The March to Folly, and How to Stop It

The May 8 Schiller Institute conference was opened by Helga Zepp-LaRouche with a dramatic appeal to reverse the current strategic dynamic, which is catapulting the world toward the “potential extinction of civilization”. The conference, held under the banner of the need for a new paradigm to overcome the current moral collapse of the Trans-Atlantic world, brought together speakers from many countries, all committed to promoting an approach of “peace through development”.

The event had been organized on short notice following Cardinal Zenari’s report from Damascus in late March on the humanitarian emergency in Syria, in order to mobilize support for ending the murderous sanctions policy, which has become aroutine tool of Western policy, although in clear violation of the most basic international law (cf. SAS 16, 18/21). Highlights of the first panel of the conference are covered below. The second panel, which dealt with concrete examples of how farmers, medical workers and concerned citizens are working together in the Schiller Institute’s Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites, will be covered in the next issue.

In her keynote speech, Zepp-LaRouche went through the three gravest dangers facing the world today: 1) thermonuclear war, if not by design, then by accident, 2) an out-of control pandemic and famine, and 3) the neo-Malthusian ideology of those promoting depopulation and “green finances”.

On the war danger, she pointed to the strategic tensions between the so-called West and both Russia and China that have reached un unprecedented height. The two most dangerous tripwires for a nuclea war at this point, she said, are the conflict with Russia over over Ukraine, and with China around the Taiwan issue. In that context, U.S. Admiral Charles Richard had instructed the Pentagon in February to upgrade the chances of nuclear war from “unlikely” to “very likely”.

The World Food Program warned in March that 34 million people are “on the brink of famine”, and urgently need food aid. In Syria specifically, after 10 years of war and sanctions, 90% of the population now lives below the poverty line, while food prices increased by 236% in 2020 alone, the year the ignominious Caesar Act was implemented by the United States. Such “unilateral sanctions”, Helga Zepp-LaRouche stated, are utterly “illegal”, and target above all children and poor people, as can be seen in the tragic situation in Yemen. As for the COVID catastrophe in India, she said it is just one example of how quickly the pandemic can explode in the entire developing sector, leading to mass deaths.

At the same time, the Trans-Atlantic financial system is bankrupt, while the policy of quantiative easing has led to a potential hyperinflationary blow-out such as in Germany in 1923, but this time on a global scale (cf. below). The latest scheme of the financial oligarchy, dubbed the “Great Reset”, is a desperate attempt to pump up a new “green bubble”, through decarbonization of the economy, which means deindustrialization and the takedown and/or the prevention of modern agriculture.

As a result of all this, Zepp-LaRouche said, we are now at the point that her late husband Lyndon LaRouche foresaw in the early 1970s, when he warned that the monetarist, neoliberal policy, coupled with IMF conditionalities imposed on developing nations would lead to new pandemics, global war and a new fascism. Clearly, she declared, “the chickens have come home to roost.”

Nonetheless, for the chairwoman of the Schiller Institute (SI), it is not too late to turn the situation around. But for that, we need a massive mobilization of all forces to ensure the creation of a global health infrastructure together with poverty alleviation programs such as China has so successfully implemented, while creating a new credit system exclusively geared to productive investments in the real economy, as opposed to speculation, and putting an end once and for all to geopolitics in favor of cooperation around the common aims of mankind, of which space exploration is exemplary.

See below for further coverage of the SI conference.