JFK at American University: The Coincidence of Opposites as the Higher Hypothesis of Peace

June 9—Many different individuals and institutions will today call attention to the June 10, 1963 American University “Peace Speech” of the slain President John F. Kennedy. Already, yesterday, a gathering took place in Rome which featured Columbia University’s Jeffrey Sachs; Kerry Kennedy, sister of Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy, Jr.; Nina Khrushcheva, adoptive grand-daughter of Nikita Khrushchev; and Gillian Sorensen, widow of JFK advisor and speechwriter Theodore Sorensen. Katrina vanden Heuvel and James Carden published an article in Responsible Statecraft titled “What Kind of Peace Do We Seek? At 60, JFK’s Speech Never Gets Old” which concluded:

“Today we stand perilously close to nuclear escalation as the administration ignores the red lines it set and succumbs to assorted hawks by agreeing to send F-16s to Ukraine. One can only hope President Kennedy’s message, delivered six decades ago this Saturday, somehow and in some way is understood by a new generation inside and outside Washington, D.C., and has an impact on the course of war—and peace.”

One can do far more than “only hope.” The six African heads of state traveling to Kiev and Moscow this coming week in search of peace, and the ongoing efforts from China, the Vatican, Brazil, and non-governmental forces like the Schiller Institute are only a first approximation of what must be done. A higher degree of commitment is required from all of us, and emphatically outside of government. It is the kind of commitment which Martin Luther King expressed the day after Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963. “I guess you have to come to the point of looking at these things philosophically, and this is where I have decided to stand. I believe firmly that this cause is right, and that someone must have the courage and the fortitude to stand up for it, even if it means suffering, or even if it means death. I have always felt that unmerited suffering is redemptive, and even if I have to die for this cause, physical death … is a price that is paid to free the soul of our nation, and to free our children from a permanent spiritual death….”

It is clear, perhaps uncomfortably clear for some, that to act now, at this time, upon JFK’s clearly enunciated American University policy, means to deliberately reject and refute the actions and premises of the present Anglo-American “Military Malthusian” NATO policy. This means exposing those behind the willful “Luddite” terrorist destruction of non-military infrastructure, like the Nord Stream pipelines, the Kakhovka Dam and Hydroelectric Power Plant, and soon, perhaps the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant. This is not the “zero population growth,” but the “population reduction” policy of the Club of Rome, and the 1970s Kissinger/Bush National Security Study Memorandum-200 which is now underway in Ukraine. Ultimately, theirs is also an anti-American policy, that has been hugely destructive of the General Welfare of the U.S. population. As centenarian Kissinger proudly admits, the policy was largely formulated in London, not Washington, and merely implemented by an Anglophile “Tory” American faction operating from within the bowels of the “intelligence establishment.”

“To address this danger from within, the European civilization which emerged in Greece about 2,500 or more years ago, adopted the theatrical performances of the Classical form of tragedy, as an indispensable instrument for examining the dangers inhering in currently accepted customs,” Lyndon LaRouche tells us in “Politics As Art.” As of today, the stage is now set for a potential resurrection and renewal of the practice of statecraft in the United States, by reviewing, from the “higher ground” of his June American University intervention against the military-industrial complex, the tragedy of Kennedy’s November assassination.

Ten Presidents ago, it was the principle of statecraft, expressed in the rapidly changing John F. Kennedy, which, as can be heard in the very tone of his American University speech, threatened to imbue the American people, with the necessary enthusiasm needed to replace the seemingly-inevitable drive to thermonuclear war with the Soviet Union with a policy based on a new vision of a revised “Apollo Project” featuring the joint travel to the Moon by the Soviet Union and the United States.

A new “harmony of interests” toward a new, just security and development architecture with Russia, China and the world, requires a “polyphonic” mind-set, one that is able to reconcile what are perceived to be distinct and even separate voices, as in a Bach fugue, to a higher principle of forward motion. That principle is the “theme,” which is not the same thing as a “tune,” a “narrative,” a “line.” The composition of a just world security and development architecture must, too, have a knowable principle of forward motion, and that principle is the increase in the potential relative population-density of the human race on the planet—as well as off the planet, in the exploration of space. More people, at a higher living standard, with greater access to larger amounts of physical resources, powered by higher-density energy systems, is the unalienable right of a creative and productive humanity.

As of today, and through the efforts of today’s Schiller Institute Conference “The World Needs JFK’s Vision of Peace,” humanity has been poised, largely through the efforts of the Schiller Institute’s Helga Zepp-LaRouche and her newly-organized International Peace Coalition, to begin a provocative but fruitful dialogue with the American and all national populations on how to change the present culture of popular indifference, and embark upon a new course of optimistic, mass-based strategic policy-action.