It is urgent that we not forget, or allow to be forgotten, especially in this 250th year of the Declaration of Independence of the United States from the British Empire, that it is the adherence to the idea of empire—what imperialist Winston Churchill meant when he said, in a September, 1943 speech at Harvard University, “the empires of the future are the empire of the mind—” which could seal the very death of civilization itself. 500 years of colonial and imperial rule, with all of the supremacist practices that has entailed, is now at an end, one way or the other. The scheme to try to restore the “Lost Cause” of empire, by building a vast army of Anglicized robots and their sidekick AI “agents” to depopulate, and then take over the world —what one writer has termed “The Nerd Reich”—is the lunatic cover for the real threat:a near-term dive, driven either by strategic incompetence, or fanatical, pagan “Apocalypse Now” madness, perhaps inspired by an inevitable financial collapse, into thermonuclear World War Three.

Our present, disastrous “slouching toward Armageddon” is not being caused by “AI.” The mis-deployment of technological systems, including AI, is a product of the “beast-man” mentality that is associated with the Epstein class, the same “Hell-Fire Club” class against which the American Revolution was fought 250 years ago. As the real physical-economic effects of the disastrous two-front NATO war in Iran and Southwest Asia, on food, fuel and energy production and consumption worldwide, become more evident by the day, the “mantle of heaven” falls more rapidly from the spectacularly morally and financially bankrupt trans-Atlantic financial system.

In this transition, new leadership must emerge. Pope Leo XIV’s spirited intervention into France this past week, the apex of which was his open-air Sunday Mass of 800,000 gathered at the Place de La Concorde, the heart of the French Republic, began eight days ago last Friday. In his address two days before, the Pope warned French leaders, including Macron: “If we are to avoid losing our humanity amid a ‘paradise of machines’ invading and conditioning our daily lives, there is an urgent need for education in ethical discernment and the capacity to acknowledge the moral good.”  

With this in mind, Consider this passage from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speech at the Valdai Club, Thursday, October 1: “I would like to recount a story from the Soviet era – from the everyday reality of those years. It was September 1983. Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, an officer at a missile early-warning centre, was on duty when the system picked up a signal. Both we and the United States had long since had such systems in place and operational. The system detected the launch of five American intercontinental ballistic missiles. Any algorithm would have classified this as an unambiguous trigger for a retaliatory strike. Yet the experienced officer questioned the accuracy of the signal, suspecting a system malfunction. And he turned out to be right. Had artificial intelligence been in his place, things might have turned out very differently. To my mind, this is a very compelling example.”

Is Putin indirectly warning—not threatening, but warning—about the possibility of thermonuclear war? He also said at Valdai, with regard to a possible confrontation with NATO in Kaliningrad, “We are not threatening anyone. We are simply stating that we do not have all that many means of defending ourselves. And, incidentally, neither that letter nor the Foreign Ministry’s statement [on Kaliningrad] mentions the use of nuclear weapons.” Does President Putin have in mind the near-confrontation between the United States and China that  almost  took place this past Spring because of an hallucinating computer— as the title of an Intercept article put it, “AI Almost Started A U.S.- China War—And No One Seems To Care?"? Is he possibly thinking of the February 28 bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, killing 168, 100 of whom were children under 12 years old, for which Palantir’s Maven system is being blamed by many? Should the citizens of the United States and Europe, perhaps, more seriously consider what these things mean, and what they should do about them?

Friday’s meeting #174 of the International Peace Coalition consisted of an intensive, far-reaching discussion which should be reviewed by all those that would wish to not only have insight into how to address the “AI” problem, but also how to provide the “peace through economic development” solutions that can supplant the impulse toward planetary war. Representatives from America’s and Mexico’s farm sectors; the chair of the American branch of Priests Against Genocide; Larry Johnson of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS); and Jacques Cheminade, chairman of the Solidarity and Progress organization in France, joined Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp LaRouche, author of the Ten Principles For A New Security And Development Architecture, for a wide-ranging  discussion. The idea was to arrive at a higher understanding of thinking about policy problems that might at first seem “local,” but are in fact only resolvable from a higher, even universal approach.

For example, there was a discussion on addressing the “problem of immigration,” not by blaming the immigrants, but by first, recognizing the “paradox” that the nations of the world with the greatest “natural resources” always, somehow, have the poorest people, and second, by pursuing the physical-economic development of those nations in a just way. Through just, advanced economic development, such as the world has seen in China, where 800 million people were successfully taken out of poverty, people would not be forced to leave their homes, which they would prefer not to do, in order to survive by moving elsewhere. Such economic development is the immediate content of peace. Peace, as Pope Leo said in France, is not merely the absence of war, but the presence of the love of mankind, manifest in dialogue and the improvement of the social condition.

As for AI, it need not augur a New Age of a ‘trans-human cyber empire.” One analytic systems expert supplied this evaluation to EIR: “The central danger in reality is not science fiction. Humans built AI systems in which a language model was given objectives, tools, code execution, network pathways, credentials, substantial computing time, repeated opportunities to act, and in some evaluations, clearly reduced safeguards and constraints….. The durable rule should be simple. NO AI agent should possess more real world power than its human operators can observe, constrain, stop, explain, and answer for, unless the humans want it that way by design and intent and motivation!”

The “Magnifica Humanitas,” the grandeur of humanity, lies not in supremacy, but in the process of improving, as expressed in the “more perfect Union” idea of the Preamble of the Constitution of the United States, our harmony of interest, and connection with the entire human species. As Helga Zepp-LaRouche has said, “If we, as the human species, want to prevent this tumultuous transition period from ending up in a new world war, we have to replace geopolitical confrontation with a completely new paradigm, the vision of ONE humanity.” That is the real, not artificial, intelligence which we must show now, if we would be morally fit to survive.