May 22, 2025 (EIRNS)—All great thinkers, be they scientists, musicians, poets, or statesmen, know that it is ideas, and not events, that shape the unfolding of history. You, too, must rise to the occasion of today’s historical punctum saliens and think like a statesman: What is the top down, epistemological fight that is driving, as if by an invisible and deep current, the intersection, interaction, and unfolding of actions on the visible world stage?
If you think like this, you will not be surprised that in a period in which major, potentially nuclear world conflicts are moving toward possible defusal and resolution—Ukraine and U.S.-Iran being two of the most prominent—a series of destabilizations, assassinations, and assassination threats has sprung seemingly out of nowhere, and all at once. The assassination of two young Israeli embassy staff in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday evening, May 21, is but the latest; add to that the killing of Ukrainian opposition leader Andriy Portnov in Madrid and of two top aides to the mayor of Mexico City, all earlier this week and in broad daylight. These come at the same time as open calls to assassinate both U.S. President Trump and Russian President Putin coming from adjuncts to the Western establishment.
This is a string of events with no obvious connection to one another, except for the fact that any one of them might be used as a lever to derail ongoing peace discussions and cooperation agreements, and all of them together act as a British intelligence-originated “strategy of tension” designed to induce the kind of generalized fear and chaos in which a coup d’état or other major shift in orientation can be justified and rammed through. Such was the period leading up to World War I, in which six heads of state were assassinated in the two decades prior to 1914, each by a “lone gunman.” The reality was a structure of control and deployment of terrorist elements by certain synarchist networks, aimed at keeping control over world policy in the hands of global imperial elites—and out of the hands of nation-state governments.
What was at issue then, as now, was the nature of man. Is it the case that some are born to rule and others to be ruled? Must it be, as Henry Kissinger promised, that “nothing important can come from the South”? Is the system of colonialism—whether militarily, institutionally, or economically enforced—just a natural consequence of the “law” that might makes right? Are some of us merely human animals?
While the vast majority of the global population would answer in the negative, and resoundingly so, the challenge we face is that for many nations of the world—certainly those dominated by Western popular culture—the image of man has been so degraded for so long, that we have lost our mooring and our mission as creative beings in this universe. Thus, while recognizing and decrying great evil, most don’t have a notion of what to replace it with.
The issue at hand is that humankind is a species capable of creative reason. It is the great mission of government to foster and enable the maximum development of each individual so that each might contribute his or her great genius to the improvement and enrichment of the human condition. A new world system of development based on mutual respect for the interests of each sovereign nation and cooperation toward advancing the needs of humanity as a whole must supplant the evil and collapsing system of war, colonialism, and imperial (i.e., Wall Street/City of London) finance.
An intense dialogue of exactly what that system must be, and how we get from here to there—how we can, as the great poet Friedrich Schiller expressed it, fix the clock while it’s still running—will be the subject of the Schiller Institute Conference, “A Beautiful Vision for Humanity in Times of Great Turbulence!,” beginning 24 hours from now.
Recognize that conference not as an event, but as an idea—one out of which you can deploy in the mode of a statesman, to organize the world around a new and true conception, and the concrete and desperately needed solutions that come with that.
