Today’s weekly meeting of the International Peace Coalition took up, at a level appropriate to the gravity of the present moment, the question of religion, the meaning of universality, and the basis upon which any continuation of human civilization actually rests. The discussion was not abstract. This coming Tuesday, May 26, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi will chair the UN Security Council high-level debate on the UN Charter; two days after that he will convene the Group of Friends of Global Governance in New York; and over the same week, the convergent proposal that the LaRouche movement and the International Peace Coalition have placed before the world—former Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu’s regional security architecture combined with the LaRouche movement’s Extended Oasis Plan for the economic development of Southwest Asia—will reach the foreign ministers and diplomats of the world in a venue designed for serious work.
The basis upon which that proposal is offered is not a matter of geopolitical positioning. It is a matter of what man is. In his 1995 essay What Is God, That Man Is in His Image?, Lyndon LaRouche put the matter directly: “Thus, humanity is sacred: only because each individual human life’s sovereign creative potentiality is a sacred image of God. Except for that agapic quality universal to the sovereign mental potential of each human individual, no man nor woman would have any more lawful right than a beast. With that agapic quality of creativity comes love of God, love for mankind, and love for this world.”
That sentence describes the fundamental question on the table at the United Nations next week. The UN Charter—like the U.S. Constitution—was written in the recognition that the sovereign dignity of each human person is the only durable basis of international order. The war launched against Iran in February by the United States and Israel for the announced purpose of regime change rather than nonproliferation; the U.S. aircraft carrier arriving this week in the Caribbean amid grand-jury indictments of foreign heads of state and talk of a Shield of the Americas intervention; the draw-down of 9.9 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in a single week; the IEA Executive Director warning that world oil markets are entering “the red zone in July or August”; the Democratic National Committee releasing a 192-page autopsy of its 2024 loss without one mention of Gaza, Israel, or Palestine—these are not isolated symptoms. They are the visible expression of a civilization that has, for some time, organized its affairs in denial of the principle LaRouche named.
The convergence that took shape at the EIR Emergency Roundtable on May 15—Davutoğlu, Princeton’s Richard Falk, Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche, and their colleagues—has not stood idly by. Today’s IPC discussion was, in that sense, a preparation: the philosophical clarity required to carry a proposal that is not merely diplomatic but, in LaRouche’s term, agapic. The May 26 Security Council debate, the May 28 Group of Friends of Global Governance meeting, and Wang Yi’s bilateral meetings are crucial venues.
The work between now and Tuesday is to ensure that every foreign minister and diplomat who will be in New York understands not only what is being proposed, but the basis on which it is offered.
LaRouche concludes his article with a concept that resonates with what Dr. Abdullah al-Ahsan brought up at the IPC on the relationship between religion and civilization:
Once we are rid of the rule of the present oligarchical power, as might occur during the coming decade, freedom, although not paradise, is available for all mankind; the Age of Reason will begin.
This true freedom is not liberty for the evil Adam Smith’s immoral will, but rather the right to participate in lifting mankind to a higher condition, both through reliving the most crucial creative artistic and scientific discoveries of all mankind before us, but also the joy of adding to that stock of discoveries through the cultivation of our own creative-mental powers in this way. To live so, is to love this world too much to relinquish it easily, to love mankind even more, and to serve thus a loving God the Creator.
Without the God of Moses’ Genesis 1:25-30, and without the Christianity reawakened to life by the … 1440 Council of Florence, this would not have become possible. That, dear friends, is a scientific fact, the truth; the contrary is not truthful.
