International LaRouche Youth Movement Statement in Support of South Africa

On Saturday, January 20, 2024, the Schiller Institute hosted an International Youth Dialogue to discuss the “10 Principles for A New Development and Security Architecture,” proposed by Schiller Institute Founder and President Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Over the course of the dialogue, youth leaders from nations across the globe discussed the historical and epistemological precedents of—as well as the required solutions for—the current, expanding world military and economic crisis, which now threatens to become a global, potentially thermonuclear, catastrophe.

The participants of that youth dialogue now release this statement of unequivocal solidarity with the application of South Africa in the International Court of Justice, which suit has unmistakably helped to bend the course of universal world history towards Justice.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche noted that, “According to Friedrich Schiller, the great German Poet of Freedom, after whom the Schiller Institute is named, there is no contradiction between being a patriot of your own country and thinking and acting as a world-citizen.”

We young women and men—from Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria, Togo, Tanzania, Germany, France, Nicaragua, Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, Argentina, El Salvador, Bangladesh, the U.S.A. and several other countries—affirm this elevated conception of patriotism, and recognize that it must be at the core of any substantial development towards international peace, in Southwest Asia and around the world.

Patriotism and world-citizenry combine in the dual invocation of both Nelson Mandela and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in South Africa’s application. South Africa did not take up its suit as merely an “exceptional” country ready to use its “forces” in order to “police” its cousin Israel. Rather, in the spirit of 1776, South Africa raised its voice as one sovereign nation among many. In the redemptive dimension of its particular history, South Africa represents the species-characteristic capacity of the whole of humanity: the capacity for progressive perfection through moral, cultural and economic development.

Having the sublime courage not to deny its own history of legalized injustice, and accepting the heavy responsibility of its accession to the 1948 Genocide Convention, South Africa has swiftly demonstrated to the world, through the universality of its individual intention, how One can become Many and Many become One; in so doing, South Africa has triumphed over the “logic” of permanent war, through the power of Reason and agapic Love.

In 1963, King warned the United States of an impending “spiritual death,” the result of “this business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane.” King’s warning was given new form by Pope John Paul II, in 1987, when he wrote of “a world which is divided into blocs, sustained by rigid ideologies, and in which instead of interdependence and solidarity different forms of imperialism hold sway.” Pope John Paul II called this “a world subject to structures of sin.”

The illusory power of these “structures of sin” has been radically challenged by the moral authority of South Africa’s suit, confirming Mandela’s statement that “the march towards freedom and justice is irreversible.”

With the aid of South Africa’s moral guidance, we refuse—as King refused—to be “mesmerized by uncertainty.”

We soberly reaffirm Mandela’s imperative:

“Let each one of you and all of our people, give the enemies of peace and liberty no space to take us back to the dark hell of apartheid. It is only disciplined mass action that assures us of the victory we seek. Go back to your factories, schools, mines, and communities; build on the massive energies that recent events in our country have released by strengthening disciplined mass organization. We are going forward.”

Transcript of Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s introductory remarks

The following is an edited transcript of Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s introductory remarks to an online Schiller Institute International Youth Conference, Jan. 20, 2024.

Hello; let me first of all greet all of you. It is really a big joy to talk to young people from over 20 countries, because right now we are in the most incredible moment in history ever. I know you can say that for many moments of history, but I think we have never been at a time where, on the one side, the dangers to the very existence of mankind have never been so great, but, at the same time, it is also a very joyful and hopeful moment, because we are in a transformation in which one system—the old neo-liberal order, the so-called rules-based order—is clearly failing. We are seeing the emergence of a completely new paradigm which promises to become a much better basis for the relations among countries internationally.

Let me first speak a little bit about what to do about this war danger. The fact is, that, because you have the collapse of the neo-liberal order, those forces that want to keep a unipolar world, or at least a world in which the old system of the rules-based order keeps dominance over the rest of the world—that clearly is not working. We indeed have the danger that the present crises which we see in Ukraine and very emphatically in Southwest Asia, both unfortunately have the potential of getting out of control and, in the worst case, becoming a global nuclear war. If it would come to that—and we must do everything possible to prevent it—it would mean the annihilation of civilization. Because once you have the exchange of nuclear weapons—and I completely refute the idea that something like a tactical, regional nuclear war is possible. Because it is the logic of nuclear war that once one nuclear weapon is used, the likelihood that the entire arsenal of all nuclear forces will be unloaded is extremely high. That would mean that, following such a nuclear exchange, there would be a nuclear winter of about a minimum of ten years, in which all life on Earth would die because of a lack of sun, a lack of food. So, this is why I think the young people, you who have your entire life hopefully ahead of you, have to have a stronger voice in making clear that the powers that be stop a course which is so threatening to the very existence of humanity. 

Therefore, what the Schiller Institute has been trying to do since the war danger has become so absolutely acute—essentially since the war in Ukraine started—we have emphasized very much that we have to teach people in every country on the planet to think about the one mankind first, before thinking about any particular national interest. To think about the one humanity is not a contradiction to being a good patriot, because, according to Friedrich Schiller, for whom the Schiller Institute is named—the great German poet of freedom—there is no contradiction between being a patriot of your own country and thinking and acting as a world citizen.

Now, I have coined a slogan, “World Citizens of All Countries, Unite!” Some of you who are familiar with Karl Marx may remember that he coined the notion “Proletarians of All Countries, Unite!” Since I have the privilege to have been born in the same city as Karl Marx, the oldest city in Germany, Trier, I have just changed that into “World Citizens of All Countries, Unite!” That is not just a slogan. I believe that as we see the tendency of the Global Majority becoming more prominent, we are also in an era in which, while sovereignty is extremely important and will be important for quite some time to come, nevertheless we are already in a period in which you can see that there will come a time in history where nations will be less important. They will not disappear, because culture, language, tradition, art will always play a very important role, but we for sure as a human species will eventually reach an identity that makes us much more conscious of being the one humanity. I will return to that later on.

There is also one philosophical foundation upon which one can think [about] the one humanity; it’s a philosophical method which has been developed by one of my favorite philosophers, Nicolaus of Kues, who was the founder of modern science in Europe, the founder of the sovereign nation-state. He lived in the 15th Century. He developed a method of thinking which he called the Coincidentia Oppositorum, the Coincidence of Opposites. The main idea behind that, is that the human mind, empowered with creative reason, can always think of the higher one than the many. Nicolaus of Cusa was a Cardinal in the Catholic Church and the Foreign Minister of the Vatican of his time. He arrived at this idea from theological considerations; that the one God has more power than all the many He created. But it’s also something you can access if you are not religious, because in mathematics you have also the idea that there can be always a mathematical power which has more power than the many. I think that that is very helpful, and we should discuss this maybe in the discussion period. It’s a very helpful device, especially in a world where you have some people saying, “America first!” Other people say, “My country is the chosen country.” I, coming from Germany, in the meantime am extremely reluctant whenever somebody says, “My country is the best,” because we in Germany did not have such great experiences with that.

But to come at this consideration of thinking about the interest of the one humanity first, I think, is of existential importance when it comes to the danger of nuclear war. Right now, we are in a situation where many people in the West are talking about the coming inevitable war with Russia, with China. You have people in Sweden, Finland, Germany who are saying the war with Russia will come in two years, in three years, on Swedish territory. Just yesterday, the head of the Military Committee of NATO, Admiral Rob Bauer, said that, in NATO, we must have a red alert because of the coming inevitable war with Russia. I think this is obviously propaganda; it’s a narrative, because there is no inevitable danger of a war with Russia. If you look at the reason why people are saying this, it has nothing to do with the actual behavior of Russia or China. It has a lot to do with geopolitics.

If you ask yourself, “How did we come to a situation where the danger of nuclear war is being earnestly discussed, like the head of NATO saying that, or one of the heads of NATO. You have to take it back—and you could take it back a lot longer—but I want to take it back to the end of the so-called Cold War. This was 1989-91, the period of German unification when the Soviet Union disintegrated. At that time, we already were extremely active as the LaRouche Movement, the Schiller Institute, because we had a clear conception, and when the Soviet Union disintegrated, we proposed the Eurasian Landbridge as the basis for a peace order, uniting Europe and Asia through development corridors, which we already called at that time The New Silk Road. That would have been an absolutely realizable conception, because there was no more “enemy”; the communism of the Soviet Union had just disappeared. It would have been possible to at least design a European common house, as [Soviet President Mikhail] Gorbachev at the time talked about. I will spare you the many aspects of it, but the reality was that our proposal was rejected, because, in the United States and Great Britain, you had the neo-cons, who said, “Oh, wonderful! The Soviet Union is no longer there, now we have won the Cold War, and we can establish a unipolar world, where only we are the dominant power.” There was one fellow in particular who designed this, [Paul] Wolfowitz, one of the defense experts of the United States. He coined the Wolfowitz Doctrine, which was the idea that, now that the West supposedly had won the Cold War, the United States would not allow any other country or group of countries to ever bypass the United States economically, socially, militarily, or otherwise. Unfortunately, that policy went into effect. At that time you had an American historian named [Francis] Fukuyama, who said that this was the end of history. What [these circles] meant by that, was that, given the fact that communism supposedly had failed, the whole world would adopt the neo-liberal economic model and the liberal model of social policy. They basically said, that will mean there will be no more war, there will be the end of history.

The Pope at that time, John Paul II, warned that the West had not won, because the whole world was still under the rule of the structures of sin; that the structures of sin did not only exist in the Soviet Union, but they also existed in the West. The Pope said, if you don’t believe it, look at the condition of the Third World to see the under-development, the poverty that these structures of sin still rule.

In the beginning of the 1990s, there was no Russia being an enemy, because [Russian] President Yeltsin, who completely implemented the neo-liberal policies, the liberal economic reforms, did exactly what the Western oligarchy wanted from him. So, there was no problem from their standpoint with Russia—except that the demographic curve of Russia collapsed by one million per year, and the Russian economist Sergei Glazyev called that genocide, because the intention was to reduce the Russian population, ruin Russia already then, under the guise of liberal policies. 

China was not an enemy, either, because China was still developing, having made already incredible progress, but it was not yet anywhere near challenging the United States. But then, China became a member of the  [World Trade Organization] WTO, which the Western forces had invited China to join. They did so, because they thought that once China was part of the WTO, they would also adopt the liberal model and become part of “us.” 

That all started to change when [Russian President Vladimir] Putin came to replace Yeltsin, because Putin was determined to undo the liberal reforms, re-establish Russia as a global power, which, under Yeltsin, had basically collapsed. Then they started to say, Putin is really an enemy. And naturally, when China became part of the WTO, it really meant that China all of a sudden had access to all the advanced technologies of the West. It started a big jump in productivity in lifting altogether 850 million people out of poverty in China, which was an incredible civilizational contribution. But eventually, China did not adopt the liberal model of the West, but to the contrary, China turned back to its 5000-year cultural tradition. The Chinese called this “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Naturally, then China was making incredible motion forward. Finally, in 2013, China felt economically strong enough—it had tried earlier, but not succeeded—to offer the rest of the world to participate in the Chinese model. This was when President Xi Jinping, in Kazakhstan, announced the Belt and Road Initiative. Then, the economic development started to spread from China. They offered many economic cooperation agreements with the countries in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. By about 2017, the West really started to treat China as an adversary.

We observed this very closely, because we had our own plan for a World Landbridge, for a Eurasian Landbridge extending into all continents, which we published in 2014 as a book called The New Silk Road Becomes the World Landbridge. We were quite surprised that, for the first four years, there was almost no coverage about the New Silk Road in the Western media. But then, at the end of 2017, all the security papers [strategic reports and analyses—ed.]—of the US first, and then all the European allies—started to treat China as an adversary, as a competitor, but also more and more as a threat.

The effort to maintain the unipolar world was expressed by, among other things,  altogether five eastward extensions of NATO. While the West had promised that NATO would not move an inch to the east after the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO moved 1000 kilometers to the east; closer and closer to the borders of Russia. In 2014, the Western powers made the Maidan coup, which was a fascist coup financed by—among others—the US State Department for $5 billion. This was admitted to by [then Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs] Victoria Nuland. The idea was that NATO would extend into Ukraine. From the standpoint of the security interests of Russia, this was unacceptable, because it would be like during the Cuban Missile Crisis [in 1962], when the Soviet Union brought their missiles, which were nuclear-armed, to Cuba. It came to a similar crisis. It should be obvious to anybody that, if NATO is trying to do the same thing the other way around by bringing offensive weapons systems to the border of Russia, this would be a reverse Cuban Missile Crisis. This is when the war in Ukraine really started; it started actually in 2014.

After that, the sanctions regime against Russia became more brutal all the time. Eventually, this even led to the weaponization of the dollar after Russia’s special military operation had started on February 24, 2022. At that point, we entered the present showdown phase of the situation. The Western democracies—and I almost have to put the word democracies in quotations—tried all the time to pull the majority of the Global South countries of Africa, Latin America, and Asia into the camp of the so-called democracies. But the countries of the Global South looked at this whole situation, and, since they had been the victims of colonialism for almost 600 years, they did not buy the narrative put out by the US and European media. They refused to take the side of the West, basically insisting they would remain neutral. From that time, there was an absolute explosion in the tradition and memory of the Non-Aligned Movement. The spirit of Bandung, the first Afro-Asian conference of 1955, came back with a vengeance, one can say. The countries of the Global South more and more were being encouraged by China, because they had for the first time an alternative for development. For all these years before, the West had not given them credit to build infrastructure. Why did the Europeans not, in the years after the Second World War, give them long-term, low-interest credits to build infrastructure—ports, railways, industrial parks? They did not. Instead, they had the IMF conditionalities, which meant that the so-called Third World countries would have to spend the money they made from exporting raw materials, not to invest in health systems, not to invest in infrastructure, but to pay their debt to the banks of the Paris Club first.

So, therefore, what then happened is that the Global South became stronger and stronger; the countries of the BRICS—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—became more active. Eventually, at the end of last year, in the BRICS summit in Johannesburg, they decided to become the BRICS+. From January 1st of this year, it’s the BRICS-10. Ethiopia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia (which is in the process of becoming a member), the Emirates, and Iran are all members of the BRICS. And about 30–40 more countries have already applied to become part of the new economic system, which is also intending to create a new reserve currency, to have their own economic system. After the weaponization of the dollar, when the US and European banks confiscated about $300 billion of Russian assets, and $9.5 billion of Afghanistan assets, these countries started to think maybe it’s not such a safe thing to have your assets in dollars; maybe we should have trade in our own currencies—rupees, reals, rubles, and others. 

Basically, that is where we are right now, because this year Russia has the chairmanship of the BRICS+, and I absolutely expect that in the present situation the BRICS will make a gigantic step forward to become a new economic system. This is a system which is very different than the so-called rules-based order, because they do not have a secretariat, they do not have a common policy they want to impose on the rest of the world, but among them, they respect each other’s sovereignty, the different social systems, that every country can choose their own path for development.

I think there has to be another point in the picture. With the recent suit by South Africa against Israel for committing genocide in Gaza, this is a world-historic event, because, as it has been stated by many people, how can you deny that there is genocide going on in Gaza when the TV stations of the whole world are streaming live what is going on in Gaza every day? When you seal off a tiny strip of land, and you make sure that for three-plus months no food, no electricity, no medicine, no water is coming in, and even the United Nations is saying that it is expected that the number of people dying from disease as a result of this will be much higher than the number of those who will have died from the bombings, the intent is very clear. So, at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, the South African government presented this case with 84 pages documenting what is going on in Gaza. I watched the first three hours of the presentation and some of the second three hours. I have never seen such an airtight legal argument, not only showing the dimension of the humanitarian crisis, but also the clear intent. When you have all the top officials of Israel talking about the Amalek, talking about animals, that nobody should survive, and then seeing the soldiers dancing in a frenzy— Anyway, I think the significance of this is historic, because it proves that the country of South Africa, which went through apartheid and overcame a system of racism of the worst kind, has taken the leadership for the whole world, while the West, those countries with the so-called high moral standard talking about democracy and human rights, when confronted with this incredible situation in Gaza, are covering up and not bringing it to the ICJ. It was South Africa which saved the honor of humanity. That is symptomatic of the kind of change we are seeing in the world right now. I think this will have reverberations, because the whole Global Majority is siding with South Africa. And I’m very sad to say that Germany took the wrong side in this battle by siding with the United States and Israel, with the mistaken argument that, because Germany committed a genocide more than 80 years ago, that we have to stand by the side of Israel, no matter what they do. This is a wrong idea, and I’m very saddened by it. Hopefully, we can remedy it.

I hope we can remedy it, because there is something positive to be reported from Germany. That is that—actually, almost unexpectedly—a couple of weeks ago, the German farmers started to take to the streets to protest against cuts in their various budgets and subsidies for fuel which threaten to bankrupt them. They are now on the streets; they had on one day more than 100,000 tractors out. They basically blocked all the main highways. They had one full week of demonstrations, and it is not stopping. They are now uniting with the truckers, who are also protesting, as well as many other segments of the population also supporting them, because their own existence is at stake as well. The bakers, the restaurant owners, other categories. Hopefully, the industrialists will realize they are in a similar position, because this present neo-liberal system is threatening Germany to crash completely against the wall.

Now, let me make another point. I think what we see right now with the fight of the German farmers and the fight of the Global South, is actually the same fight. Now, that may not be apparent to people in Bavaria or people in Somalia; they may not look at it this way. But actually, if you really understand what is going on, it is the same fight. Because, what are the countries of the Global South fighting against? They are fighting against a system of control of the terms of trade. They are now demanding that every country of the developing sector has the right, not only to develop their own resources, but to increase the production chain, the value chain in their own countries by developing industry, agriculture, infrastructure, building new cities, going into new areas of science and technology. In other words, becoming a middle-income country in the near future. Who is trying to block that? It’s the institutions of finance, of Wall Street, the City of London, it’s the military-industrial complex of the North, of NATO, and the food cartels. If you look at the charts of who are the powers that be in Wall Street, in the City of London, and other financial centers, these complexes finance military-industrial and food cartels and reinsurance companies. They are so interwoven that you cannot separate them one iota.

Therefore, the farmers who are fighting against these same cartels and the developing countries are fighting against that same thing. They have much more in common than meets the eye. One of the things we want to accomplish is to match these two powerful motions to become one, because the only way, in my view, to get out of this crisis, is by uniting the people of Europe and the United States with the people of the Global South. I cannot see any other solution, because that is the one New Paradigm we have to accomplish. We have to come to this New Paradigm by ending the 600 years of colonial rule for the Global South. 

Let me quickly introduce my Ten Principles, because about two years ago, I started to suggest a new security and development architecture which has to replace the present geopolitical order. I would like if some of you have thought about it already, that we discuss how to actually put such a new security order on the table. The Ten Principles which I proposed: First of all, the absolute sovereignty of every country needs to be respected. There must the absolute eradication of poverty on the whole planet. A universal health system in every country; universal education for every newborn child and adult. A credit system which can finance that. A World Landbridge to bring infrastructure to all corners of the planet. And then three philosophical ideas—namely, this method of the Coincidence of Opposites as a method of solving problems, and the discussion of how to find out the truth. How do you differentiate between opinion and narrative, and the actual truth? And there is a method which natural science gives us right now as a way of indeed finding the truth and the effect of ideas in the physical universe. And finally, the discussion about the image of man; that man is good by nature. That is not too long a discussion, but we can come back to it in the Q&A. 

Let me introduce one other train of thought. That is, I want to encourage all of you, and actually excite you and interest you to study the ideas of my late husband, Lyndon LaRouche. Because the fact that our movement exists at all is a miracle. We were supposed to be smashed and not exist, eradicated from the face of the Earth. Why? Because Lyndon LaRouche had developed a method of thinking which is the way to set people free. It’s how to unleash your own creativity and to give you the key that actually almost everybody can become a genius; however, it requires a certain amount of industriousness, it’s not falling like manna from heaven. But it does require work. 

Let me give you a couple of ideas of why I’m saying that. Our movement is based on the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche, who developed a method of thinking which is based on physical economy, it’s based on a method of identifying the axioms of thinking, not just going by what people say, but immediately looking at it analytically. Identify the axioms and assumptions on which certain statements are made. That way, you find an unmistaken key to every area of knowledge. That method of thinking enabled him to already make a prognosis about the present situation today, where we have a systemic collapse of the neo-liberal order. He already identified that in 1971, when President Nixon decoupled the dollar from the gold standard and introduced floating exchange rates. He recognized that the taking down of the old Bretton Woods system—the credit system which was established in the postwar period—and replacing it with a system which was entirely oriented towards profit maximization and therefore the disrespect for the common interest of the general population, would lead inevitably to a new depression, a new fascism, and the danger of a new nuclear war, unless you would replace this system with a completely different economic order. 

I can only encourage you to look into the writings of what we have published in the last 50 years to see how absolutely accurate he was in predicting every turn of the present financial system to the worse. Many newspapers and liberal economists had insisted that no economist could ever know that the world financial system would enter the present crisis. We can prove that that is not true, because all the steps which occurred, he identified with absolute precision. The reason why the United States economy is in such a poor condition, except for its military-industrial complex, is because they did the out-sourcing of their production to cheap labor markets. They shifted from an orientation of the common good to a shareholder-value society. They changed from having full-chain production in your own country; they changed to the just-in-time mode. They went more and more to the idea that money makes money, which ended up in the derivatives trade, which now amounts to $2 quadrillion in outstanding derivatives contracts, which are unpayable. That is why we are right now in danger of a total collapse of the financial system.

LaRouche’s method of thinking is very much associated with understanding what is it that moves society forward. What is the source of wealth? Namely, that is entirely the creative powers of the individual which are able again and again to come up with new ideas, identifying qualitative breakthroughs in science, in great art; identifying principles which give us new insight in how the physical universe works. When we apply these principles in the production process, it leads to an increase of the productivity of the people, of the industrial capacity, and the productivity in general, leading to an increase in physical wealth again and again. So, it is not the possession of raw materials; it is not the control of the terms of trade—what the free market economists are saying. It is entirely the ability of the human mind to use its creative powers to make discoveries of physical principles, qualitatively new principles. Then applying them in production and in this way increase the power of man over nature and over the universe. That is the right which has been denied to the developing countries until the recent struggle, in which the Global South is insisting that you have to apply your innate right to apply this principle to your own economies.

This is basically associated with the image of man. The ecologists are trying to convince people that man is a parasite; that man is a burden to nature. Some even go so far as to say that women should not have children anymore, because every newborn child is a burden to nature. There are books like that in Germany and the US. Some other people are saying that man is only the steward of nature, and should phase in not being different than the other species; that even plants have an equal right to human beings. I think this is a fundamentally wrong conception, and Lyndon LaRouche, already very early in his creative work, which lasted, actually, I would say eight decades—that’s about right—very early on, he recognized the importance of space travel. This is very important for the young people today, because we have a huge cultural crisis. There are studies everywhere that young people have a concentration span like a grasshopper; they are married to their electronic devices, and are increasingly incapable of interacting socially; and thinking about a year in their own life which is not located in the here and now. 

Lyndon LaRouche made many speeches about why it is so important to lift the eyes and the mind to the stars and start to think about space science, space travel. The obvious fact which everybody who starts to look into it is aware of, is that our planet Earth will not be livable forever. Because of certain processes in the galaxy and the cycle of Milky Way, sometime in about 2 billion years, our planet will not be so livable anymore. We have to think about expanding in the universe at large. This poses all the right challenges. Just yesterday, the Japanese landed an object on the Moon; it may not function perfectly, but they are now the fifth nation to do so. It is very clear that our present phase of space exploration is just in the baby shoes. Think about two, three, four generations from now, that the idea once we conquer different fuels for space travel, like fusion for example, the travel time to Mars and other planets will become much shorter. Therefore, it will be much more realistic that we explore nearby space. The moment we leave Earth, we are leaving the gravity zone of Earth, and therefore we are entering a relativistic space and time. That completely changes the kinds of physical laws we have to deal with, which Einstein enabled us to even think about. And even before, [Arab philosopher and physician (980–1037)] Ibn Sina had similar ideas, but that’s a different discussion.

If you think about the fact that we, with our lives, not only have to solve the problems of the present transformation of an old order, which is still colonial, into a New Paradigm where the one humanity will be the first consideration. Later, when we think about space travel, the concept of one humanity will become much more obvious. We should not think about who controls the Moon or other such silly headlines you can read these days, or who will weaponize space to better conduct war on Earth from space. No, this comes to the very question of the identity, of who are we in the universe? When you look, for example, at what the Hubble Telescope found, or now the James Webb Telescope, there are at least two trillion galaxies. This, for me, is one of the most mind-boggling ideas. When you look up to the stars, and you think there are so many stars. But this is just a tiny tip of the iceberg. Two trillion galaxies—we are just at the very beginning of exploring what the universe is all about; how it functions, and how we can maintain the existence of the human species in an immortal way.

Obviously, each of us is mortal. We are born, and we die. And the short span between these two occurrences, most people are wasting it, because, before they even get to the idea that they could contribute something lasting with their life, they become old and senile and they have missed the opportunity to do so. But, the reality is, that once you understand that our identity as human beings is not limited to our biological existence, but that when we truly develop our creative potential and contribute some knowledge to the existing body of knowledge of mankind as a whole, and in this way increase the ability of mankind for a durable existence, this exists even after we are dead. In this way, we are creating immortal ideas in science, in art, that we contribute to the immortality of the human species at large, but also participate in that immortality if we produce such valid ideas.

I have an absolutely optimistic view about the future of mankind, because I think that once we create a world where geopolitical confrontation is overcome by the idea that we have new relations among nations respecting the other and bringing forward the best traditions; that we have a dialogue of civilizations and cultures where each nation and each civilization actualizes the best they have ever produced in terms of culture, poetry, science, all the beautiful things people in past generations have produced; and we enter a dialogue with the other nations to bring forward the best they ever have produced, then we will really grow up. The present situation in the world I always compare with four-year old boys. I have a horror of those four-year old boys, because they tend to kick each other. We, as nations, should not behave like four-year old boys. When we develop our creativity in the way I was trying to convey before, relating to the creative potential of the other person, the other nation, and vice versa, we will enter the age of adulthood of mankind. There is absolutely no limit to what we can accomplish as the only creative species known in the universe so far.

I think that is where we are, on the verge of reaching this. This is why I’m saying this is the most exciting moment in history. While the danger of complete extinction in a nuclear war has never existed as now, at the same time, if we overcome this present difficulty—because in the long arc of history, it’s not more than a difficulty—and actually truly realize what we are as a creative species, I think that we will enter a period of a new renaissance which will be much more human and much more beautiful than anything we have experienced so far. And I want to invite you to be part of it, and think about yourself as shaping it, of not just sitting there watching how it develops. Become an active part in making our world more human, more livable, and more beautiful. Thank you.

This report was prepared by an EIR Research Team · December 22, 2023

Taxpayers in the United States and NATO nations support vast sums of money thrown away annually to the military-industrial-financial complex, for economic waste and physical destruction. This provides a tremendous bonanza to four Wall Street financial giants and banks that are the dominant stockholders of all the biggest war producers, and the ones driving the perpetual wars to maintain their bankrupt financial system with its $2 quadrillion speculative bubble. They are picking your pocket to fund the wars, and keep their bubble alive – and they are engaging in genocide and population wars.

In the U.S., the defense budget was $858 billion in 2023, and it is rapidly heading towards $1 trillion per year. Meanwhile our highways and railroads, our bridges and tunnels, our hospitals and schools are crumbling. And the rest of the world also desperately needs American technology and capital goods to help their development, working with China and Russia, rather than driving the planet towards World War III against them.

Here’s the face of the enemy of mankind, the modern-day Military-Financial Complex:

They Are Owned by Wall Street Speculators

They Are Addicted to Blood Money For Wars

Those Resources Should Be Used For People, Not Wars

Related Material

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Eisenhower’s 1953 ‘Chance for Peace’ — War Producers Can Retool for Humanity · by Richard Freeman and John Scialdone

Join the initiatives of Helga Zepp-LaRouche and the Schiller Institute to urgently mobilize for an immediate ceasefire, a comprehensive Middle East peace conference, a two-state solution, and the implementation of LaRouche’s Oasis Plan.

A series of diplomatic meetings occurred yesterday, with more scheduled for today and the coming days ahead, of leaders seeking a strategy to find an exit from the vicious cycle of violence, which did not begin on October 7, but has proceeded continuously since the British left Palestine in 1948. An agreement for an extended ceasefire is a crucial first step, which could be enforced by the U.S., which would be supported by most nations.

A two-day extension of the “Humanitarian Pause“ was announced Monday evening, Nov. 27, thereby extending the pause until Thursday morning, Nov. 30. The question lingering in front of the world, however, remains: Can this temporary pause be turned into a real, lasting peace? And what’s required to actually achieve that?

Nov. 29 will see the convening of a high-level meeting of United Nations Security Council in New York, to be specially chaired by China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi. In addition, members of the Arab League and Organization for Islamic Cooperation (OIC), whose foreign ministers have recently visited most members of the Security Council, will be in attendance, likely making the event another step forward in the flurry of global diplomatic activity underway.

In discussion with associates on Nov 27, Helga Zepp-LaRouche reminded people that this conflict in Gaza, as with the war in Ukraine, are pawns of today’s reigning unipolar world order, and are thus being pushed in ways to further a much larger geopolitical agenda. This is also why it is so dangerous, because as the system continues to collapse before the eyes of the world, there are some who are willing to go to the end of the Earth to maintain their control—even if that includes world war.

Therefore, the United States and other Western nations must be brought to see other nations, particularly rising powers such as Russia and China, not as threats to “our system” but as allies in an effort to improve the whole world. Those who are stuck in a geopolitical confrontation are like “robots,” Zepp-LaRouche said, “they have no idea of culture nor of justice,” and they have no respect for the cultures of other nations.

“It is high time that the United States goes back to its foreign policy of John Quincy Adams, and that Europe likewise really starts to overcome the remnants of colonialism,” she continued. These underlying axioms are the biggest obstacle for Western societies’ ability to see a solution out of this crisis, Zepp-LaRouche said: “They do not really take into consideration the fact that the Global South has a fundamental right to overcome poverty, and that their decision, which was reinforced by China’s rise and the economic power of China … that they have the absolute right to control their own resources, increase the value chain in their own countries by reprocessing and the creation of semi-finished and finished products, and by building up real, full-fledged economies in their own country to increase the living standard of the entire population.”

Therefore, the way to shift the world today is to “get Europe and the United States to really understand that cooperation with the Global South, and not confrontation, is the easy way to get out of this whole war danger and establish a new paradigm among the nations of the world.”

The principles that are the key to mutual security based on common economic development were exemplified by Lyndon LaRouche in his Oasis Plan. These principles can be applied globally within the framework of a New Security and Development Architecture and the underlying Ten Principles of Helga Zepp-LaRouche.

Join the Schiller Institute in these crucial days and help build a mass movement for peace through development.

Speakers

• Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Founder and Chairwoman, Schiller institute
• Ray McGovern, co-founder, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
• Questions and Answers

A Nov. 5 article titled “Israel Minister Suspended after Calling Nuking Gaza an Option” Politico reported that “Israel’s Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu was suspended indefinitely after he said in an interview that dropping a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip was ‘one of the possibilities,’ the government announced on Sunday.”

It would be supremely irresponsible to {not} take this threat seriously. Already, between 25,000 and 30,000 tons of bombs have been detonated by the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza since October 7. This far exceeds the bomb tonnage dropped in the most lethal air raids of the Second World War, including Hamburg (4 raids, 9,000 tons) Dresden(4 raids, 3900 tons) and Tokyo (1,665 tons.) War crimes are afoot.

Türkiye’s Anadolou Agency reported October 12 that “The Israeli Air Force (IAF) said …that it has dropped ‘about 6,000 bombs against Hamas targets’ in Gaza since Saturday’s attack, which nearly matches the number of bombs the US used in Afghanistan in one year. The Washington Post, citing Marc Garlasco, a military adviser at the Dutch organization PAX for Peace, reported that Israel is ‘dropping in less than a week what the US was dropping in Afghanistan in a year, in a much smaller, much more densely populated area, where mistakes are going to be magnified.’” War crimes are afoot.

Has the 1930s era of publicly advocated and justified war crimes returned? Has the decision been made, contrary to ratified UN resolutions, to the 1993 Oslo Accords, to the Geneva Conventions and the Nuremberg code—as well as to the “mutually assured destruction” of thermonuclear weapons—to reintroduce mass murder in warfare as a “legitimate” practice?

“According to the Gazan Ministry of Health, as of Nov 7, 2023, 10,328 people in the Gaza Strip have been killed, including 4237 children, 2719 women, and 631 older people. In addition, 25,956 people have been injured and 2450 are missing, including 1350 children, mostly covered by some of the 262,000 damaged housing units. So far, 192 medical staff have been killed,”reported the Nov.17 edition of the British medical journal, The Lancet. These deaths—real people with real aspirations, not “collateral damage”—cannot be either necessary, right, or justified.

Consider a recent interview given to the BBC by senior British MP and Secretary of State for Defence Grant Shapps, when asked if he believes Israel is acting disproportionately in its military actions against Gaza: “I think it’s kind of forgotten that in war, very sadly, people lose their lives. When Britain bombed Dresden, 35,000 people apparently lost their lives. People die in war.” Then, recall the infamous statement reported by correspondent Peter Arnett on February 7, 1968, regarding the American bombing of the Vietnamese village of Ben Tre: “‘It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,’ a U.S. major said Wednesday….. regardless of civilian casualties, they must bomb and shell the once placid river city of 35,000 to rout the Viet Cong forces.” Same war crimes, different country, different decade, different people, different “unassailable righteous cause.” Are we all going to stand for this all over again?

When, in 1962, U.S. President John F. Kennedy was pressured by hardliners within his own administration to launch a military invasion of Cuba “ in defense of America,” after the Soviet Union had placed ballistic missiles there—missiles which, unknown to Americans at the time, were armed with nuclear warheads—he refused, and saved the world from nuclear war, perhaps at the cost of his own life. Like Israel’s prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated November 4,1995 by Israeli extremists that opposed Rabin’s “Oslo Accords”collaboration with Yassr Arafat for peace in Gaza and the West Bank, JFK had the courage to change America’s axioms. In his June 10, 1963 American University speech, he proposed this:”Let us examine our attitude toward peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable – that mankind is doomed – that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not except that view. Our problems are man-made – therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.”

On November 26, at 11 a.m. EST, International Peace Coalition members Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institute, and Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst and founder of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, will present an alternative to madness, and call on the world to make a shift towards sanity, on the brink of annihilation. Following their presentations and discussion, the film, “8:15 Hiroshima: From Father to Daughter,” directed by J.R. Heffelfinger and written and produced by Dr. Akiko Mikamo, will be shown. It is a first-hand account of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima City by U.S. forces. Dr. Mikamo will be available for discussion at the film’s conclusion.

 Following the international conference, organized by the Ibn-e-Sina Research & Development Center’s in Kabul in early November, on the reconstruction of Afghanistan, a group of researchers launched the following petition:

We, the undersigned, researchers and experts in the domains of the history of civilizations, cultural heritage, archaeology, anthropology, sociology, and many other fields, and other enlightened citizens of the world, in Afghanistan, Syria, Russia, China, and many other countries, launch the following call.

1) We regret profoundly that the “Collective West”, while weeping crocodile tears over destruction of the world’s cultural heritage, has imposed a selective ban of scientific cooperation on nations mistakenly considered as “opposed to their rules and values.” The complete freeze of all cooperation in the field of archaeology between France and both Syria and Afghanistan, is just one example of this tragedy.

2) We request particular attention to the case of Afghanistan. Its neighboring countries, national and international institutions, and countries involved in international conventions for the protection of cultural and natural heritage are committed to cooperation in the field of guarding cultural heritage sites and artifacts and preventing their smuggling and destruction. Therefore, it is expected, that in the current situation, they will fully play their role in the protection of Afghanistan’s cultural heritage in accordance with international laws and conventions. However, the dramatic neglect of international cultural institutions and donors to Afghanistan, the lack of sufficient funds in the field of cultural heritage protection, and the political treatment of international cultural heritage institutions have seriously endangered Afghanistan. Undoubtedly, the non-recognition of the Afghan government has dimmed the attention of cultural institutions. Considering the above, we expect these international institutions to renew their full support to protect both the tangible and the intangible cultural heritage of Afghanistan.

3) We regret that UNESCO, which should raise its voice against any new form of “cultural and scientific apartheid,” has repeatedly worsened the situation by politicizing issues beyond its prerogatives.

4) Therefore, we call on the international community, to end immediately this form of “collective punishment,” which creates suffering and injustice, promotes ignorance, and endangers humanity’s capacity for mutual respect and understanding.

The progress of scientific knowledge, in a positive climate permitting all to share it, is by its very nature beneficial to each and to all and to the very foundation of a true peace.

Join the live broadcast Wednesday, November 15 at 11am EDT/5pm CET! 

Please submit your questions ahead of time to questions@schillerinstitute.org 

Or you can write them live in the YouTube chat

The facts speak for themselves. The British and American governments are deliberately and knowingly allowing Netanyahu’s Israel to commit war crimes in full view of the entire planet, crimes so heinous they are a moral blot on all humanity, and lead us to cry out: What ever happened to “Never Again!”? They are doing this “in full technicolor,” as used to be said, to send a simple message to the entire world: “Anybody else want to rebel against the City of London and Wall Street?”

In recent days, the situation in Southwest Asia has deteriorated dramatically. Israeli forces have expanded their operations and are bombing innocent Palestinian children and civilians, covered by the US and the entire West. At the same time, fighting between Israel and Hezbollah is intensifying with Israeli airstrikes deeper into southern Lebanon and counter-attacks by Hezbollah, while the US flew a third airstrike on suspected Iranian-backed militia bases in Syria. If the conflict spills over into Iran, it will be too late to talk of a ceasefire, and perhaps even too late to prevent a world war.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche summarized the situation in a dialogue with associates on Nov. 13: “The situation is rapidly, very rapidly worsening, and I think it looks extremely, extremely dangerous. Because right now we are on a course of complete escalation into a regional war. And the whole situation is so much on the edge that my absolute horror vision is that, once you are in a regional war, that it will not remain there. Because if it involves Iran, I have said this many times, that is the tripwire to world war. That is where we are at.”

The expansion of the BRICS grouping to the BRICS-11 on Jan. 1, 2024, has generated an international momentum towards creating a new international security and development architecture that the global financial Establishment fears more than anything else. It is a new architecture that is being built by different nations and civilizations around a common concept of Man: as a creative, moral being—made, in that sense, in the image of his Creator. (I changed the beginning of the paragraph to mach the other text)

The (bankrupt) City of London and Wall Street financial Establishment disagrees. They view Man as a beast whose numbers must be limited, Malthus style, and they would wipe out all worldviews—emphatically including the three great monotheistic religions—that believe otherwise. Induced religious warfare—Jew against Muslim; Christian against both; each against all—is their historic stock in trade.

Zepp-LaRouche concluded her dialogue with associates as follows: “To a very large extent—not entirely, but to a large extent—it is up to us to give people the inner strength to act in such a way that the influence they put on the situation means there is hope for the future of humanity. Given that the U.S. is the most crucial battlefield—not the only one, but the most crucial one—you should give people that sense. The world looks to you: Are you condoning what is going on, or not? We have an enormous moment, and we are in an absolutely revolutionary period and a better coalition of nations may soon be on top.”

Join Helga Zepp-LaRouche and the Schiller Institute in the fight for a new just world economic order, the new paradigm. As a creative species, mankind is born for that which is better than being driven into subjugation and World War 3 by the bankrupt financial establishment.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche delivered a pre-recorded 24-minute address to the closing session of the 29th National Congress of Economists of Peru, on the topic: “The Economist’s Role, Facing the Current World Crisis and the Emerging New World Economic Architecture.”

Zepp-LaRouche had last addressed Peru’s Economists Association in a keynote address back in November 2016, which is remembered to this day. This year’s annual meeting was held in the University of Huamanga in the city of Ayacucho—which ironically is where the Shining Path narco-terorrist group was founded back in 1969, and once reigned supreme.

The bloodbath and deaths in Palestine continue unabated, with over 10,000 people, including over 4,000 children, already dead. UN Secretary-General António Guterres once again called for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, lamenting that “Gaza is becoming a graveyard for children”.

Millions of people around the world protested against the bloodshed last weekend and many more actions are already planned, which more and more people will join — despite all the bans and attempts at intimidation.

Now is the time for solutions like the ones the Schiller Institute and the LaRouche movement have been working on for decades, because ideas have power, mere slogans not.

Proof that ideas can change the universe can be seen in the conference currently taking place and organized the Ibn Sina Research and Development Center in the Afghan capital Kabul, which is being attended by a seven-member international delegation from the Schiller Institute.

The reconstruction plan ‘Operation Ibn Sina: The Coming Economic Miracle in Afghanistan’, drafted by experts from the Schiller Institute and Afghanistan, will be presented and discussed in various panels.

The motto “Peace through Development” can and must become the driver in all regions of the world.
Join Helga Zepp-LaRouche and the Schiller Institute and support the implementation of the ideas and projects of the international LaRouche Movement.

Prof. Richard Sakwa – “The Last Gaullist in England”

Mike Billington:  Thank you for this second interview with EIR. Since the March 2023 interview, you’ve published a new book: “The Lost Peace — The Second Cold War and the Making of a New Global Conflict.”  

Prof. Sakwa: It’s due to be published in the United Kingdom on the 25th of October, and it’s due to come out in the United States in November. The title has slightly changed, zhelayushchiy ili ne zhelayushchiy as they say in Russian, “willing or unwilling.” It’s now called “The Lost Peace– How the West Failed to Prevent a Second Cold War.’ It’s out with Yale University Press. It’s available on Amazon, I think for pre-order.

Mike Billington: You also spoke at the Valdai Club. I watched some of that event, and we followed President Putin’s speech very closely in EIR. I noticed that you also participated in the press conference and had a question for President Putin, which I’ll bring up later on. You’ve generally been emphasizing the need to stop the rush to war before it gets out of control. Are there other things that you wish to mention about your current activities?

Prof. Sakwa: I’ve got another book coming out, with Edward Elgar Publishers. It’s called “An Advanced Introduction to Russian Politics.” It’s a short book, 60,000 words. And of course, it’s a bit of an ambitious or fool’s journey, to try to do this at a moment of huge flux. But it’s an attempt to establish some of the frameworks in which we can understand Russian politics today. Of course, in this incredibly polarized intellectual atmosphere, any attempt to deal with Russia or China today, and a whole stack of other countries in a dispassionate, objective manner, is condemned even in terms of methodology, quite apart from the content. The actual act of doing so is often condemned, even before people get to the substance of what the book actually says. As I think the Schiller Institute and others have argued for so long, we simply must have dialogue and we must have debate. You mentioned the Valdai Club, even my attendance there itself has provoked a certain degree of criticism. But I insist that dialogue, debate, open channels are absolutely essential, in fact more essential today than possibly at any other time, because the dangers of war and conflict are so high. So just to talk to people, not just in the formal sessions, but the informal discussions. People from across the world, good friends from China, from India, South Africa, so many other countries. I must say, the Valdai Club is always a very stimulating intellectual environment because the discussions are always measured, informed, reasonable, with a positive view on things. Never does it descend into simple attacks, denunciations, let alone personal ad hominem attacks.

Mike Billington: I listened to one of your presentations at the Valdai Club. You noted that there is a  growing momentum towards shifting the unipolar world to a multipolar world, which you noted was very important, but you also warned that such a multipolar world must not simply change one hierarchy, with some country in charge, for another. And you noted that the Westphalia Peace of 1648, which ended the 30 Years War, established the principle of sovereignty, but that a “Westphalia-Plus” — that was your term — was required. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, as I’m sure you know, has emphasized that the Westphalian principle of the “interests of the other” being more important, or at least equally important, as the self-interest of each nation. What do you mean by Westphalia-Plus?

Prof. Sakwa: I think it’s precisely the formulation of “sovereign internationalism.” Sovereignty, yes, that’s the core principle of Westphalia. But Westphalia left the content of what is within the states, as it were, and the model of relations between states, open. Westphalia didn’t put an end to religious wars. In fact, in some ways it may have facilitated it. We know that bloc politics continued. What we mean by Westphalia-Plus today means two things: First, a genuine and substantive positive mode of internationalism, which, based on the framework established by the United Nations and its subsequent protocols, charters, etcetera, of 1945. So that’s one of the Plus elements, which is just simply a substantive internationalism, which doesn’t deny some of the US led bodies, but it also suggests that  in some ways they have not served the cause of humanity, but they’ve often been rather more narrowly focused on maintaining the power of the previous or the hegemonic powers. Today I think that the Plus is going to say that multipolarity too often is seen as an empty slogan, whereas it has many facets. One of them is the maturation of the post-war state system. There are now 200 states in the world, 193 in the United Nations. Many, including the post-colonial states, have now matured.

Obviously, India is number one amongst them because when the United Nations was formed, it was not an independent state. Today, it’s a state, the third largest economy in the world, demanding that its voice be heard, quite rightly. And similarly, Indonesia, Mexico, Brazil, so many others, South Africa. But also the Plus sign means that there is still a normative dimension. Too often it’s simply reduced to the question of human rights. Obviously, human rights are important. Who would deny it? But human rights are within the whole framework of development, of unleashing potential. So the internationalism takes both an institutional form and a normative form. I think that when we’re talking about groups like BRICs or Shanghai Cooperation Organization, we should also remember that the UN system isn’t just a question of sovereign internationalism. It’s also a question of — I hesitate to use such a word as “values,” because it’s so often been cheapened and used as an instrument in geopolitical contestation. That doesn’t, though, ultimately mean that those values which are — and I’m talking about UN values, not those put forwards by a particular bloc — are genuinely human values. Rights are human. That includes, of course, social and other economic rights, which includes the right to life, clean water and development. So the Westphalia-Plus for me does quite a lot of work.

Mike Billington: You said that the UN charter was essentially intended as a solution to that issue of sovereign internationalism, but that the Charter is now under great threat due to the former colonial powers who have been  — and this is your quote, which I appreciate, “locked into a stupid, pointless, savage and tragic war.” We now have a new savage war in Gaza. So what must be done?

Prof. Sakwa: If I knew that, —  I think that it’s obvious that change begins with ourselves, with us, and we just simply have to do what we feel is right. Obviously, we must simply insist that without the UN system, without the charter, without that international system and its genuinely universal principles, then we are literally in unchartered waters. There’s a lot of condemnation of the UN, including calls for Russia, even China, to lose their veto powers and to be taken out, expelled from the Security Council. I think that’s madness. Of course, it’s impossible to achieve without the destruction of the system itself. The reason why I say that, the charter system, the 1945 system, is undoubtedly far from perfect and it needs reform. We need India, we need Brazil. We need a representative or two from Africa as permanent members of the Security Council. But even as it is, without it, we really will be in a totally anarchic jungle world. So I think the defense of the charter system is the number one. And then, of course, advancing its principles: peace, development, negotiated settlements, negotiation, diplomacy, all of those elements, because we certainly cannot slip back to a situation which held during the First and Second World Wars. But of course, we are very much in danger of slipping inexorably, unavoidably into a possibility of the foothills of the Third World War.

Mike Billington: You just mentioned the rising powers who should be part of the UN. Putin also said that — in fact, it was in response to your question, which I watched. You asked about the emergence of these post-colonial states, and that they’re coming together in new institutions like the BRICs and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. His response was that the 1945 framework no longer functions, and without a new framework, there will be chaos, which is pretty much what you just said as well. He called for new developed major powers like India, Brazil and South Africa, to be added to the UN Security Council. But is that enough, or are you implying in your last statement that it’s really not enough?

Prof. Sakwa: I must say that Putin did go on to say that the UN needs reform in a way we’ve just outlined, changing and expanding the membership of the UN Security Council. But he also said, however flawed the UN system is, there’s nothing waiting in the wings to replace it. And that is the absolutely crucial point. There is nothing in the wings. As I’ve suggested earlier, international politics takes place within the framework of this international system. But at the second level, if you like, international politics, leaving aside international political economy, transnational civil society, but at the second level of international politics, we’re seeing a reorganisation and a shakeup, the likes of which, to quote Xi Jinping and Putin in their meeting in March, the likes of which we’ve not seen since 1945. You mentioned the emergence of, let’s call them “post Western political alignments,” because they are characterized by a number of things: one, it’s absolutely mistaken to consider them anti-Western —  they’re “post-western.” They’re going beyond it. The goal is not to replicate the pattern of politics of what I call the Political West, but to transcend that bloc politics, the competitive dynamic, the attempt to defend hegemony. So these are counter-hegemonic alliances — not alliances, but alignments — not just simply to balance the existing system, but to transcend it. And thus they take some energy or certainly some intellectual affiliation with the type of politics outlined by Gorbachev in the late 1980s during perestroika, when he was launching reforms in the Soviet Union. The goal was not simply to make the Soviet Union like the West. It was to make the Soviet Union, along with the West, in more close alignment to those fundamental principles outlined in 1945. It is on this basis that he talked about there being no winners or losers at the end of the Cold War, everyone was a winner, and that is the similar language used by Putin and above all, Xi Jinping — win-win situations and so on. These aren’t empty slogans, but a substantive vision of how international politics should be conducted.

Mike Billington: We’re dealing with this continuing surrogate war in Ukraine against Russia. You’ve written extensively on the war, pointing to the fact that the 2014 coup against the elected government in Kiev, which was sponsored by the US, not only put a proto-nazi regime in power in Ukraine, but also collapsed the entire European security system. You said this marked the failure of the Western world after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s to create what you called an “inclusive, comprehensive peace order.” I think you know that Helga has referred to that period as the “lost opportunity.” And your new book is titled “The Lost Peace.” What is the theme of that book?  

Prof. Sakwa: A number of themes, but the main one is the assertion and the argument and hopefully substantiated, that there was an opportunity for a new pattern to international politics after the end of the Cold War, based within the framework of sovereign internationalism and the charter international system. Unfortunately, the political West, which is an entity — the European Union is part of it, but above all, NATO. It’s also the dynamic based on US primacy, leadership, call it what you will. The political West, instead of recognizing this opportunity to reset international politics, only intensified the logic and the pattern that had prevailed during the first Cold War, and thus that moment of opportunity — this isn’t an abstract, it was genuine, and a lot of people recognized it at the time — that there was an ability to transcend bloc politics, to make the charter system work better, to have in Europe a genuine, enduring peace. One of those elements would have had to have been a genuine pan-continental vision of security, instead of which we saw the intensification of the Atlantic power system, which by definition excluded Russia. So we have a dynamic which — and many other books have put it — Thomas Graham, I think is one of the most perceptive, has just argued similarly in his book, which just come out, called “Getting Russia Right” — the fundamental point is that we had an opportunity to establish a positive peace. And a positive peace is more than a negative peace, which is just simply the absence of war, but a positive peace, which would include developmental and other indices in it. Until his death last year, Gorbachev  stuck to that vision, surprisingly enough, because his vision was a powerful one. My book is rooted in how the first Cold War ended, creating the framework for the continuation of Cold War, if not intensification, without some of the guardrails, because after 1989, the political West radicalized itself. This is why the second Cold War is so much more intense and more dangerous than the first. Quite apart from the fact that it’s now focused in the first instance on Europe. In the first Cold War, Europe was relatively static and the Cold War was fought elsewhere, above all Korea, Vietnam, Africa. But this second Cold War, its epicenter, has come home to roost in Europe. And that’s something I’ve been warning against for 30 years. And of course, it’s utterly tragic for all of Europe and above all, for the Ukrainian people and indeed the Russian people.

Mike Billington: As you’ve just referenced, your histories of modern Russia portray glasnost and perestroika as efforts by Gorbachev in particular, and others, to create a “genuinely transformative program of change” — that’s one of your terms — but that the West rejected that, as you’ve just explained. What was Putin’s role in that dichotomy in Russia and internationally? And what is it today?

Prof. Sakwa: It’s important to understand that Putin’s thinking has evolved over the years. Certain base concepts which he stuck to all throughout — Russia as a great power and a statist inflection, things which we can criticize because of the failure, perhaps, to really envisage an independent public sphere. But in terms of international politics, he came to power as perhaps the most pro-European leader Russia has ever had. But because of the context, the structural context, which was this radicalization of the political West, ultimately there was no space to maneuver. We can chart the landmarks, the signposts: which include the US withdrawal from the ABM treaty in June 2002; the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003; the installation of anti-ballistic missile systems in Eastern Europe; Libya in 2011; then the events in Ukraine 2013-14. Ultimately in Russia, it isn’t just Putin — the elite, the Russian elite, or certainly the political-military security elite felt that the room for maneuver was becoming smaller and smaller.  That is, of course, quite clear because there was no transformation of the European security order after 1989. NATO was effectively an instrument of collective defense. What we failed to do was establish a pan- European institution of collective “security.” The United States quite clearly vetoed any substantive attempts to transform the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the OSCE, to move in that direction. So we ended up in the impasse in which we find ourselves now. As to the implication of your question about maintaining the power of the colonial powers — you call them that, I call it the political West, but it’s the same thing — they insisted on maintaining their powers. But what we see today, of course, is the intellectual exhaustion of the political west. There are no ideas coming from them. They had no idea of how to deal with the problems of Southwest Asia, as we nowadays call it — I noticed that you’ve been calling the Middle East “Southwest Asia” quite consistently. I think that’s right, actually. I’ve been doing so for some time as well.

Mike Billington: You’ve referred regularly in various publications to Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History,” which has been used as sort of a meme to justify the unipolar world, the neoliberal order. You may know that Fukuyama is being promoted again by the Council on Foreign Relations in an article published in their journal Foreign Affairs called “China’s Road to Ruin — The Real Toll of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative” a classic assault on the Belt and Road. How do you read these neoconservative efforts to demonize both Russia and China?

Prof. Sakwa: It’s a continuation of what we’ve seen over the last 30 years. There are two major streams which feed into this. There’s the neocon one, Fukuyama’s line. And of course, on the other side, we have this “liberal interventionism,” which have become fused effectively in the politics — there’s almost nothing to distinguish between them over the last few years, their interventionism, their lack of respect for Soviet internationalism. Instead of the principle being sovereign internationalism, it becomes “democratic internationalism” for the liberal interventionists. For the neocons, they couldn’t care less about the values and normative side — its power which they’re concerned about. But it’s a very substantive coalition from those two interventionists and activist traditions. Of course, in the United States, we have other traditions. We have the Pat Buchanan line. The Paleoconservatives, which, of course, in the best sense, I think the Schiller Institute finds itself in that, talking about a traditional American foreign policy based on conservative, small c conservative, engagement with the world, but without a sense of American exceptionalism and a messianic vision and need to lead.  These neocon and liberal interventionist ideas are, if the proof of the pudding is in the eating, they have been catastrophic. All they do in their thinking — I read Foreign Affairs Journal, you mentioned where Fukuyama’s article is published, some of the stuff is interesting. But one has to say that it’s a sign of intellectual exhaustion. To be honest, there is no positive vision of how to transcend the logic of conflict and how to move into a world which could allow genuine human development to take place. And this is all the more tragic, not only because the challenges that we face, given the challenges facing humanity, but also the enormous potential. I think this is what the Schiller Institute constantly stresses: the technological advances by humanity allow the possibility of so much positive good, a positive peace. And yet, what they call the foreign policy blob in the United States is still intent on relitigating the first Cold War today. And of course, one of the major tragedies of our time is the failure of Europe to devise and pursue an independent policy of its own. At Valdai, I met and had a really marvelous talk with Philip de Gaulle, the grandson of Charles de Gaulle, and was very keen to meet him because, as I introduced myself to him, I’m probably the last Gaullist in England today — there’s a few elsewhere. By Gaullist, I mean, not necessarily domestic politics, but that vision of pan-continental European unity, not against the United States, but as an autonomous and independent force sometimes guiding our American friends, but working, if there’s a positive agenda, on positive goals.

Mike Billington: In your 2022 essay called the “End of Endemism,” which also was referring to Fukuyama’s “End of History,” you referred to the “march of neoliberalism” in the late 20th century, which you defined as “neo-Hegelianism.”  I need to ask you to explain what you were referring to.

Prof. Sakwa: Let me explain it this way. The Hegelian logic is based on a dialectical approach to history, not just even thesis, antithesis and synthesis, but the dialectical approach suggests a certain ineluctable spirit of history, marching forwards, usually in the form of a state or constellation of states. I’ve long been highly critical of this determinism, this historicism, the idea that we can know the meaning and purpose of history and guide it on its way. I think that we have to understand international politics through the lens of tragedy, that a lot of human endeavors don’t achieve its lofty goals, and the loftier the goals, often the more disastrous the outcome. But above all, compared to the neo-Hegelian or the dialectical view of history I’ve been putting forward for a number of years a “dialogical” approach. The political dialogism obviously draws from people like Mikhail Bakhtin, but the key point is dialogue, diplomacy, openness to the experience of others, learning from others, and of course, political dialogism is a term which Bakhtin himself never actually used. But political dialogism draws on him. as in a novel of Dostoyevsky, where people talk and then talk some more and then talk yet more, and another 500 pages have passed, and they’re still talking, as in The Brothers Karamazov. But at the end they all change. That is dialogism political dialogism, and that absolutely repudiates Hegelian or neo-Hegelian thinking of dialectics of the Fukuyama sort, because Fukuyama is very much a neo-Hegelian, as filtered via Alexandre Kojève.   

 Bakhtin is a very, very important thinker. He developed an art and literary cultural criticism, the idea of dialogism. I’m pushing it a little bit further by talking about “political dialogism,” which could be the foundational basis for a more sustained vision of diplomacy today, and how we can get out of this mess through only dialogue and diplomacy. And that is one reason why I attended the Valdai meeting, because that’s what we do. We talk, open ended talk. And it really is genuinely why I’m talking with you today. And how to do these things? Because I don’t for a second pretend to have all the answers. But I certainly think that we just simply have to keep channels of dialogue open everywhere, and precisely where we have the deepest political differences. That is when perhaps it’s most important to return to diplomacy. And of course, that applies to the war in Ukraine as well.

Mike Billington: And the Mideast.

Prof. Sakwa:  And Middle East, of course. And Southwest Asia.

Mike Billington: This is clearly the view of the nations that formed the BRICs, that idea of bringing all nations of different continents, of different political outlooks and so forth, but to bring them together around the concept of mutual development.  They’ve now expanded with six new members, unless it gets sabotaged. In Argentina yesterday, the current government candidate won — there’s going to have to be a runoff election, but nonetheless, the people who were openly peddling that Argentina should not go into the BRICs, that they should break relations with China and so on, were defeated. But there’ll be a runoff. Clearly the BRICs is committed to that principle with the new countries that came in. They include Iran and Saudi Arabia, which of course, China played this amazing role in bringing these two fierce enemies together. And now they’re both part of the BRICs, if that proceeds. The BRICs meeting in South Africa, the G20 meeting in India, the Far Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok just this month — all featured discussions of the end of colonialism, that colonialism is essentially finished. The new system hasn’t really come into place, or at least it’s only there as a potential through the BRICs and the expanded BRICs-Plus. But there were also extensive discussions about establishing a new international financial system, which I think you know that  Mr. LaRouche and our organization have been deeply involved in this for many years. The Russian economist Sergei Glazyev, whom you certainly know, has promoted a concept which Lyndon LaRouche promoted in his 2000 article called “On a Basket of Hard Commodities — Trade without Currency,” breaking out from under the dollar hegemony and establishing a basis for international trade that is based upon the values of production rather than the values established by the speculation on currencies. Where does this discussion stand at this point, and do you expect that there will be a new policy in place in time for the 2024 BRICs summit, which is going to be held in Kazan?

Prof. Sakwa: Yes, Russia takes over the chair of BRICS-Plus on the 1st of January. So it’ll be up to it to devise policies. Can I add one more institutional organization to the list you mentioned and that is ASEAN, the ten countries (of Southeast Asia). For many years there’s been this concept of the ASEAN method, which is one precisely of focusing on development, focusing on trade, not trying to interfere in internal political matters. An ASEAN-Plus meeting also took place not long ago. It’s very important. So all of that, what you’ve just said, is absolutely right, the BRICs-Plus with the six new members. There were 17 others who were really keen to join, Algeria, for example, Indonesia’s membership was offered, but they have elections coming up as well and they thought they would be best to postpone it.

Can I just go back to Argentina. It’s fascinating that Argentina figured so heavily in the initial San Francisco conference, when the United Nations was established in 1945, and the question was then whether to invite Argentina or not. So there’s a certain pattern, and history seems to be emerging because Argentina clearly is faceing a fundamentally important runoff election in mid November between the populist Javier Milei and the incumbent Sergio Massa, from the incumbent party.

Mike Billington: “Populist” is a very polite term for Milei.

Prof. Sakwa: Yes indeed. Libertarian crazy guy. Yes, yes indeed.

Mike Billington: I might mention — In what you were saying about various things earlier, that LaRouche many, many years ago referred to some of the circles around the Rockefeller family as “fascism with a democratic face.” And I think that’s what you were getting at with the issue of, not the neocons, per se, but the so-called “liberal interventionists,” that this is a fascist ideology, but it’s portrayed as a democratic intervention.

Prof. Sakwa: I would avoid personally using the f word, fascism, but clearly it’s there. Some people do indeed characterize it. And I avoid the word fascism because one has to be very careful in delineating exactly what we mean. But the point stands.

As for the currency and economic change, I think that Jeffrey Sachs addressed the Valdai meeting online, but he gave a very powerful overview of this issue, precisely. And I agree. He didn’t say this as such, but there’s two things involved at the moment. The first step will be to de-dollarize and to conduct trade in a basket of currencies, including an alternative financial architecture to facilitate this. The actual development of an alternative currency is a far more challenging prospect. It took the euro at least two decades, if not more, to develop, and even then we can see its downsides. I think Putin, in one of his interviews recently said —  in fact, it was at Valdai — he said the alternative currency, a reserve currency, or a BRICs currency, as such, a new currency, is not on the agenda at the moment. What is on the agenda is the more effective utilization of the yuan, the ruble, the rupee, and facilitating mechanisms for trade.

It may come to it, but it’s an alternative. Financial architecture is clearly something that is happening. We can see it in the data. The percentage of global trade which is bypassing the dollar, is going up very fast. It’s remarkable how fast people are de-dollarizing because of the brutality with which the dollar has been weaponized recently. I just saw some figures today about the Chinese divesting themselves of US debt. Obviously, they’ve still got vast stocks, and this is going to take a long time. But it’s certainly happening. And this is, as we say, a shift in international politics and international political economy with huge consequences, because it will mean that the United States will not have that exorbitant privilege of the dollar being the unique reserve currency, which allows it to run what is now $32 trillion debt and of course, extensive trade deficits for year upon year. So clearly, De-dollarization is going to force the United States to get its own finances in order. And we just hope that they will be able to find the leadership to do that.

Mike Billington: A separate subject. A lot of discussion, including at the Valdai Club in part, in a back and forth with President Putin, about the issue of nuclear weapons. A lot of the Western press is claiming that Russia is threatening the use of nuclear weapons. And Putin responded to the proposal by one of the leading Russians who was essentially arguing that they should put the use of nuclear weapons back on the agenda as a way of reinforcing the fact that the West has, as you mentioned, canceled all of the treaty agreements to limit nuclear weapons and to limit tests and so forth. But Putin responded very strongly that that’s not on the table, at least not now, because there’s no threat to the existence of the Russian Federation, nor a threat of a nuclear attack on the Russian Federation, which are the only two bases on which there would be the use, by Russia, of nuclear weapons. But there are also people in the West who are pushing for the destruction of Russia and China. They make it very clear, and especially in the Ukraine case, they openly state their intention is to drastically weaken Russia so that they can never do the “nefarious things” that they do. That kind of talk, which means that especially with, essentially, the loss of the war in Ukraine and the failure of the counteroffensive and so forth, that they’re pushing towards open confrontation with Russia, which could very likely end up being nuclear. So what is your view on that?

Prof. Sakwa: The first thing is the ideas put forward by Sergey Karaganov about nuclear weapons. It’s a more nuanced and complex position than sometimes presented in the Western media. Sergei Alexandrovich, as we call him, Karaganov, has done 2 or 3 versions of it, including an extended version in “Russia in Global Affairs,” in which he is basically not calling for the use of nuclear weapons, but he is calling for is the return of healthy deterrence to avoid the use of nuclear weapons. He’s arguing that it is the West, as you’ve just suggested, which has lost a fear of nuclear weapons and indeed discounts the dangers of sliding into some sort of nuclear escalation. What Sergei is trying to do is to up the ante, in other words, so that the ante doesn’t have to be upped all the way. It’s a complex position, but I think it’s an important one. Putin of course, as you said, said that he understood that position, but he rejected it. And that is absolutely, fundamentally important. And he reiterated the two points that, as you’ve said, there’s only two Russian nuclear doctrine circumstances in which nuclear weapons are used, in response to another attack, a second strike and indeed, if the country’s existence was existentially challenged. That’s the standard nuclear doctrine. 

Of course, the United States has not signed the “no first use” declarations, which is interesting. So that means that everybody has to be constantly on the alert. And of course, the danger of accidental nuclear conflict is therefore always ever present. But you’re right that the political West seems to be on a trajectory with almost no limits. It’s been driven, of course, by the extremists in Ukraine, who for them there is no limit. They’ve always wanted to negate Russia. This is western Ukraine. As far as they are concerned, Russia, even the very name is illegitimate. Zelensky not long ago, and his adviser, said we should use the word Muscovy instead of Russia! This sort of attempt to cancel Russia, negate it, is clearly one of those issues in the political West today. Of course it won’t work. Russia is a nuclear power, and it’s actually expecting over 2% economic growth this year. It has survived the challenges of sanctions so far. Clearly it has difficulties. The economy has suffered, no question about it. But it won’t be going anywhere soon. And indeed, this is a point which a lot of. commentators make, including Thomas Graham, that even without Putin himself, the views of the Russian elite and a large section of the population maintain the position that Russia has to maintain itself as an independent great power.

The policy manifestations may be debated, but the fundamental principle is one shared by the elite and the population. Putin is now supported by, still, over 80% of the population. Well, you may say, how do you measure these things in war time? Clearly there’s methodological issues, but nevertheless Russia is not going anywhere soon, and neither is China. One is almost left — and I think that’s the logic of your question — is that we appear to have two trains on the same track heading inexorably towards each other. Before the time that the two collide, there are a number of junctions or sidings. Of course, the US presidential elections next year are one of those big events. The difficulties in Congress today is another one of those. There are also elections elsewhere in the world, in the UK next year. But that’s hardly of any significance to most people apart from us. So, nothing. Is inevitable, yet the dangers are unprecedentedly high.

Mike Billington:  You’ve written books and a great deal of material on the Ukraine war and the Ukraine situation. What’s your forecast at this point for what’s going to take place in Ukraine?

Prof. Sakwa: Well, in some ways this also depends what’s going to happen in Southwest Asia, because what we’re now seeing is a genuine global crisis, or certainly in Southwest Asia and in Eastern Europe.  

It’s very difficult talking now, because I’ve actually argued that certainly as far as Israel-Palestine is concerned, the next couple of weeks will be crucial. In some ways, depending on how that goes, this will affect the conduct of the war in Ukraine. As for Ukraine, obviously I just want the killing to stop, the war to stop. There has to be some sort of negotiated element. There’s no sign of that at the moment. My feeling is that in the next few months, Russia may move on to a more active offensive position. This is certainly the position, the view of some generals. It is not clear whether Russia actually has the military muscle power. For example, the fighting over Avdiyivka has been going on for several weeks. Of course, the Ukrainians have dug themselves in very, very deeply there, the coke plant and so on. And we thought that Russia was just about to take over. And yet it hasn’t even managed to close the access to the city. And of course, it’s from Avdiyivka that the Ukrainians were shelling Donetsk for the last seven or eight years. Now, how is it going to go? I think that we’re in for a long, dark period, and only in about 2025 will we begin to see the lineaments, the outline of some sort of post-conflict solutions.

Mike Billington:  If it doesn’t explode beyond those borders

 Prof. Sakwa: And it may do because this Southwest Asia crisis has got huge explosive potential. At the moment it’s all being kept in. But as developments in Gaza develop, then clearly it may draw in other actors. And thus we have an escalatory dynamic which may become unstoppable.

Mike Billington: We have a map of North Africa and the Middle East in EIR this week, which shows this very small country of Israel on the far eastern coast of the Mediterranean, surrounded by five huge countries that we have in bright gold, all of whom have just become members of the BRICs: Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, UAE. It makes you wonder what those two US aircraft carriers, now under Central Command control, are they just there as a warning regarding Israel, or are they there preparing for a war against the BRICs? This is the thing unfortunately, you have to consider at a time of such vast instability in the world today.

Prof. Sakwa: And also, Putin announced the other day that Russian planes will be on patrol in the Black Sea with the kinzhal hypersonic weapon, which, of course, you know, if utilized.

 Mike Billington: Can reach the Mediterranean.  

Prof. Sakwa: Yes. As Colonel MacGregor said, an aircraft carrier today is, is basically a target. And that’s really what it is. 

Mike Billington: Okay. Do you have any final thoughts for our readership?

Prof. Sakwa: Well, as I say, keep up the good work. I think that I quite like the new format of the EIR Bulletin (Daily Alert). And I must say it’s phenomenally informative and always a pleasure to read, for what’s to learn and the tone, the positive tone of peace and development. It’s in short supply nowadays, so keep up the good work.

Mike Billington: Good. And thank you very much. And I hope we can continue this process.