This transcript appears in the December 2, 2022 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Print version of this transcript
Helga Zepp-LaRouche
This is the edited transcript of Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s Keynote Address to Panel 1, “Stopping the Doomsday Clock—The Common Good of the One Humanity,” of the Schiller Institute’s Nov. 22 conference, “For World Peace—Stop the Danger of Nuclear War: Third Seminar of Political and Social Leaders of the World.”
Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche is the founder and leader of the Schiller Institute. The full proceedings of the conference are available at the Schiller Institute website.
*Helga Zepp-LaRouche; Schiller Institute
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Let me greet you, wherever you may be.
What has brought people from all over the world together here in this conference, is the recognition that humanity is at a crossroad. There is clearly the danger that the present geopolitical confrontation—between those forces who want to assert that the Western liberal model of democracy is be the only good, and the only acceptable model, and those who insist that the idea of a unipolar world is irrevocably past and is already being replaced by a multipolar world order—could lead to a thermonuclear war.
Such a war could be ignited, by design or by accident, in the short term over the proxy war in Ukraine. Such a crisis could erupt before the end of the year, if the proposals made earlier this year by such people as Malcolm Chalmers, the Deputy Director-General of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), to “boil the Russian frog” by provoking a “Cuban Missile Crisis on steroids,” as he says, over a Ukrainian attempt to reconquer Crimea. Russia could view this as an existential threat, “putting its nuclear forces on higher alert” and threaten its use, says Chalmers. “This would be a moment of extreme peril,” he says. But, he adds: “Precisely because of the peril inherent in such a situation, a nuclear crisis of this sort could make it easier for leaders to make difficult compromises.”
To propose a policy which aims to drive the strategic conflict to the edge of the extinction of the human race does not even find a comment by the oh-so-good governments of the rules-based order, but, to argue with facts that the Russian intervention in Ukraine has a prehistory can, in the worst case, get you a jail sentence, according to a new law passed by the German Parliament on Oct. 20, with a change of Article 130 of the criminal code, paragraph 5.
Apparently in tune with this British perspective is Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister [Volodymyr] Havrylov, who just said in an interview with Sky News, “We can step in Crimea by the end of December” and emphasized about the retaking of Crimea, “It’s only a matter of time. Of course, we would like to make it sooner than later.”
The British seem to want to exceed themselves in creating world wars, as it was [former Prime Minister] Boris Johnson who personally made sure in April that the promise of ending the war through negotiations was sabotaged. Unfortunately it seems to be the majority of the trans-Atlantic security establishment, many of whom just met at the Halifax International Security Conference, who agree that the way to protect global democracy right now is with weapons and support for Ukraine’s battle against Russia, not talks, rejecting even the proposal of Gen. Mark Milley, Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, that it may now be the time for diplomacy.
It is this criminal policy of nuclear brinkmanship, which contains the danger of the annihilation of the entire human species in a global nuclear war and the nuclear winter that would follow. That nuclear brinkmanship is what makes every individual on Earth necessarily a world citizen who must take responsibility for the outcome of this present conjuncture of human history. We, therefore, want to catalyze an international movement of world citizens committed to creating a new international security and development architecture, which will take into account the interest of every single country on the planet. This concept of taking into consideration the interests of every country, was the principle of the [1648] Peace of Westphalia, which laid the basis for peace after 150 years of religious war in Europe. It represented the beginning of international law and laid the foundation for the UN Charter, which we need to uphold and reassert.
A True Image of Man’s Goodness
What are the fundamental principles on which such a new global security and development architecture must be built?
The absolute center for such a new architecture must be the image of man, about which all nations can agree. Man is differentiated from all other species by his gift of creative reason, that he or she is the only creature that can, again and again, discover new valid principles of the physical universe, and through the application of this scientific and technological progress in the production process, can increase the quality of life, longevity, and number of human beings living. It is that creative potential which makes human beings sacred.
The epoch which is coming to an end, is the period of the last approximately 600 years, which began with the emergence of the sovereign nation state, based on the writings of Nicholas of Cusa and the first sovereign nation state of Louis XI in France in the 15th century, being concerned for the first time with the common good of the people, and the opposition to this idea on the side of the Venetian Empire. For 600 years, there has been a continuous battle between those two forms of government, between the sovereign nation state and the oligarchical form of society, vacillating back and forth with sometimes a greater emphasis in this or that direction.
All empires based on the oligarchical model have been oriented towards protecting the privileges of the ruling elite, while trying to keep the masses of the population as backward as possible, because as sheep they are easier to control (and we will hear something about that a little later). It was considered “normal” to keep a certain portion of the people as slaves, or “helots,” who can be killed if they become too many, as [Friedrich] Schiller describes it in his writings about the laws of Solon and Lycurgus. It was that same oligarchical outlook, which was the basis of the ideology of Malthus, and the underlying assumption of all colonial policies, including in the modern forms of colonialism, of which President Sukarno had warned in his speech at the first Bandung conference in 1955.
Against this modern-day colonialism, there is now a powerful renaissance of the Non-Aligned Movement, which is working on a new economic system involving the BRICS-Plus, which more and more countries want to join, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), and other organizations of the Global South.
Christianity emerged during the Roman Empire and spread, for the first time in European civilization, the idea of the sacredness of each human person as in the image of the Creator, being gifted with that creative power, the vis creativa as Cusa calls it, which emanates from his or her likeness with the Creator. That same idea is also found in the other two monotheistic religions, Judaism and Islam, as well as secular humanism, Confucianism, and Indian philosophy and religion in the tradition of the Vedic writings. Echoes of this idea are found in other cultures.
Whenever currents emerged in these religions which deviated from the idea that all human beings are sacred, as in the Crusades and the Inquisition, that was always instrumentalized by the oligarchical elites for their own special purposes.
The new paradigm, which will be characteristic of the new epoch, and toward which the new global security and development architecture must be directed, therefore, must eliminate the concept of oligarchism for good, and proceed to organize the political order in such a way that the true character of humanity as the creative species can be realized.
Ten Principles To Discuss
Therefore, I suggest that the following principles must be discussed, and if agreed upon, be realized.
These ideas are meant to be food for thought and dialogue among all people concerned to find a basis for a world order guaranteeing the durable existence of the human species.
First: The new International Security and Development Architecture must be a partnership of perfectly sovereign nation states, based on the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence and the UN Charter.
Second: The absolute priority must be to alleviate poverty in every nation on the planet, which is easily possible, if existing technologies are used for the benefit of the common good.
Third: The life expectancy of all people must be prolonged to its fullest potential by creating modern health systems in every country on the planet. This is also the only way by which the present and future potential pandemics can be overcome or be prevented.
Fourth: Since mankind is the only creative species known so far in the universe, and given the fact that human creativity is the only source of wealth through the potentially limitless discovery of new universal principles, one of the main aims of the new International Security and Development Architecture must be providing access to universal education for every child and adult person living. The true nature of man is to become a beautiful soul, as Friedrich Schiller discusses this, and the only [kind of] person who can fulfill that condition is the genius.
Fifth: The international financial system must be reorganized, so that it can provide productive credit to accomplish these aims. Reference points can be the original Bretton Woods system, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt intended it, although Roosevelt’s intention was never fully implemented due to his untimely death, and the Four Laws proposed by Lyndon LaRouche. The primary aim of such a new credit system must be to increase dramatically living standards especially in the nations of the Global South and of the poor in the Global North.
Sixth: The new economic order must focus on creating the conditions for modern industries and agriculture, starting with the infrastructural development of all continents to eventually be connected by tunnels and bridges to become a World Land-Bridge.
Seventh: The new global security architecture must eliminate the concept of geopolitics by ending the division of the world into blocs. The security concerns of every sovereign nation must be taken into account. Nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction must immediately be banned. Through international cooperation, the means must be developed to make nuclear weapons technologically obsolete, as it was originally intended by the proposal which became known as the SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative), suggested by Lyndon LaRouche, and made as an offer to the Soviet Union by President Reagan.
Eighth: In former times, one civilization at one corner of the world could go under, and the rest of the world would only find out years later, due to the length of distances and the time needed for travel. Now, for the first time, because of nuclear weapons, pandemics, the internet, and other global effects, mankind is sitting in one boat. Therefore, a solution to the existential threat to humanity cannot be found with the help of secondary or partial arrangements; rather, the solution can only be found on the level of that higher One, which is more powerful than the Many. It requires the thinking on the level of the Coincidentia Oppositorum, the Coincidence of Opposites, of Nicholas of Cusa.
Ninth: In order to overcome the conflicts arising out of quarreling opinions, which is how empires have maintained control over their underlings, the economic, social and political order has to be brought into cohesion with the lawfulness of the physical universe. In European philosophy this was discussed as the being in character with natural law, in Indian philosophy as cosmology, and in other cultures appropriate notions can be found. Modern sciences such as space science, biophysics, and thermonuclear fusion science will continuously increase the knowledge of mankind about this lawfulness. A similar cohesion can be found in the great works of classical art in different cultures.
Tenth: The basic assumption for the new paradigm is, that man is fundamentally good, capable of infinitely perfecting the creativity of his mind and the beauty of his soul, and the most advanced geological force in the universe, which proves that the lawfulness of the mind and that of the physical universe are in correspondence and cohesion, and that all evil is the result of a lack of development, and therefore can be overcome.
A new world economic order is emerging, involving the vast majority of the countries of the Global South. The European nations and the U.S. must not fight this effort, but instead join hands with the developing countries, cooperating to shape the next epoch of the development of the human species to become a renaissance of the highest and most noble expressions of creativity!
Let us therefore create an international movement of World Citizens, who work together to shape the next phase in the evolution of mankind, the new epoch! World Citizens of all countries, unite!
