Source: Schiller Institute    Published: 2022-06-19

International Schiller Institute online conference
June 18-19, 2022

Saturday, June 18, 2022

Moderator: Dennis Speed, The Schiller Institute

1) Helga Zepp-LaRouche (Germany); Founder, Schiller Institute: Keynote Address: “Let’s Win Mission Impossible or Find Another Planet!” (30 min.)

2) Andrey Kortunov (Russia); Director General of the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC): “Russia and the Indivisible Security of All Nations” 3) Col. Richard Black (ret.) (U.S.); former head of the U.S. Army’s Criminal Law Division at the Pentagon; former Virginia State Senator: “The U.S. Is Leading the World to Nuclear War”

3) Dr. Wang Wen (China), Executive Dean of Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, and Deputy Dean of the Silk Road School at Renmin University of China: “Why China’s Rise Is Beneficial to the World”.

4) Dr. Wolfgang Bittner (Germany); Author of over 80 books; Doctor in Law: “The West-East Conflict – An Orchestration”

5) Sam Pitroda (U.S./India); Innovator, Entrepreneur and Policy-Maker: “India and The Emerging New World Architecture”

6) Jay Naidoo (South Africa); Cabinet Minister under President Nelson Mandela, South Africa: “Africa, the Continent of the Future”

7) Dr. Clifford Kiracofe (U.S.); Former Senior Staff Member, U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations; President, Washington Institute for Peace and Development: “Diplomacy and Cooperation in a Time of Crisis”

Above is the title of the first panel of the two-day international Schiller Institute Conference, “There Can Be No Peace Without the Bankruptcy Reorganization of the Dying Trans-Atlantic Financial System.” Leading speakers from Russia, China India, the U.S. and Germany presented a powerful picture of the global crisis facing mankind today—described by Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche as the worst crisis in the history of civilization—and the urgency that a new paradigm be negotiated and implemented through the cooperation of all the leading nations, including the U.S., Russia, China and India.

Introduction: Dennis Speed moderated the first panel, beginning with a performance of Schumann’s Lied, based on the poem of Heinrich Heine of Die Beiden Grenadiere, performed brilliantly by baritone William Warfield, the late Schiller Institute board member, whose rendering captured the sickness of militarism. Speed the ran a clip from a speech by Lyndon LaRouche in 1996 on the nature of the British Empire, which can be defeated when its financial empire disintegrates—as it is doing now.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s keynote address, “Let’s Win Mission Impossible or Find Another Planet!” posed the image of a high-speed train approaching a cliff at top speed, with an engineer at the controls who has gone mad and will do nothing to stop the train. That is the reality of the current rush to war with Russia which would certainly be nuclear, ending civilization as we know it, or outright extinction of the human race. This did not start with the Russian military operation in Ukraine, but was the policy of the West from the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the lost opportunity to have a peace regime for mankind. Instead, she said, “shock therapy” was imposed on Russia, followed by NATO expansion, nuclear missiles placed on its border, leading to the U.S. violent coup against the Ukraine government in 2014 and the U.S./U.K. arming of the Nazi-linked regime to wage war on its own citizens who refused to support the coup. Now, Helga Zepp-LaRouche noted, the massive sanctions on Russia and the ongoing “decoupling” from China are proving to be self-destructive, intersecting the already collapsing Western financial system, while threatening 1.7 billion people with starvation. Lyndon LaRouche warned in 1971 that Nixon’s destruction of FDR’s Bretton Woods system would lead to precisely this breakdown crisis and the threat of global war.

Convincing the U.S. and Europe to end the madness, she added, and to negotiate with the major powers to not only end the war, but to create a New Bretton Woods system based on security and development for all nations, may seem impossible, but it is not. When the elite fail to lead, citizens must become leaders, she insisted, stating that at moments of crisis, history is shaped not only by money and power, but by ideas.

Andrey Kortunov, the Director General of the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC), then spoke on the “Indivisible Security of All Nations.” The current severe economic and military actions against Russia are not a reaction to the war in Ukraine, he said, but have been building for years, pointing most recently to the creation of the AUKUS military bloc, the Quad, Biden’s “Summit of Democracies” and the constant expansion of military forces around Russia. He said that beginning with the 2003 illegal war on Iraq, many European nations began to break from the U.S./U.K. war policies, and also with the Obama “Pivot to Asia,” which were considered provocative and unnecessary, as was Trump’s trade war and tech war with China. But now the U.S. and U.K. have forced Europe to follow orders against Russia, to Europe’s economic detriment. It cannot last, he argued, as the collapse of the dollar as the world currency is leading to the disintegration of the West. The historic differences between East and West, and between North and South, fostered by imperial geopolitics, are losing their relative importance, as the new coalition of forces behind China and Russia are uniting nations from all parts of the world.

Wang Wen, the Executive Dean of Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, and Deputy Dean of the Silk Road School at Renmin University of China, spoke on “Why China’s Rise Is Beneficial to the World.” He reviewed the miraculous rise of China over the past 40 years, demonstrating that it took place without any war or any serious financial crisis, which has never happened elsewhere in history. The West sees rising China as a threat, he said, because they assume that since Western nations did many evil things throughout their history as the leading powers in the world, that China will do the same. They don’t consider that China believes in its slogan of “win-win,” as opposed to the West’s use of sanctions and a big stick. But China’s rise is in fact an “upgrade” in the history of great powers. He declared that China is responsible for 60% of the investment in Africa, and that China provided fully half of the ventilators and masks for the world during the pandemic. He insisted that China will not allow Taiwan, an integral part of China, to be separated from the nation as the U.S. is increasingly promoting, and that China’s military buildup should not be surprising with the open threats from the U.S. A strong China, however, is a benefit for the peace and development of the world. He concluded that China should be trusted.

Col. Richard Black (ret.), the former Marine combat veteran and head of the Army Criminal War Division at the Pentagon, spoke on “The U.S. Is Leading the World to Nuclear War.” He declared that “Ukraine has lost the war. The war is not over, but Ukraine has lost.” He noted the horrendous casualty rate of the Ukrainian military, calculating that per capita it is 60 times greater than the rate of casualties of American soldiers in the Vietnam War, making it unsustainable. The U.S. sanctions have failed in their stated intent to destroy the Russian economy or to isolate the country, as Russia’s trade and cooperation outside of the West has expanded dramatically. The insane propaganda regime demonizing Russia is now crumbling, he pointed out, while the European nations have lost any semblance of sovereignty, as demonstrated by the forced closure of Nord Stream 2 and related orders from Washington and London causing economic collapse across Europe. The open promotion of the use of nuclear weapons by several political leaders in the West, he said, is utter madness. The necessary solution lies in Ukraine following the Austrian model—neutrality, non-alignment and no foreign troops.

Sam Pitroda, an IT innovator and a former cabinet minister or advisor to seven Indian Prime Ministers, spoke on “India and the Emerging New World Architecture.” He said he spoke as a “Global Citizen” on the future of humanity, counterposing the great potential of IT, life sciences and new energy to transform the world, lift millions out of poverty and develop all nations, but that “profit and power, not people and the planet,” are governing and leading to chaos. He called for a new economic order, more decentralized, with local enterprise and agriculture, but with respect to globalization. Born in 1942 under the British Raj, he looked to “Gandhian thought” and nonviolence, contrasting the $2 trillion in military spending every year compared to the few billion it would take to end hunger. There is no hope to end the domestic violence rampant in the U.S. as long as military spending and war fighting remain U.S. policy.

Dr. Wolfgang Bittner, a Doctor of Law and a prolific German writer, spoke on “The West-East Conflict—An Orchestration.” He asserted that Germany has never been granted true sovereignty following World War II, and the U.S. policy has been to prevent at all costs the cooperation between Germany and Russia. Germany is still an occupied country, with 11 major U.S. military bases on its territory. While Putin gave an impassioned speech to the Bundestag in 2001, in German, calling for a united Europe for peace and development, that was prevented by U.S. imperial pretensions, which has caused disruption to the entire world. He asked, what are the “Western values” being defended in Ukraine, where Nazis are openly part of the military and the government, and they are waging a deadly war on their own people. He pointed to the hubris of U.S. leaders, and to Obama in particular, claiming that the U.S. has been imperial- minded since the 1823 Monroe Doctrine.

This claim of a U.S. imperial nature was challenged by a question from a LaRouche Organization member, who said it sounded more like the British Empire, but was the opposite of the original “American System” of Alexander Hamilton, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt, among others. That led to a fruitful discussion by the panel on the role of the British in three wars to destroy the American system, while Russia came to America’s defense in its Revolution, in the Civil War to prevent British support to the Confederacy, while they U.S. and the U.S.S.R. collaborated in World War II to defeat Nazism. Helga Zepp-LaRouche polemicized that the U.S. has given up the American System, and that ironically China is today practicing the American System of directed credit while the U.S. has succumbed to the British System of “free trade.”

Dr. Cliff Kiracofe, a former Senior Staff Member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and President of the Washington Institute for Peace and Development, spoke on “Diplomacy and Cooperation in a Time of Crisis.” He decried the U.S. leading the West back to a Cold War “crusade” against the reality of a world shifting to multipolarity with the rise of China. This was true of Obama, of Trump, and now Biden, whose “Summit of Democracies” and sanctions regime are forcing a bifurcation of the world, while the collapse of diplomacy is creating chaos and the danger of global war. The West is “pouring billions into a neo-Nazi sewer” in Ukraine, he said, while creating “helicopter money” and negative interest rate credit to bail out banks and fund the military, while the real economy collapses. The sanctions are forcing Russia and China to create an alternative financial system, but, he insisted, “two competing systems is not a solution.” We must plan now for a new international system which includes all nations, assuring security and development, as Franklin Roosevelt did with the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, before the end of the war. Roosevelt recognized that any peace required internationalism and the role of the major powers, as in the United Nations. Militarism must be replaced with internationalism, and diplomacy must be restored immediately if this pending disaster is to be avoided.

Discussion: A few highlights of the rich discussion period: Mrs. LaRouche responded to the “powerful speeches” by calling on all participants in this conference to join in formulating a new initiative, reviving an earlier Schiller Institute mobilization which gathered thousands of supporters 15 years ago, calling for a New Bretton Woods Conference to be sponsored by the UN.

Sam Pitroda worried that the political leaders “are not listening,” that many groups are sounding the alarm, but they are not being heard. A LaRouche Organization member in the audience responded that in such a moment of existential crisis, a single voice telling the truth will have more influence on the citizenry than the lies from the failed leaders.

Andrey Kortunov responded to a question on the dangerous food crisis, by explaining how the food crisis began long before the Ukraine war. He said that sanction waivers are needed to free up Russian and Ukrainian food and fertilizer, but that will not suffix, calling for a “Green Revolution 2.0,” like that of the 1960s, on a global scale, to vastly expand food production.

Cliff Kiracofe noted that U.S. German relations were extremely close in the 19th Century, when Bismarck adopted the American System from Friedrich List, a follower of Hamilton. American students studied in large numbers at the excellent German universities, in particular at Göttingen. The later rise of Nietzschean nihilism brought militarism not only to Germany, but to the U.S. as well, as seen in the neocons’ militarism of today.