On Friday, Nov. 1, President of the World Surgical Foundation Dr. Mark Perlmutter stood as a witness before a New York City audience to deliver a devastating firsthand report, punctuated by raw photos of what he experienced, on the horrors of the situation in Gaza. For some of those in attendance, the accounts of a deliberate extermination of a trapped population, epitomized by the targeted killing of its children, was almost too much to bear. Perlmutter, who was originally scheduled to speak at Mount Sinai Hospital, but was driven away by cowardly accusations of anti-Semitism, charged the audience to act—to do whatever it takes to force a change in U.S. policy supporting a blatant genocide.
Will we face up to the gut-wrenching reality that the weaponization of the Holocaust is being used to justify a new Holocaust—unfolding, nakedly, before the eyes of the world? Will we watch and yet claim we did not know? Or will we, as Perlmutter demanded, act? We must. As stated plainly by UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini, “Today, even as we look into the faces of children in Gaza, some of whom we know will die tomorrow, the rules-based international order is crumbling in a repetition of the horrors that led to the establishment of the United Nations, and in violation of commitments to prevent their recurrence.” The inability of the world community so far to respond to what has been unfolding in front of our eyes for more than a year means that this world order is finished—morally and otherwise.
The growing conflagration in Southwest Asia is becoming perhaps more explosive and more dangerous to humanity than it has ever been, but it can’t go on much longer as it will soon consume its purveyors. This has been noted, courageously, by thousands of Israelis who signed an open letter calling on the international community and its institutions “to intervene immediately and implement every possible sanction towards achieving an immediate ceasefire between Israel and its neighbors, for the future of both peoples in Israel and Palestine and the peoples of the region, and for their rights to security and life….The state of Israel is on a suicidal path and sows destruction and devastation that increase day by day.” The case is exactly the same with the NATO proxy war in Ukraine—because its purveyors, the ghouls of the geopolitical world order, are the same.
And what of the impending U.S Presidential election? Much seems to ride on its outcome—at least one must come to that conclusion when witnessing the lengths to which the British establishment and its American establishment partners have gone to try to manipulate, brutally or otherwise, the result. While many have predictions of what will or will not happen when the vote is counted (or not counted, or miscounted as the case may be) in the world’s finest exemplar of “democracy,” what is known, is that the outcome will not solve the fundamental problem we all face: The fate of humanity hangs by a very fine, thermonuclear-charged thread, and unless we elect to end geopolitics because it’s evil, wrong, destructive, and suicidal, there is no solution to the currently accelerating showdown.
We must think differently; this is the privilege of being human. We survive as a species by adapting in our conceptions, and consequently our behavior, to be more and more perfectly in line with true and knowable universal principles. This is a power inaccessible to the merely biotic world, including our own biological faculties. The human mind can ascend to a higher level than that on which a paradox, an impossible conflict, first presents itself. Father of the Renaissance and, implicitly, the American republic Nicholas of Cusa refuted the beastman Aristotle in proving that the human mind can elevate itself to think a higher “one” which is above the level on which the conflict exists.
Most people today, products of a fallen and decayed culture, aren’t accustomed to such thinking—they trap themselves in choosing a side or remaining “neutral,” immobilized. Helga Zepp-LaRouche has charged that if we start from the standpoint of the one humanity as primary, we will find the level of reason necessary to solve any of the problems facing civilization today.
The vital task today for those courageous enough, and loving enough, is to convince the countries of the collective West to adopt a mode of cooperation with the Global Majority—the BRICS nations and the Global South—which is already taking steps to form new relationships and new institutions for a post-colonial and pro-human system of development.
For this to become possible, the world must establish a new international security and development architecture as called for by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, in the tradition of the Peace of Westphalia. In order to put this forward, the Schiller Institute will hold an Internet conference on December 7-8 to discuss the principles on which it must be based.
This is our task. Impossible? Do you then, in your stubbornness, choose thermonuclear annihilation?
