We don’t know all of what was discussed between the CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund Kirill Dmitriev, who is a close associate of President Vladimir Putin, and Steven Witkoff and other representatives of the Trump Administration, over his just-concluded two-day White House visit. We do know that on two occasions in March, Dmitriev proposed collaboration with the United States on a joint mission to Mars. He said that the Russians could provide a “small nuclear power plant” for the American Mars Mission, planned for later in this decade. The Russians are also working on nuclear propulsion spacecraft, and are said to have the most advanced research program in this area in the world.
The Russia-U.S. resumption of relations—Dmitriev, for whom sanctions had to be lifted to allow him to travel here, is the highest-ranking Russian official to visit the U.S. since February 2022—is the top priority for the planet, in order to avoid thermonuclear war. The New York Times’ lengthy article, “The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine” makes it clear that the war against Russia, coordinated in large part from Wiesbaden, Germany, from April of 2022, and starting right after “Borish” Johnson’s April 9, 2022 “fly-in” destruction of the Ukraine-Russian negotiations for peace, was managed directly by NATO and the Biden Administration, including Ukraine’s launching of Western long-range missiles into Russia’s pre-2014 territory. What was done goes way beyond the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
Through these talks, sanity may return just in time, if they are not sabotaged. Through the bloody fog of wars (Yemen, Ukraine) and rumors of wars (Iran), through the bloody injustice of the ongoing mass murder in Gaza (as well as the persisting moral indifference to mass death in Congo, Sudan, etc.) the words of Dmitriev sound, if not poetic, at least reassuringly sane: “Whatever your politics—dialogue between the U.S.and Russia matters. It’s about building a more secure, more prosperous world for everyone.”
If only the American System of Physical Economy were still understood in the United States! An announced commitment to a crash program of full productive employment in advanced, energy-intensive technologies; massive projects, like the building of a national magnetically levitated train-based high-speed rail system for freight and passenger transport; a North American Water And Power Alliance, encompassing (without talk of annexing or invading) Canada and Northern Mexico; a 15-year U.S.-China-Russia crash program for “fifth generation” nuclear reactor production, ranging from small modular plants, to pebble-bed reactors, thorium plants, etc., and leading to fission-fusion commercially viable plants, thus laying the research and development preconditions for “unattainable” thermonuclear fusion; and a similar “Apollo program” Moon-Mars industrialization, involving, besides Russia, China and the United States, India, Japan, Brazil, South Africa, and all nations that wish to participate—that is the development basis for a new security architecture that could be humanity’s future. Once upon a time, before the casino economy, the drug economy, the virtual economy, and the two-bitcoin economy—in other words, when the American System of Physical Economy was still American—this would have been, or would have become, the front end of international diplomacy.
It can be so again. To get there, however, the threats must cease. The “hard cop” school of caveman negotiating must give way to something more uplifting than horse-trading at knife-point. Some may remember the 19th-century cartoon satirizing American manners, that showed two men at a dinner table, each with guns drawn at the other’s head, with people scattering to get out of the way. The caption read, “Pass the salt, please. “
The poet Friedrich Schiller observed in his poem, Die Hoffnung/Hope, that humanity is “born for that which is better. “ The May 24-25 Schiller Institute/ ICLC Conference, “A Beautiful Vision for Humanity in Times of Great Turbulence!” proceeds from that conviction. It will be an intercontinental Congress, modeled on the 1774-76 American Continental Congresses of 250 years ago that began the discussion of the principles that eventually resulted in the Declaration of Independence. This is not strange intellectual territory for the Schiller Institute, which used the American Declaration of Independence as the basis for its founding document, Declaration of the Inalienable Rights of Man, in 1984. Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche, who authored that Declaration, has also authored “Ten Principles for a New International Security and Development Architecture” as a guideline for how to apply the earlier standard of deliberation that produced the Declaration, the Federalist Papers and the United States Constitution to today’s even more urgent needs. To avoid the manipulations of the various and sundry British and other intelligence agencies presently attempting to induce the Trump Administration to decapitate itself, the hope to change the world through a beautiful vision, rather than through a desperate, self-defeating display of dubious power, is the mark of a true “warrior soul.” Inspiration, not coercion, is what humanity requires.
Fifty-seven years ago today, April 4, 1968, a great warrior soul, Martin Luther King, was assassinated. The day before, like Socrates, he delivered an extemporaneous address, one of America’s greatest. It was addressed to garbage workers, on strike after two of their number had been killed. Echol Cole and Robert Walker had both been crushed to death on the previous February 1 by a malfunctioning compactor in their truck, forced by rain to sit in the truck’s garbage bay, because, under segregation, they were legally prohibited from seeking shelter from the rain anywhere else.
King did not begin by speaking to the evil of their condition. The first thing he did, was to transport them above the garbage of the streets of Memphis, to the very roof of the universe itself. “Something is happening in Memphis; something is happening in our world. And you know, if I were standing at the beginning of time, with the possibility of taking a kind of general and panoramic view of the whole of human history up to now, and the Almighty said to me, ‘Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?’ I would take my mental flight by Egypt, and I would watch God’s children in their magnificent trek from the dark dungeons of Egypt through, or rather across the Red Sea, through the wilderness on toward the promised land. And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn’t stop there. I would move on by Greece and take my mind to Mount Olympus. And I would see Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides and Aristophanes assembled around the Parthenon. And I would watch them around the Parthenon as they discussed the great and eternal issues of reality. But I wouldn’t stop there.... “ This was the beginning of King’s last speech, delivered without notes, on a rain-swept night in Memphis, to a half-empty church.
“Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty and say, ‘if you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the 20th century, I will be happy.’ Now that’s a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around. That’s a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.” King made it clear, that of all the places in the universe that he would prefer to be, in all of time, it was Memphis, to give his life for garbage men, one day later.
It is such a beautiful vision of humanity, a vision of hope, rooted in human creativity and its expression in physical economy, that can breathe life into the dry bones of a world on the brink of arrogant self-destruction. That, not coercion, is the mark of the true warrior soul. Our war is not against flesh and blood, but against the decayed and dying axioms of empire. A new security and development architecture, achieved now, is humanity’s best hope, and may well prove the measure of our moral fitness to survive. Private citizen or President, it is only when we can recognize Kings in garbage men, or Christ in the Gaza rubble, that we will free ourselves, and our nations.
