June 21—“In a moment of crisis, it is not power, it is not money which counts. It is the question, do you have an adequate idea which is needed at that moment? Then, you can actually shape history.”
Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche combined that succinct statement of strategy, with the warning to leaders and citizens around the world that we must prepare mentally, because we are heading into “the perfect storm” of an acute war danger and an unstoppable collapse of the Trans-Atlantic system as currently organized. Under those conditions, only a force organized on behalf of an adequate idea will be able to change the course of history.
The subject of last weekend’s Schiller Institute’s two-day conference, “There Can Be No Peace Without the Bankruptcy Reorganization of the Dying Trans-Atlantic Financial System,” where Zepp-LaRouche issued those statements, was precisely an extensive discussion of those “adequate ideas” which will work, centered on American statesman Lyndon LaRouche’s 50 years of constant study and proposals of how humanity can move safely, and quickly, out of today’s hell back into unending progress.
The conference was none too soon. On the eve of next week’s NATO summit in Madrid, the European Union, the United Kingdom and the United States have escalated their drive for war, setting off a new provocation in Europe with the potential to lead to a nuclear showdown between Russia and NATO. This time, NATO-member Lithuania has been chosen as the pawn, ordered to impose a for-the-moment partial blockade of land transport to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. The pretext used is enforcement of EU sanctions against Russia. Russian officials have declared the blockade a violation of international law, which is “beyond serious,” and have promised that there will be a Russian response. The State Department today issued a statement that the U.S. will invoke NATO’s Article V (an attack against one member is an attack against all), should Russia take action.
All the makings of a Cuban missile crisis in reverse are now upon us.
And that unavoidable fact is making growing circles in the West increasingly nervous about the outcome. For example, former US Ambassador to NATO Robert Hunter, a man with a long Establishment pedigree, just published a call for the upcoming NATO summit itself to be postponed. Hunter argues that were the summit to fail—which it might because of the bitter differences among the members over how to deal with the Russia-Ukraine conflict—it would hurt U.S. credibility worldwide more than a postponement.
There is also growing popular ferment in the Global NATO nations themselves, in part over the war policies, in part over the economic collapse they are being subjected to. London has been shut down by a rail strike that threatens to become a general strike against the killer austerity being pushed down their throats. In Brussels —the home of NATO and EU headquarters— the major labor unions mobilized 80,000 members to shut the city down for several hours, and they carried signs and chanted not only that wages must go up, but “Stop NATO,” and turn off military spending in order to pay livable salaries.
In France, this past weekend’s legislative elections delivered a possible body blow to the Macron government, for going along with NATO and militarization of the economy. Likewise, the Italian government again is heading towards a crisis, because members of Draghi’s coalition government are balking at shipping an unending supply of weapons to Ukraine.
Even as the West self-implodes, serious leaders of governments around the globe are meeting to discuss how to secure economic progress for their people by cooperating on decade-long projects—their regional portions of the stunning “World Land-Bridge” project the Schiller Institute has been working on for three decades. These were the kinds of ideas discussed at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, and which will dominate the expanded BRICS meetings at the end of this week in China.
Key advisors in the capitals of the countries participating in those discussions are now studying the four panels of the Schiller Institute conference this past weekend. They will be looking for one of the things they are most concerned about: What political forces are in motion around the “workable ideas” the Schiller Institute discussed in the United States and Europe?
Join these world leaders in studying this conference. Like them, you will find a force which may be small in numbers, but fiercely determined to save humanity from the abyss.
As one participant asserted: We are David; it is our governments and corporations which are Goliath.
