Report on Schiller Institute Conference : War? or Peace through a New Paradigm?

The Schiller Institute conference of April 9 was an extraordinary demonstration of the cooperation of all nations and cultures required to address the current threat to civilization. Political and institutional leaders from four continents, including the Ambassador of the Russian Federation to the United States, addressed the “perfect storm” facing mankind — the military and economic confrontation of nuclear powers, the hyper-inflationary collapse of the dollar-based financial system, a continuing pandemic, and a cultural decline into a new dark age. Despite differences on particular issues, all speakers concurred that only a total systemic change, a new international security and development architecture of the sort represented by the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, can both reverse the collapse and begin the necessary process to create a new era of global peace through development.

We provide a short overview of the proceedings here and in the following four items, but we encourage our readers to watch the videos on the Schiller Institute (SI) websites (a preliminary program of the four panels was included in last week’s issue). The texts of many of the speeches will also be published in English in the upcoming issues of EIR magazine .

In opening the proceedings, SI chairwoman Helga Zepp-LaRouche noted that the acute danger of world war we are facing today, and even of nuclear war, began to build long before the Russian military operation in Ukraine. As her late husband Lyndon LaRouche always stressed, the driving factor for war has been the inevitable breakdown of the trans-Atlantic financial system and neo-liberalism, which threatens to bring down the power structures of the current elites. From that perspective, she briefly reviewed the development of NATO-Russia relations since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Today, it is clear that the “unipolar world” imposed by Great Britain and the U.S. has caused tremendous poverty globally, to the point now that one billion people may soon be facing starvation, which reflects a blatant moral failure. But a new system is emerging, centered on powers outside the trans-Atlantic world. Driven by the illegal regime of economic sanctions, Russia, China, India and others are beginning to plan a new currency system, but Zepp-LaRouche cautioned, we must work to get the U.S. and Europe to end their defense of the bankrupt financial institutions and join the new system based on peace through development.

Russian Federation Ambassador to the U.S. Anatoly Antonov then delivered his remarks, focussed on presenting Moscow’s view of the current, dangerous confrontation between the United States and NATO and Russia. The crisis, he said, cannot be reduced to the Ukraine issue, one must look at the root cause of the problem. Highlights of his speech are provided above.