that I believe in are the ones we do ourselves.” The problem is that the axioms of policymaking that are presently embedded in trans-Atlantic thinking, in areas that range from finance and banking, to economy, to science, to culture, are irredeemably flawed. Indeed, as the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, it were unrecognizable, not only to its 18th-century founders like Alexander Hamilton and Gouverneur Morris, but also to Dwight Eisenhower, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and perhaps even to Martin Luther King, Jr.

The economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche, however, had an “infuriating, and devastatingly effective” approach to “axiom-busting.” LaRouche originated, through his science of physical economy, an application of the Socratic method of discovery of scientific principles directly to the process of political organizing. That distinguished his approach to the American Presidency from that of all other candidates. He started from his original breakthrough in physical economy. In his “The Independent Democrats 1984 Platform,” for example, LaRouche proposed a “Reorganization of the Federal Executive” branch, examining the functioning of the Department of State, Energy, Interior, etc. His approach was based on, not merely invoking, but applying the universal principle of Natural Law, in order to devise solutions to the apparently insoluble paradoxes of policy-planning that lead people to believe “there’s no possible solution.” “Our Republic was founded, in respect of doctrines of law, under the governance of the proposition that all nations and persons are properly self governed by a higher body of law, identifiable as the Augustinian natural law.… Under our system of constitutional law, the federal constitution has only one permitted interpretation: our federal constitution is a servant of the higher body of natural Augustinian law,” LaRouche said.

What is needed in our time, confronted by limitless opportunity, and limitless destruction, is the courage to change the viciously wrong axioms of thinking and conduct that doom every civilization to failure—and in our case, could doom the world to extinction. The Ten Principles for a New International Strategic and Development Architecture by Helga Zepp-LaRouche are not only a statement of principle, but a statement of intent, which, if adopted by people in the trans-Atlantic world, would supply the only means by which a collaboration with the nations of the Global South, and the Global Majority would ever be trusted, and therefore realized.