Executive Intelligence Review, Volume 47, Number 51, December 18, 2020

- Cover

- Masthead

- PDF edition Table of Contents — Volume 47, Number 51, December 18, 2020

- I. Schiller Institute Looks at the World After the U.S. Election

- PANEL 1: Hang Together, or Hang Separately: Free and Sovereign Republics or Digital Dictatorship? by Rainer Apel

- Viktor Dedaj: The Crucifixion of Julian Assange, A Journalist Committed to Truth and Peace

- Hidden Scandals Are Emerging Now: Why? by Paul Gallagher

- William Binney: Fraud and Cover-Up

- PANEL 2: Escaping the Danger of World War III: A Strategic Order Based on the Common Aims of Mankind Great-Power Strategic Relations May Soon Change: Schiller Institute Conference Discusses How by Paul Gallagher

- Cusa and Mankind: the Immortal Species by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

- Col. Richard H. Black (USA Ret.) NATO Poses a Grave Threat to World Peace

- PANEL 3: Overcoming the World Health Crisis and the Hunger Pandemic Thinking on the Level of the Coincidentia Oppositorum by Marcia Merry Baker

- The Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

- Dr. Joycelyn Elders Carving a Stone of Hope out of a Mountain of Despair

- Schiller Institute Conference Program

- II. Indian Farmers Challenge Global Food Cartels

- Mass Farmer Protest in India Is Front Line Against Cartels and Famine by Marcia Merry Baker and Ramtanu Maitra

- III. Relations with China

- The Trump-Xi Big Deals of 2017Worth $253 Billion for China-U.S.A. by Marcia Merry Baker

- A Tale of Two Think Tanks: Canberra Escalates McCarthyism, Defunds Diplomacy by Richard Bardon

Solve the Worldwide Crisis of Food and Healthcare

Founder: Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (1922–2019)

Editor-in-Chief: Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Co-Editors: Marcia Merry Baker, Michael Billington, Stephanie Ezrol, Paul Gallagher

Managing Editor: Stephanie Ezrol

Editorial Staff: David Cherry, Charles Notley

Technology: Marsha Freeman

Transcriptions: Katherine Notley

Ebooks: Richard Burden

Graphics: Alan Yue

Photos: Stuart Lewis

Circulation Manager: Stanley Ezrol

INTELLIGENCE DIRECTORS

Asia: Michael Billington

Economics: Marcia Merry Baker, Paul Gallagher

History: Anton Chaitkin

Ibero-America: Dennis Small

United States: Debra Freeman

INTERNATIONAL BUREAUS

Berlin: Elke Fimmen

Copenhagen: Tom Gillesberg

Lima: Sara Madueño

Melbourne: Robert Barwick

Mexico City: Gerardo Castilleja Chávez

New Delhi: Ramtanu Maitra

Paris: Christine Bierre

Stockholm: Ulf Sandmark

United Nations, N.Y.C.: Richard Black, Leni Rubinstein

Washington, D.C.: William Jones

Wiesbaden: Rainer Apel

ON THE WEB

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EIR Contents

www.larouchepub.com — Volume 47, Number 51, December 18, 2020

Cover This Week

CC/Randeep Maddoke and (right) Schiller Institute

Three hundred thousand Indian farmers streamed to New Delhi in late November, to protest deregulation, demanded by the food cartels. The showdown continues.

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SOLVE THE WORLDWIDE CRISIS OF FOOD AND HEALTHCARE

I. SCHILLER INSTITUTE LOOKS AT THE WORLD AFTER THE U.S. ELECTIONS

Schiller Institute Conference

December 12-13

The World After the U.S. Election:

Creating a World Based on Reason

PANEL 1

3 Hang Together, or Hang Separately: Free and Sovereign Republics, or Digital Dictatorship?

by Rainer Apel

5 The Crucifixion of Julian Assange, A Journalist Committed to Truth and Peace

by Viktor Dedaj

8 Hidden Scandals Are Emerging Now: Why?

by Paul Gallagher

9 Fraud and Cover-Up

by William Binney

PANEL 2

Escaping the Danger of World War III:

A Strategic Order Based on the Common Aims of Mankind

12 Great-Power Strategic Relations May Soon Change: Schiller Institute Conference Discusses How

by Paul Gallagher

14 Cusa and Mankind the Immortal Species

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

20 NATO Poses a Grave Threat to World Peace

by Col. Richard H. Black (USA Ret.)

PANEL 3

Overcoming the World Health Crisis and the Hunger Pandemic

22 Thinking on the Level of the Coincidentia Oppositorum

by Marcia Merry Baker

25 The Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

26 Carve a Stone of Hope Out of a Mountain of Despair

by Dr. Joycelyn Elders

28 Schiller Institute Conference Program

II. INDIAN FARMERS CHALLENGE GLOBAL FOOD CARTELS

29 Mass Farmer Protest in India Is Front Line Against Cartels and Famine

by Marcia Merry Baker and Ramtanu Maitra

III. RELATIONS WITH CHINA

34 U.S. GOVERNORS’ FORUM

How Pompeo’s War on China Has Destroyed the U.S. Economy

by Michael Billington

38 The Trump-Xi Big Deals of 2017: Worth $253 Billion for China-U.S.A.

by Marcia Merry Baker

40 A Tale of Two Think Tanks: Canberra Escalates McCarthyism, Defunds Diplomacy

by Richard Bardon

NOTE: EIR will skip the issue which would be dated Friday, Dec. 25, 2019. Subscriptions will not be affected.

I. Schiller Institute Looks at the World

After the U.S. Election

Schiller Institute Conference

The World After the U.S. Election:

Creating a World Based on Reason

December 12-13, 2020

Videos of the entire conference are available here.

PANEL 1

Hang Together, or Hang Separately:

Free and Sovereign Republics or

Digital Dictatorship?

by Rainer Apel

Dec. 12—The Schiller Institute opened its two-day, online international conference, “The World after the U.S. Election—Creating a World Based on Reason,” this morning with the first panel dedicated to the theme “Hang Together, or Hang Separately—Free and Sovereign Republics or Digital Dictatorship?” The panel, moderated by Dennis Speed, featured six speakers: Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche (Germany); two members of the recently created International Investigative Commission on Truth in Elections, Marino Elsevyf, Attorney-at-law (Dominican Republic), member of the 1995 Martin Luther King International Tribunal, and David Meiswinkle (U.S.), Attorney-at-Law; Viktor Dedaj (France), citizen-journalist; Harley Schlanger (U.S.), Board of Directors, Schiller Institute; and David Christie (U.S.), LaRouche Policy Committee.

Referencing the setback which the Texas State legal action just suffered at the Supreme Court, Zepp-LaRouche said in her introductory remarks that the fight against the vote fraud is not over, but what must be addressed is a fight for a solution to all the other big problems that challenge mankind at this present time: the Covid-19 pandemic, the new famine which is threatening 270 million lives, the financial collapse, the strategic confrontation of NATO with Russia and China—all of these being a threat to the human species as a whole.

A video clip featured Lyndon LaRouche’s remarks to a Schiller conference on September 2, 2000 on the mission of mankind to improve the universe as well as human conditions of life, by investigating the universal principles, this mission being the only aspect that makes man different from animals. LaRouche said in part:

So, what is action? What is relevant action? What kind of actions can we take, which the universe acknowledges to be a command?

Well, typical of those kinds of acts that we make—which we can prove, the universe will obey, otherwise the universe won’t obey them—are actions which conform to the discovery of a universal physical principle. If you can discover a validated, universal physical principle, and you can give that, as an order to the universe, the universe will obey. Man is the only creature that can do that! That can formulate an order, called a universal physical principle, validate that discovery, and issue that discovery as an order, a command, to the universe, and the universe is compelled to obey.

Zepp-LaRouche then addressed the need for a new Renaissance in the tradition of Plato and Nicholas of Cusa, for a new paradigm of human existence.

Marino Elsevyf and David Meiswinkle reported on the founding session of the International Investigative Commission on November 28, Elsevyf in particular recalling that this vote fraud pattern has been there for at least 20 years, and that Lyndon LaRouche was absolutely on the mark when also about 20 years ago he spoke about the Manifest Destiny of the United States to bring the world back to the principle of reason—a new principle of a kind that is needed now, continuing the work of the U.S. Presidents like Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Meiswinkle gave a detailed account of heavy evidence of the vote fraud, also pointing out that this practice has been in place for a long time. He himself witnessed it many times in elections in New Jersey where he is based. This time, there has been a “mail-in vote tsunami,” he said, and all of that needs to be investigated. This is a challenge to U.S. citizens to stand up and fight for their Constitution which is so much disrespected now. But there is a revolutionary moment developing of people that realize that a massive vote fraud has been orchestrated, Meiswinkle said, so “The battle has begun!”

Viktor Dedaj then focused on “The Crucifixion of Julian Assange: A Journalist Committed to Truth and Peace,” as a striking example of breaches of laws and constitutions, of lies and fake news, of inhuman treatment and seven years of imprisonment, of an information war like never before. Dedaj portrayed Assange’s creation of WikiLeaks as a great contribution to breaking the conspiracy of lies and disinformation spread by the elites globally, saving the free press, making things public which would have been kept secret otherwise by the legacy press. Zepp-LaRouche noted later the urgency that President Trump pardon Assange, as his life is seriously threatened by the treatment he is facing in prison at the hands of the British.

Harley Schlanger, in his speech, “What Are the Principles and Facts Concerning the Recent U.S. Election?” lashed out against the vote fraud as occurring in the overall march into dictatorship and the danger of a new world war, caused by the U.S. military might and the military-industrial complex around it. This cabal is trying to impose extra-territorial dictates across the world, all states that stand in the way of that are being attacked—Libya, Syria, Iraq, Ukraine—while Russia and China are being provoked. Citizens must get the big picture of what is behind this—it is the physical economy and who has the power over it: the oligarchy of the Empire or the people represented by the Republic. This is what our forefathers have fought for, for several centuries. Harley called for a Special Prosecutor to be appointed by Trump to carry out the investigation of the massive vote fraud.

Under the theme, “The British Empire’s Digital Dictatorship: Censorship and Mass Social Control,” David Christie elaborated on the role of social control as the most efficient method of oligarchical rule, its beginning dating to the British Empire’s role in Africa in the 1930s, the role of the Tavistock Institute, such imperial bodies as the International Network of Social Analysis [INSA], the media aspects with their fake news, and the internet-based color revolutions which are not there to promote democracy but to install a digitized Empire. This manipulation machine is active in Hong Kong, in Belarus, and many other states, and the U.S. vote fraud apparatus is an integral part of that. What is urgently required, Christie said, is that people declare themselves to be fed up with all of the Reesian Tavistock methods and return to the higher poetical concepts represented by the great minds like Cusa.

The discussion period after the six presentations saw an intervention first by William Binney, on the fact that the FBI has known all the time that there is vote fraud in practice; the FBI knew it before Trump was elected in 2016 that there was an “inside job” done and not an outside one done by Russia. To this, the panelists responded, with Zepp-LaRouche stressing that the appointing of a Special Prosecutor was really urgent, with Meiswinkle calling on citizens to step to the forefront and fight for their constitutional rights, with Schlanger recalling that this prosecutor was even proposed by Trump himself, so he should do it right now. Elsevyf stressed again the need to return to the principle of reason and investigate all the evidence of vote manipulation, while Christie elaborated on the fake color revolutions allegedly fighting against “authoritarian regimes,” whereas the real issue is real leadership based on principles of the Republic against the Empire.

We publish below the full remarks by Viktor Dedaj and William Binney. Next week’s EIR will include David Christie’s presentation on the manipulation of social networks for social control by intelligence agencies and their minions in the fields of cybernetics, sociology, and anthropology.

Viktor Dedaj

The Crucifixion of Julian Assange,

A Journalist Committed to Truth and Peace

Mr. Dedaj is Co-administrator of the French alternative media website, Le Grand Soir, https://www.legrandsoir.info/. This is the edited text of the English translation of his remarks delivered on Panel 2 of the December 12-13 Schiller Institute conference.

Schiller Institute

Viktor Dedaj

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I am a “citizen journalist” who has adopted this mission for 30 years now after discovering and following politics in Latin America. I have been following the past and present evolution of the Latin American situation, especially Nicaragua and later Cuba. It was therefore natural that I was very interested in all notions of knowledge, freedom of the press, and how to circulate propaganda.

WikiLeaks: A New Hope in Media

When WikiLeaks appeared on the international scene in 2010, it appeared only natural that we should meet somewhere. And this experience of WikiLeaks, for us alternative media, alternative journalists, was literally a kind of hope. A hope to get rid of having to depend on the information conveyed by the mainstream media, which we were certainly scrutinizing and analyzing.

Now a new media offered us raw and unfiltered information. The WikiLeaks model was crucial for us. This model was the following. It offered to whistle-blowers the ability to anonymously post authentic documents issued by insiders within the entities of corrupt systems without risk of retaliation or punishment. In addition, WikiLeaks and its team of journalists and technicians guaranteed the authenticity of these documents. The third thing WikiLeaks was morally committed to, was that someone, somewhere, had taken risks to expose crimes or embezzlement.

This model was something quite extraordinary, quite innovative. Similar sites existed, but they lacked the dimension and the validity of the data, the certification of the authenticity of the documents.

You are aware of the 2010 publication of the famous video “Collateral murder,” which I considered a sort of trailer WikiLeaks prepared to introduce a whole series of other documents, terrible documents about the reality of the wars that were hidden from us. We were there with the WikiLeaks phenomenon at the heart of a major problem that appeared in the post-9/11 world.

This world, the turning point after the attacks, is distinguished by several factors.

The first is the state of astonishment in which the world found itself under the threat of an American empire that was unleashed with words like “you’re either with us, or against us.”

A second element, post-9/11, is the explosion of the security and intelligence services in terms of volume and margins for maneuvering. The tentacles of these entities were spreading. They were becoming more and more invasive and less and less controlled. Governments, under the pretext of fighting terrorism, a phenomenon, arrogated to themselves the right to practice more and more in the dark and less and less in transparency.

And as for the media—and this is the essential point—they abandoned any claim of objectivity ... and we saw the emergence of what has been called “embedded journalism.” The big international media did not even pretend to do their job. So it was logical that a media like WikiLeaks, which we could call Media 2.0, emerged soon after these phenomena. It was essential for democracy that our right to know as citizens be restored. And this right to know, which was sacred to WikiLeaks, was probably the greatest service it could render to humanity, at that moment, in the midst of those events.

If you think about it, you become aware of it, and I think the public didn’t realize it immediately, but some people got the point very quickly.

The model that WikiLeaks proposed, the model of being able to propose to insiders within organizations to denounce abuses anonymously, and thus with a certain guarantee of impunity, is important.

Well, this Modus Operandi was an existential threat to all corrupt structures. And I insist on corrupt structures because, starting from the idea that WikiLeaks spied and revealed things, it is easy to understand that WikiLeaks did not denounce and has never denounced good deeds. It is not the good deeds that the whistleblowers transmit in the hope of making them public. It is indeed a question of embezzlement, and in this case, speaking of the publications of 2010, truly, war crimes.

Repression of Assange and WikiLeaks

And here the media have done their job of stifling WikiLeaks, because when WikiLeaks releases a video, ok, it gets media attention, but in reality, very little is reported about the content.

The repression that came down on Julian Assange and WikiLeaks was equal to the real or perceived existential threat. It was clear that the U.S. administration, in short, was determined 1) not to let this model work normally, and 2) above all not to repeat itself.

To go after Assange therefore required not simply neutralizing the organization, but an intimidation to make clear that it was dangerous to fight for its right to inform. You know that Assange was accused of being a sexual abuser, and this kind of stuff.

In the meantime, we have proof that it was a frame-up. It was the journalist Stefania Maurizi of La Repubblica, an Italian investigative journalist who got us the emails exchanged between the two prosecutors that show collusion. We know that the arrest warrant issued by the Swedish prosecutor was irregular. We know that the British were forced to change the law after arresting Julian Assange because of the irregularity of their arrest warrant but in the end accepted.

We know that the trap had closed around Julian Assange’s ankle, like a wolf caught in a trap, and he knew that he was expected in Sweden to be sent to the United States for the serious crime of having allowed us to know the truth. So he took refuge in the embassy where the British took extraordinary measures, never before seen for a person who was formally accused of nothing, since the prosecutor, Marianne Ny, had only launched a preliminary investigation and nothing else.

Seven years in an embassy of 70 square meters without having seen the light of day, WikiLeaks was able to continue to act and did even more by saving—this is what I believe—saving the life of Edward Snowden by organizing his escape—if I may say so—from Hong Kong. Few people know this, but Edward Snowden owes his present freedom to Julian Assange.

Unfortunately all the attempts to regularize his situation—all the attempts to set up humanitarian channels to cure him of his lung disease, his shoulder problem, his broken tooth—everything failed, largely due to the bad will of Great Britain, which treated Assange worse than the way it had treated the [Chilean] dictator [Augusto] Pinochet, who in his time had benefited from a 4-star hotel and humanitarian measures.

The determination to capture Assange was stated loud and clear with an embassy surrounded night and day by British police officers at the cost to the American taxpayer of tens of millions of pounds sterling.

Later, as you know, the Ecuadorian government was to change, and the betrayal by the new president, Lenín Moreno, was blatant. He reneges on all the commitments made, he violates the constitution, and almost at the same time, it becomes clear that Julian Assange had been the subject of a full-fledged spy operation by the very company that was in charge of security at the embassy, UC Global, which is currently on trial in Madrid.

The fact that Lenín Moreno went on to betray almost all of his promises, including to his voters, violated the Ecuadorian constitution itself, made life impossible for Julian Assange and attempted by all means available to push him out of the embassy, for example, by turning off the heating in his room, by installing new staff who became very aggressive with him, by setting up impractical visiting conditions, by cutting off his internet communications, by accusing him of organizing a world spy center from the embassy, etc., in short, by even accusing him of covering the walls of the embassy with his excrement! This is what the president of Ecuador said at a press conference. Of course, it was not known at the time that everything was recorded and filmed and that all the madness surrounding Julian Assange could be demonstrated as a fraud precisely because of their own espionage.

This simple fact of having been spied on, including his lawyers and the journalists who visited him, even his doctors, should, because of the violation of the client/lawyer privilege, have made any trial impossible in England, but as we will see throughout this case, legality has nothing to do with this story.

Defamation and Sham Legal Maneuverings

So it was a question of getting their hands on the greatest journalist of the 21st century, and how would they do it? They were to proceed with a propaganda campaign to infiltrate people’s minds very slowly over a period of ten years, where urban legends would appear about what WikiLeaks is doing, the crimes allegedly committed by WikiLeaks, and also about the person of Julian Assange, presented as a mythomaniac, as a misogynist, and sometimes as an anti-Semite—in short all the weapons known to destroy someone’s personality.

This campaign was not a surprise, in fact it had been prepared by one of those private intelligence companies that gravitate around the CIA, the NSA, and the rest of that crowd. We’re talking about the Stratfor company, which is one of the main companies in charge of the fight against WikiLeaks, and we know this because a leak from the company was passed on to WikiLeaks.

When Julian Assange was finally removed from the Embassy in violation of international law and even the Ecuadorian constitution, it only took a quarter of an hour for the British judge first to insult him, and then to sentence him to 50 weeks in prison, for violating what? His “conditions of probation,” which is a sentence that has never been more severe for someone who has committed such a crime, especially since he committed it to seek refuge and asylum in an embassy. But he will not just be sentenced to 50 weeks, but to 50 weeks in a high security prison. We will see that this is the only case to my knowledge in Great Britain, that a journalist, accused of nothing, in preventive detention, is locked up in a high security prison.

The second shock that will really surprise you, but which is not really a surprise, is that at that moment, as if by chance, Sweden, and the Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny, decides that finally, it is a good time to abandon the case, as she had decided in 2007 to reopen it. In fact the Swedes opened and closed the case three times! Because it was necessary to give space to the real actor of this farce—I mean the United States Department of Justice, which during all this time was hidden backstage behind the curtains, but with their shoes protruding under the curtain. And here they came, presenting themselves to ask for the extradition of Julian Assange.

A Rendition, Not an Extradition

So already if we stop and think about the words—because here we are in the middle of propaganda—extradition, already there, we are in the middle of it, extradition is sending someone back to a country where he has committed a crime or sending him back to a country where he has to serve a sentence.

Julian Assange is an Australian, strangely qualified as a traitor in the United States. He is a journalist who has worked in Europe, whose publishing house is based in Reykjavik, Iceland. It is therefore not actually an extradition. Julian Assange has never been under American jurisdiction. It is simply a well-established American habit of exercising extra-territoriality, a new extra-territoriality, and after their embargo law, the Americans have decided to apply an extra-territoriality to an Australian journalist on the basis of an old law from 1917, the “Espionage Act.”

It is not therefore an extradition in the strict sense of the term. The word “extradition” is used by the press and by the Ministry of Justice to confuse the public in order to hide the following fact: Julian Assange is the subject of a sophisticated form of “rendition,” of forced kidnapping on British soil disguised as an extradition. As far as Europe is concerned, especially London, it is about the equivalent of pulling a hood over his head and throwing him in the trunk of a car and taking him off to a wasteland.

Not a single person found an anomaly and raised their finger to wonder what exactly was going on. So the urban legends and propaganda campaigns tried to turn Julian Assange and WikiLeaks into some kind of terrorist organization. That’s how he was labeled, agent of Russian forces of course, and a whole panoply of epithets that served to slowly erase the passing years, to erase from the public’s consciousness the memory of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange who in 2010 had made the front page of Le Monde and Time magazine. He was the man of the year, representing the organization of the year. Today there are a lot of people asking us who Julian Assange is. Ah yes, WikiLeaks reminds me of something. The greatest press adventure of the 21st century, the most promising experiment has literally been erased from the collective consciousness.

The Show Trial

The trial that finally took place on September 7 will have seen the same strategy applied. The Americans will change several charges; the public knows the first ones that were launched in February, but in August, at the last minute, the Americans presented a whole new series of charges that had nothing to do with the first ones, and during the trial they changed again their arguments and their guns by questioning witnesses who were prepared for charges that were 7 months old.

So much so that they even tried to destabilize an important witness, Daniel Ellsberg, by sending him 300 pages at 3 o’clock in the morning when he was supposed to testify at 6 o’clock in the morning.

During this trial we saw the Americans finally say out loud what everyone knew: that they gave themselves the right to come and get any journalist anywhere in the world under the Espionage Act of 1917.

We saw a trial that almost took place behind closed doors, refusing by name the presence of about 50 NGOs, where 90 journalists had been accredited and not a single one came. In the room there were only four people and a few rare witnesses who could tell us how the trial unfolded. We saw American lawyers who were extremely aggressive towards the witnesses but who lost their footing in the face of witnesses of exceptional strength. Losing ground to such an extent that we saw the American lawyer, Lewis, attacking his own witness after having forgotten that it was his witness, and so annoyed at not receiving the right answers. This operation to kidnap Julian Assange that is taking place before our eyes will probably succeed despite all efforts, because of a parallel event to this trial: the silence of the media.

Here in France we have solidarity—several hundred people who are trying by all means to warn of the danger of what has just been done.

Extraterritoriality

The extraterritoriality of American laws and their affirmation means that no journalist is safe anywhere. The justification employed for prosecuting a journalist abroad is important, it’s interesting. Their justification is that since he published on the internet, it is as though he published everywhere in the world, and thus in the United States. Therefore, for all of us who would like to defend our right to know, who believe they would be safe, elsewhere, far away, well, no, they would not.

Apparently, the paradigm is changing, a new era is opening up and from the most absolute silence we have probably fallen into an information war as we have never seen it before. It is clear that the people targeted are not mainstream journalists but real investigative journalists and so-called alternative media.

In conclusion, I have only one thing to say to you: Imagine a world with WikiLeaks, a world without WikiLeaks, decide which world you prefer, and act accordingly.

Thank you.

Hidden Scandals Are Emerging Now: Why?

by Paul Gallagher

Dec. 13—In the second week of December, even as virtually every sworn statement, video, and legislative hearing about fraud during the Presidential election is being strictly blacked out by most media, other buried scandals are emerging, from earlier in the four-years’ battle between President Trump and the London-Wall Street oligarchy. One such, is the sudden revelation of an FBI criminal investigation into financial dealings of Joe Biden’s son Hunter—an investigation apparently underway for at least many months, but kept secret by the Justice Department even as exposés of the same financial dealings were made by the President’s supporters and called “Russian disinformation” by the media.

In the Schiller Institute’s conference panel, “Hang Together, or Hang Separately,” William Binney, a former Technical Director at the National Security Agency who became a famous whistleblower after 30 years, reported the sudden re-emergence of another scandal. Binney—whose expert team since 2017 has produced airtight proof that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) e-mails were not hacked in 2016 by Russians—revealed important developments regarding how WikiLeaks did get those e-mails to publish.

Again, the FBI has just this week admitted to an attorney in a long-running lawsuit, the Bureau’s long impoundment and inspection of the computer of a DNC employee—a murder victim in Washington, D.C. in 2016—who may have sent WikiLeaks those e-mails which exposed the DNC pushing Sen. Bernie Sanders out of the Presidential nomination. This after national media have spent years denouncing and suppressing any attempt to discover why this individual was then murdered.

This also brings to mind the fact that Julian Assange, at one point slightly later, offered a monetary reward from WikiLeaks to anyone who could provide information that would solve the murder of this individual.

“It just came out today,” Binney reported, “that the FBI suddenly found over 20,000 pages of information related to Seth Rich. And, they also had his computer, and on that computer, it was reported today, was evidence of him passing information, the emails from the DNC to WikiLeaks, asking for money for the rest of them, or something of that nature.” And Binney notes here, “It says that the FBI has known all along, even before the inauguration of President Trump, that the information that WikiLeaks had, had nothing to do with the Russians.”

Are these scandals suddenly emerging out of years of censorship and denial because the intelligence agencies and their controllers are finally now confident that they are getting rid of President Donald Trump? They’ve made that estimation before—and been mistaken—but they have not released their secret grip on such exposed crimes.

What follows is William Binney’s report to the Schiller Conference panel December 12.

William Binney

Fraud and Cover-Up

Bill Binney was at the National Security Agency (NSA) for 36 years. His system, known as ThinThread, would have been capable of preventing the 9/11 attacks from occurring, had its use not been prevented by NSA Director Michael Hayden and others at the NSA at the time. Ed Snowden and others have spoken of Bill as a pioneer in the pursuit of truth against digital dictatorship.

Schiller Institute

William Binney

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I’d like to address two basic things here. First, I’d like to say I’ve been reading about the case that Ty Clevenger, who’s a lawyer representing Ed Butowsky in a lawsuit involving the FBI and the discovery of information about the Seth Rich exchange of data with WikiLeaks. It just came out today that the FBI suddenly found over 20,000 pages of information related to Seth Rich. And, they also had his computer, and on that computer, it was reported today, was evidence of him passing information, the emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to WikiLeaks, asking for money for the rest of them, or something of that nature.

That’s basically what Sy Hersh’s conversation was all about that was recorded by Ed Butowsky, I believe, early on, and that was what was posted on the web, and people heard that. Sy wouldn’t publicly say anything about it, because he didn’t want to compromise his sources. But what that does is, it says that the FBI has known all along, even before the inauguration of President Trump, that the information that WikiLeaks had, had nothing to do with the Russians. It has an insider doing that job.

Now, we knew that from the forensics of the data that was published by WikiLeaks—simply by looking at the last modified times on all the 35,813 emails that were posted—that they all had the same even ending-numbers in terms of last modified time. That was clearly a forensic proof that the data was downloaded to a thumb drive or a CD-ROM, some memory stick, and then physically transported before WikiLeaks could post it. Which said to us that it was an inside job; we couldn’t say who it was that did it, but we could say it was an inside job, not a hack coming from Russia extracting data.

I think it was in January 2017, that Shawn Henry—he used to be the CEO of CrowdStrike—was testifying to the House Intelligence Committee, and he said that they had evidence that the data was prepared for exfiltration, but they never saw it being exfiltrated. That’s because it didn’t go across the web; it went down to a thumb drive, and when it did, it probably modified the times on file in terms of the data stored in the DNC. That’s how he said it was prepared to be exfiltrated, but he never really said how.

All of that says to me, the lie from the beginning has been known and is provable now to have been known by the FBI as well as everybody else.

And the same is true with Guccifer 2.0, and all the information we had on Guccifer 2.0 at that time said it was a lie, too. And all the evidence we could find, in terms of what happened with the data in Guccifer 2.0 and all of that in terms of modifying the data and stuff; all of that pointed back to CIA as the origin of Guccifer 2.0. And the time-stamps all said it was occurring somewhere inside the United States, on the East Coast primarily.

But still, the use of that Marble Framework program being said in WikiLeaks, and the Vault 7 material said it was used once in 2016. And we tied that with that Guccifer 2.0 material that he posted on the 15th of June of 2016. That clearly again was also found later on, published by WikiLeaks in the John Podesta emails, and in the Guccifer 2.0 emails, the Russian fingerprints were there, but in the posted WikiLeaks data, those fingerprints were not there. Which said that Guccifer 2.0 inserted them, and that’s typical of what the Marble Framework program did, and Vault 7 said it was used once in 2016. We said, well there it is. And that all points back to CIA as the origin of this.

Now, I told this to Pompeo when he was the Director of the CIA, and said all these agencies are lying to you and the President. He said he couldn’t believe that, because he thought, well all these are good Americans here. Well, he’s finding out they’re not; and it’s coming out now more and more that we have a real corrupt set of criminals in charge of our government down there. And they’re the bureaucrats, not the elected people. They go along to get along internally in the government. The real bureaucrats are the ones running the place, and that’s what the IC [Intelligence Community] and all this has all been about.

Election Fraud

And the election fraud is the other issue I want to address. About June of this year, we sent 54 registered letters to all the Secretaries of State of all the states in the United States and Guam and Puerto Rico and two others, saying that there are ways to fix and validate and rely on the real outcome of an accurate count of any voting process, and we would love to talk to you about it. Well, we heard from zero of them; none of them responded, whatsoever.

Now, this vote came along, and you see this video of people stuffing ballots into the voting system after hours, after they threw everybody else out. Why? They didn’t want them to notice; but they didn’t realize they were being photographed by a camera all the time. So, after they threw the witnesses, the press, and the Republicans who monitor the voting counts, after they threw them out, they pulled these things out from under the table, and started throwing them in the machine.

We were advocating looking at bulk information on those ballots and also using things like Census data, telephone White Pages, Yellow Pages, Social Security, lists of dead people, and those who have Social Security numbers and so forth.

Using all that data, crunching it together and saying, here’s the reliable valid data of all eligible U.S. voters in the country. We could buy a holding place and say here are all the eligible voters that can come and vote in your county. And if we had taps on all the voting as it occurred, we could monitor that as it occurred in real time, not after the fact. None of this late counting or any of that crap. Everything would be done right there. And it would be done once for every valid person, no matter where they were living; in what state, or whatever. They could have moved or be in different places, but they were allowed to vote one time. And that we could have figured out.

So, we went and started looking at some of this data that some of us had access to, and we found that in the case of—and I tweeted this out—in the case of Georgia, there were almost 2 million people with the same birthdate of 1 January; different years, but the same birthdate. If you just said there should be an equal number born on any given day of the year, that’s 365 times 2 million, which is 730 million people who must live in Georgia! So, that tells you that there’s something wrong there. That doesn’t say these people are guilty or anything, or that these ballots are bad. It says you need to look at them and verify them.

You’d look at other things like clustering and time of input. Like, those people that input all of those files after they threw everybody out, and then started throwing these ballots from under the table into the vote counting machines, they should cluster in time. If that happened, then a cluster in time showed commonality with all these birthdates of 1 January, then you know this is just more additional evidence of fraud.

I’m sitting here, I’m asking myself, I’m going to have to start tweeting about this, because where is the FBI, where is the Department of Justice? What are they doing? Why aren’t they investigating these people who are perpetuating this fraud on the voting? They should be going after U.S. Code 52; it’s the one that deals with election crimes. Why aren’t they pursuing this? This is obviously some criminal activity going on with the evidence of that video. Why aren’t they after those people to find out? Another thing. The guy in the center of it, who seemed to be the central point of it, was on the phone after everybody was thrown out, and then he hung up, and after they got all the votes in, he got back on the phone again after it was done, and then they left. Well, that says it might be that we’re starting this action, and then we’re ending the action. And he’s talking to somebody else, so who is that?

Well, let me tell you, NSA has got a record of all those phone calls inside the United States, and they could probably even get back to exactly what was being said. And do a translation of that and follow and trace the entire social network of all the people who were involved in these things. They all close down at about the same time, roughly. They throw everybody out, and then all of a sudden, these massive amounts of ballots came in after the fact, and it all tipped the balance to Biden.

So, this is further evidence of a coordinated conspiracy to subvert the election. That phone call could trace out and get the basic input as to what these people, who they were involved with to do this and achieve this. And therefore, by the FBI and so on putting pressure on them to squeal and open up the rest of the conspiracy, all these people should be put right into jail for violating the law.

And not only that. It’s just unfathomable to me that Americans would do this, would actually turn us into a banana republic. This is exactly what Stalin did, and all the dictators in the banana republics do. Let’s fix the voting. As Stalin said—or it’s attributed to him anyway—“It doesn’t matter who votes, or how they vote. It only matters who counts the vote.” And that’s what we have here.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche, in response to Mr. Binney’s interventions and the remarks of other speakers in the panel, told those assembled for the conference, “All that has been said requires further follow-up. I think the idea that this is a settled question will not hold. I think Harley Schlanger’s proposal for a special prosecutor and the other proposals are fully to be endorsed. The outcome of this is not a question pertaining to the United States alone. If the United States goes in the wrong direction, I fear this will have implications for every corner of the world. So therefore, I encourage as many people as possible to get engaged in this fight, because it does affect the future of us all.

Watch the videos and Sign the Petition to Exonerate LaRouche

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Schiller Institute Conference

The World After the U.S. Election: Creating a World Based on Reason

December 12-13, 2020

Videos of the entire conference are available here.

PANEL 2

Escaping the Danger of World War III:

A Strategic Order Based on the Common Aims of Mankind

Great-Power Strategic Relations May Soon Change:

Schiller Institute Conference Discusses How

by Paul Gallagher

Dec. 12—A group of international strategists and economists discussed how U.S.-China, U.S.-Russia, and U.S.-Europe relations can change productively in the immediate future at the Schiller Institute conference panel, “Escaping the Danger of World War III,” December 12. This had no reference to Joe Biden and his assembling a “team” of geopolitical retreads. Rather, the speakers’ subjects ranged from the increasing drawing power of China’s model of international development lending—presented by former World Bank senior economist Dr. Yan Wang—to the prospect of NATO being disbanded, debated by veteran military Judge Advocate Sen. Richard Black of Virginia and Prof. Emmanuel Dupuy of the Institute of European Perspective and Security. But the overall theme, as Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche described it in her keynote to the panel, was “the right not to be trapped in contradictions and between bad choices,” a right available both to major nations now caught in increasingly dangerous strategic confrontations, and to individuals learning to think creatively.

Zepp-LaRouche began her keynote by stating that, “after the U.S. election, a world based on reason”—the title of the two-day conference overall—might seem farfetched in the face of an unprecedented combination of worsening strategic, political, and demographic crises, and that some may begin to despair of their solution. Senator Black described President Donald Trump, as a candidate and President-elect, coming into office with a group of stated policies—NATO is obsolete; good U.S.-Russia and U.S.-China relations are important; Wall Street is “a gigantic bubble”; new economic infrastructure is urgent—which now seem farfetched after four years in which they caused the entire establishment to unite to block his every step and try to drive him out of office.

But clearly, we are not “trapped in contradictions and bad choices” offered by that financial and intelligence establishment. The American people can now respond if these policies are put on the table, at a higher and still more specific level, by an “international chorus” of expert voices which the Schiller Institute is organizing. Zepp-LaRouche spent much of her keynote, which follows this article, evoking the primacy in human thinking of creative discovery, using the dialogues of Plato and the scientific discoveries of Nicholas of Cusa. Americans can rediscover what Trump was beginning to tumble to—that President Putin’s Russia has strategic ideas to assist in getting American troops home from endless wars, and that China, accused of imperialism by the British imperialists, is actually offering economic development to many nations and can enter into business with the United States to do it.

Grim Discovery about NATO

Senator Black’s blunt proposal—“NATO must be dissolved”—was introduced based on his fascinating discovery that NATO, aside from posing a grave threat to world peace, “is the centerpiece of the deep state.” We might say, the uncanny ability of British financial, military, and intelligence circles to drive their U.S. counterparts into fatal actions, and even to control and censor the thinking of Americans in general—Exhibit A, “Russiagate”—goes through NATO military intelligence and such of its institutions as the Atlantic Council. Black also stated that the threat of nuclear war with Russia, which had faded into the far distance in 1991, is real again now, and “NATO is to blame for it. We will have NATO to thank for the death of civilization.”

Professor Dupuy, including in their exchanges, could go with Black and Zepp-LaRouche on that second point; he assessed that “NATO will no longer be relevant as in the past,” and neither will negotiations related to the New START Treaty unless they include China, France, and the UK. But he failed to see the first point about a (non-American) secret government force underneath NATO; he insisted that an American general always commands NATO and that if America was “removed from NATO” it could be changed. Nonetheless he foresaw no European unity regarding strategic arms or NATO.

America, China and Third Countries

China’s locomotive-drive of the world economy out of the 2007-08 global financial crash got Americans and Europeans to think seriously of cooperating in a world land-bridge of infrastructure development, but a financial oligarchy, deploying British liars like Prof. Niall Ferguson and U.S. madman “Messiah Mike” Pompeo, has driven them into thinking of a hostile rivalry. This can change rapidly again.

Dr. Yan Wang, who has decades of experience as an economist for multinational banks and lending institutions, presented the Schiller Institute panel with “The Chinese Economic Model: Belt and Road Initiative and Debt Issues.” She focused on Africa, noting that China was trying to “combine aid, trade, and investment/lending” to help African countries build new, productive economic infrastructure, using the advantages of low-cost engineering talent and economics of scale in building many projects. Nonetheless, she said, its 259 projects in Africa, which has created 137,000 African jobs from 2014-18, had peaked in terms of foreign direct investment in 2016, and fallen somewhat since. In other words, while China is a model for Africa in that its GDP/capital was one-half the African average in the 1960s and it has eliminated severe poverty entirely now, it needs lending and investment partners for further development in the African continent and elsewhere. “There is still a shortage of long-term capital,” Dr. Wang said. “Foreign direct investment is declining.”

Dr. Wang’s solutions included more multilateral banks and multilateral lending by major economic powers to developing nations. She said more sovereign wealth funds can be drawn into major developing sector lending; and she included in this category, the new International Development Finance Corporation of the United States. And she emphasized that “developing nations should be in the driver’s seat with the World Bank, both in the right to decide what their development needs are, and in the responsibility to improve the investment climate in their countries.

Dr. Wang’s case was backed by Dr. Marcelo Muñoz of the Cátedra China institute in Spain, who said that China does not see itself becoming a superpower, but a leading power in what it can offer other countries. He forecast that the United States and Europe will reach agreements with China based not on “coincidences,” but on differences, including between the Confucian idea of collective good as the basis of ethics, and what he called the “theist” view of individual striving for both good works and individual rewards in American culture.

Joining the panel was Dr. Ole Döring from Germany, a sinologist and philosopher, who spoke on the topic, “A Salutogenic Symphony with Ancient Chinese Philosophy: Harmony as Polyphonic Accord and Peace as Expressive Equilibrium. Can We Make It Work?”

The Issues of Debt and Vaccines

The issue of the huge mass of international debt, much of it now unpayable after the added blow of the COVID-19 pandemic, may very well drive the changes in major-power relations which were discussed by the Schiller Institute panel. World debt has reached $277 trillion and is growing at 6% annually, with the developed nations debt-to-GDP ratios now much worse than the developing countries. A catastrophic crash of what many call the “everything bubble” is not far off, particularly since such a huge portion of that debt is corporate, and there are such armies of “zombie companies.” And sovereign debts of many developing nations have been rendered completely unpayable by the impacts of the pandemic, including real mass unemployment, food supply breakdowns, and absolute famine.

In fact, questions about debt cancellation or debt forgiveness, from African representatives including those of Ghana, Zambia, Tanzania and others, dominated the question-and-answer sessions of this panel. Dr. Wang’s presentation on this was new. She said debt/GDP ratio is an outmoded measure, because debt is a question of both liabilities and assets. Debt contracted to produce new infrastructure produces assets—“public sector net worth.” China, whose lending is characterized by a lot of “patient capital” which will readily agree to restructure debt, is third in the world in the creation of other nations’ public sector assets by its lending, as has been found independently by studies of the Belt and Road Initiative by Ernst & Young and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Otherwise, it was clear that all major nations should cooperate in getting vaccines to developing nations. The subtitle of this Schiller Conference panel was, “A Strategic Order Based on the Common Aims of Mankind.” It may seem farfetched, as Helga Zepp-LaRouche said to start the panel off, but the impulsions of looming financial debt breakdown, preventing really mass deaths from “pandemic famine” and war, and matching up with China’s infrastructure investments, can trigger rapid change in the right direction. That depends, she explained, on using the principle of Lyndon LaRouche’s economic method: defining solutions on a higher, more unifying level than the problems.

Conference Keynote

Cusa and Mankind the Immortal Species

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Helga Zepp-LaRouche is the founder and President of the Schiller Institute.

Schiller Institute

Helga Zepp-LaRouche

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When we decided to hold this conference shortly after the U.S. election, we anticipated, sort of, that it would be a very dangerous moment in history, so we named the title of the conference, “Creating a World Based on Reason.” Now that may sound a very far distance away, but this conference is not meant to just discuss academically the issues raised, but it is supposed to function as an appeal to all institutions, governments, elected officials, people of good will, to help the Schiller Institute to organize an international alliance of people who will intervene in this present situation, because solutions are there. It is absolutely possible to find a way out of each of the crises. But it requires that people get activated and act as state citizens.

Now, if you look at the world, many people can easily start to despair. The proverb, “Whom the gods want to destroy they first drive mad,” echoes this in many corners. We can ask ourselves, does mankind have the moral fitness to survive? Because the behavior of many institutions, and people, sometimes seems to say the opposite.

The combination of crises is really unprecedented. Let me just touch upon some of them. We have a pandemic. This pandemic has been managed relatively well in Asia, in several Asian countries, but it is completely out of control in the United States, in Europe, and also in many developing countries. Just on December 10, the number of new infections in the United States was 217,729. In one week, from December 3-9, 16,850 people died. Germany did relatively well in the beginning, but now, on December 11, there were 27,217 new cases—it’s completely out of control; 524 deaths in one day. And the different governors and the government are talking about the possibility of a complete, total lockdown, even before Christmas, then into the New Year.

This would not have to be like that. Had people done what has proven to be an effective method, which is general testing, testing, testing, contact tracing, using digitalization and modern technology; and then putting people into quarantine—it could have been brought under control. And it’s still not being done.

CGTN

United Nations World Food Program (WFP) responds to the critical needs of more than 164,000 South Sudanese refugees in war-ravaged Sudan.

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On top of the COVID crisis, and as a matter of fact aggravated by it tremendously, is a famine, which is called by the World Food Program, a famine of “biblical dimensions,” meaning that if nothing is done dramatically to change it, next year, there could be the deaths of 270 million people. This could be remedied very quickly, also, by saving agriculture in the United States and Europe and other so-called advanced countries, and doubling the food production.

But this is just the front end of the underlying crisis, which is that the entire system is collapsing: The financial system is hopelessly bankrupt, and all the trillions of money which have been pumped by the European Central Bank, which pumped altogether €1.85 trillion, mainly through a Pandemic Emergency Purchase Program; the Federal Reserve, somewhere between $6 and $7 trillion, which all went to save the bankrupt system and not going much into investment in the real economy. And then, on top of this ongoing collapse, which is not ended, you have the really insane effort by the European Union to implement a Green Deal. They just met yesterday, and they decided to cut the emission of CO_2 by 2030 from a planned 40% to increase that to even 55%; the same is being attempted with the Green New Deal in the United States, if Joe Biden becomes the new President. That is the utmost insanity, because it would mean further weakening an already collapsing economy by imposing the direction of all investment only into Green technologies—and we cannot maintain modern industrial societies this way.

The European and American economies are collapsing, last year by about on average 10%, while China, for example, in the third quarter, after they very well recovered from the COVID crisis, had a growth rate of 4.9%, and in the month of November, Chinese exports increased on average 25%.

Left: CC/pedrik; right: CC/Eric Chan

The European Central Bank in Frankfurt Germany (left) and the Federal Reserve Board Building (right) in Washington, D.C. have pumped in trillions to prop up the hopelessly bankrupt financial system, but hardly any into investments in the physical economy.

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That is the real reason, or one of the contributing reasons, for this absolutely hysterical anti-China campaign. Because what we are looking at in an underlying way, is the collapse of the old paradigm, the neoliberal system, that which has constituted the so-called “Western financial system,” the trans-Atlantic system, and this is why Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has made one speech after another causing an anti-Chinese hysteria, which is going way beyond McCarthyism: He just spoke in Georgia, saying every Chinese student in the United States, every professor is a Chinese spy. And very dangerously, [Marshall] Billingslea, the special presidential envoy for arms control just on November 17 made a speech before the National Institute of Public Policy, where he went into a rampage against Russia and China, saying Russia cannot be trusted on arms control, that China is responsible for unleashing the coronavirus pandemic around the world, and that Russia’s nuclear doctrine promotes the early use of nuclear weapons with the strategy, “escalate to win.”

Now, that assertion is a complete lie. It is actually what the present NATO doctrine is saying, but they assert that Russia has a plan to attack NATO, counting on the capitulation of NATO. Billingslea, in that speech, also said that he advised the Trump Administration, or President Trump personally, not to reaffirm the Reagan-Gorbachev statement that nuclear war cannot be won by anybody. This is why the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has recently warned many times, that there is a very dangerous illusion that a limited nuclear war can be won. And as many other experts, also from the Federation of American Scientists, have warned, there is no such thing as a “limited” nuclear war, because it is the very nature of nuclear weapons, that once you use one, all of them will be used.

Billingslea also accused China of building up its nuclear weapons arsenal behind a “Great Wall of Secrecy.” Now, the reality is, while both the United States and Russia have, I think, somewhere between 6,000-7,000 nuclear warheads each, China has a meager 290. Given the fact of this continuous anti-China campaign, naturally, China feels compelled to build up its nuclear arsenal. And you have a dynamic where there is a hardening in China, very clearly, and there is a German proverb that says, “As you yell into the forest, so you get the echo back.” So you’re in an escalation spiral that is extremely dangerous. Maria Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said this all is just a pretext for the U.S. to modernize its medium- and short-range nuclear missiles.

It is an irony that just five days before this raving speech by Billingslea, the Trump Administration denied a request from the Federation of American Scientists to publish the size of its nuclear warhead stockpile. They used to do that until 2018, but no longer. And Hans Kristensen basically said that Billingslea’s accusations against China would be a lot more credible if the United States would reveal their numbers in this respect.

So you have an unbelievable situation on all of these fronts. And what we discussed in the last panel, the unbelievable events in the United States, the five years of operations against Trump, first as a candidate, then in the entire time of his presidency; Russiagate, which could not be proven; impeachment, which was based on lies; and now finally the attempted, or actual fraud in the election—and, an unbelievable censorship by the major TV stations, declaring who won the election, and by the social media censoring content! So you have a situation which is really out of control. And that is why we should think back, and think, how can we develop a different approach of thinking? Because I think that is the most urgent question. And the overarching idea of this conference is the “Coincidence of Opposites.”

I want to take it back a step to what my late husband, Lyndon LaRouche, has emphasized in every single country he ever travelled to: He asked people, especially young people, that they should start to reflect about their particular ideology. Because, when you are in the United States, it’s very easy for you to see that people think differently in European countries, each one of them still thinks differently; people in Latin America think differently. But, when you are in a country, you don’t think about it much; you think everything is self-evident. And Lyndon LaRouche is very famous, and you can verify that by reading his many books—which will keep you busy for a while—because he was very much concerned for how to give people a method how to become self-conscious about your own method of thinking.

We have right now, as part of this civilizational breakdown crisis, a real crisis in the method of thinking. There is enormous confusion about opinions, and that has reached an absolute crisis point after the breakout of the pandemic, where people who up to that point were quite rational, went into the wildest interpretations and conspiracy theories, and efforts to explain something which is obviously very frightening. Now, most people don’t question the axiomatic basis of their views. They regard them as self-evident truths, as a matter of fact, as the only true truth. But if one undertakes an epistemological investigation of those opinions, one finds that they are many times formed on the basis of nominalism—that people just take a word, and then jump off, as if that would be the explanation; or empiricism, positivism, and conclusions are arrived as a result of reductionist method, of deductionism, or an analysis is made on the basis of looking at the world through concave glasses: Now, if you do that, you project the map of your own mind and own beliefs on the intentions of the supposed view of the other person.

Now we can see that right now: This is typically the case for people, who, for example, define the supposed geopolitical interest—let’s say, of the EU, against that of Russia and China. Or, what you have presently in the United States, the circles that are accusing China of imperial designs, are exactly promoting such designs themselves, where anybody who is honestly investigating the matter, has to come to the conclusion that the Chinese model of development has not only eradicated extreme poverty in China itself—they just did that two weeks ago, and altogether, China has lifted 850 million of its own people out of poverty into a growing, large middle class; but China is also offering that model of development to the developing countries, which obviously challenges the imperial designs of the accuser.

Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464).

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Now, as I said, the overall subject of this conference is the concept of the Coincidentia Oppositorum, the coincidence of opposites, a concept which was developed by Nicolaus of Cusa, who is the most important thinker of European intellectual life in the 15th century. And, actually, very importantly, he was the first one to develop principles of the modern, sovereign nation-state. He did that mainly in his Concordantia Catholica, which presented for the first time the idea that the government has to work with the consent of the governed, and there must be a reciprocal relationship between the government, the representatives, and the governed.

He is also the father of modern natural science: He developed a method of thinking—of thinking something completely new—and he was very self-consciously saying that he was proposing something which no human being ever had thought before. And that method also is underlying all the philosophical writings and economic-scientific method of my late husband, Lyndon LaRouche, and his physical economics. It is basically the idea, that human reason has the capability to define a solution on a completely different and higher level, than those on which all the conflicts and contradictions arose. It addresses the capacity to think a One, which is of a higher magnitude and power, than the Many. And once you train your mind to think that way, you have the inerrant key to creativity, and one can apply this way of thinking to virtually all realms of thought.

In order to get an approximation of the coincidence of opposites, one has to start with a rejection of the Aristotelian method. Now, Aristotle says, “if something is A, it cannot be at the same time B.” But the coincidence is also not A plus B, divided by 2, or some other algebraic or arithmetic calculation. Nicolaus develops his concept in several of his writings, but extensively in the De Docta Ignorantia (On Learned Ignorance), which was immediately attacked by the Heidelberg professor and scholastic Johannes Wenck, in an attack on De Docta Ignorantia, called De Ignota Litteratura (The Ignorant Scholar), meaning Nicolaus. Nicolaus answered several years later, because he didn’t get this writing immediately, in a little paper, which I recommend to all of you to read, called, Apologia Doctae Ignorantiae (In Defense of Learned Ignorance), in which he laments that the Aristotelian tradition nowadays (meaning in Cusa’s time) was prevailing, which would estimate the coincidence of opposites as a heresy, since that school completely rejects this approach as totally opposite to their intentions. Now, the intentions are really of an oligarchical nature, which he doesn’t say here, but that is what it was. Therefore, Cusa says, it would be a total miracle, and would be a complete transformation of their school, if they would abandon Aristotle and arrive at a higher perspective.

Contrary to the Aristotelean method, which gets entangled in the fight between the contradictions, the view of the coincidence of opposites looks at the process from a higher level. And this was mentioned in the little video which you saw at the beginning [in Panel 1], in which I talk about the need to publish the collected works of Lyndon LaRouche: That the coincidence view is like looking at events as if from a high tower, where you see the hunter, the hunted, and the process of the hunting. And that gives you a completely different viewpoint, than if you were the hunter or the hunted, or just running around with your nose to the ground.

To arrive at this level of thinking, however, requires an enormous exertion. It requires a tension of the mind. It’s not something you can switch on, but it is an intellectual struggle. But, once you do that, you have power to enter areas which are otherwise completely closed off. Nicolaus references how thinkers like Avicenna (also called Ibn Sina) have resorted to negative theology in order to get the mind out of the habit of latching onto the factoid, provided by sense-certainty. But the most keen-witted one, Cusa says, was Plato in his argument in the Parmenides dialogue, which may be, for anyone who has struggled with Plato’s dialogues, the most challenging of all of these dialogues. Parmenides was the leader of the methodologically reductionist Eleatic school, which taught that the essence of things could only be arrived at through the thought process, and not through anything having to do with material matter. But that this essence had to be a strict simplicity, without all multitude and diversity—and especially, without any change and motion. All multiplicity provided by the senses and the implied change thereby are only appearance, Parmenides said. They’re illusory, therefore any diversity and change can neither belong to the essence of things, nor participate in them.

Now, in this dialogue Plato lures Parmenides into exposing that glaring paradox in his thinking, namely, that Parmenides leaves out the principle of change. In the tradition established by Plato, “change” is not a linear extension of a Euclidean space, but rather a sequence of original axiomatic-revolutionary acts of discovery, leading to a nested set of discoveries of universal physical principles, which deepen our knowledge of the physical universe and perfect the creative powers of all those human beings, to whom that progress is transmitted. Nicolaus says, at one point that through that education every human being recreates the evolution of the entire universe up to that point in his mind. It is that microcosm of the mind that corresponds to the macrocosm at large, which is the universe, which enables each human being potentially to have prescience, to know what the necessary next discovery has to be, in order to continue the lawful process of creation.

This is very important, and it has everything to do with the concept of relative potential population density, which was developed by Lyndon LaRouche. Relative potential population density gives you a yardstick for the absolutely necessary next discovery.

For Plato each individual such discovery is the result of an adequate discovery, which is that the human mind can generate in an “intuited” way. That is why Einstein emphasized that imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.

Plato’s answer to Parmenides, therefore, is his ontological notion of Becoming, as the continuing ability of the human mind to generate such hypothesis, or the hypothesis of the higher hypothesis, in which that all-encompassing change is the One, which includes the Many on a higher level.

That same method of thinking was employed by Nicolaus, when he solved a problem which had left many thinkers and mathematicians sleepless, since ancient times, namely the problem of the quadrature of the circle. Archimedes, an earlier mathematician, had tried to solve the problem with the method of exhaustion, by inscribing and circumscribing an ever-increasing number of polygons on the circle. The mistaken assumption is that eventually the perimeters of the two polygons would ultimately coincide with the circle. In this way Archimedes did find a workable approximation of the number pi, but in reality, the problem was not solved. Because Cusa says that the more angles a polygon has, the further away you get from the circle.

It took Cusa’s revolutionary method of thinking to solve the problem of the quadrature of the circle by making clear that a circle cannot be constructed by a geometry that is based on the axiomatic assumption of self-evident points and straight lines, but that an axiomatically different geometry has to be applied, whereby circular action replaces the Euclidean self-evident assumption of the point and the straight line. The isoperimetric principle, as it’s called, of the primacy of the circle makes clear that from the circle one can arrive at the polygon, but not the other way around. In this way Nicolaus provided the conclusive demonstration of the difference of the domain of mathematics limited to the commensurables and the completely distinct domain of the incommensurables.

This progression from the understanding of Archimedes of the quadrature of the circle, to the superior one of Cusa also illustrates the role of human discovery of a preexisting universal principle and the change of its existence as a potential, but as one which had been previously hidden from the view of mankind’s knowledge, to the “realization” of that principle through the act of human discovery. It is that continuous process of discovery, which is ontologically primary, that is the One, that is primary relative to the content of each and all of the Many.

Bernhard Riemann, whose scientific method lent itself to contribute to name the LaRouche-Riemann economic model, elaborated the same idea in a writing quoted by Lyndon LaRouche, “Zur Psychologie und Metaphysik” (“On Psychology and Metaphysics”), by describing the human soul as a compact and tightly and multiply connected body of ideas, Geistesmassen, as this notion was developed by Herbart and then taken up by Riemann; or as Lyn named them, “thought-objects.” Each new such Geistesmasse, or idea, resonates with all the previously accumulated ones and interacts in a reciprocal way, the more so as there is an inner affinity among them. Riemann also says that these compact Geistesmassen continue to exist, even if the person who has created them has died, and becomes part of what he calls the soul of the Earth. Essentially the same idea is expressed by Vernadsky, in a lecture he gave in Paris in 1925, where he described the human species and the collective human mind as a “geological force” in the universe. Vernadsky insisted, that the entire history of the universe proves that the Noösphere—that which is influenced by human intellectual activity and reason—will gain more and more dominion over the biosphere. And it is that anti-entropic character of the creativity of the human mind as the most advanced part of the driving force of the physical universe, which is the reason for optimism for the future of mankind.

It implies, that more and more human beings, in all different nations and cultures, will be able to elevate themselves above the infantile level of sense-certainty, and overcome failed ideological traditions, such as the rhetoric school of sophistry, which is not concerned with truth, but with the victory of whatever assertion the sophist wishes to make, in order to promote his own particular self.

Now, the concept of the coincidence of opposites can be applied to the present strategic situation, and actually, every area of human knowledge. The interest of mankind, if you define it, not as the interest of the present living people, and in the here and now, but if you take into mind the interest of all future generations to come, essentially the same idea which is the Preamble of the American Constitution: That it’s not just the present, but all future generations who must be served with the common good, and in this time, the entire world, the entire human population.

To get an understanding of what this means, think about how you would apply what I just said theoretically to the present world situation. If you take each nation as a microcosm, according to Nicolaus of Cusa, peace in the macrocosm is only possible if each microcosm has the best possible development, and takes it as its own self-interest that all the other microcosms develop. That means that you’re not taking the so-called geopolitical self-interest of the nation or a group of nations, positioning themselves against the supposed interest of all the others, but that you have a different conception, rejecting the Aristotelian method of contradiction. If you take Plato’s concept of change and becoming as the ontological primary, then the development of each microcosm can be seen like in a contrapuntal, fugal composition, where the development of each note and each idea contributes to the future development of all others.

There are already functioning examples, where you can see an approximation of how that can function. One in the international cooperation in the thermonuclear fusion reactor in France, in Cadarache, the ITER, which is the joint collaboration of 34 nations, which all profit from the discoveries. Now, it is also obviously the potential international cooperation in space research and travel: We have presently three very fascinating missions to Mars, which will all arrive in a few weeks on Mars, and would it not make sense to join the research together? Now, it’s not the question of who puts the first flag on Mars, or who puts the first woman or man on Mars, but it is the question of how do we conquer the Solar System for human habitation.

Now, our galaxy is incredibly big. I don’t know if you recently looked, for example, up to the stars, to the Milky Way, But our galaxy is only one of 2 trillion galaxies which have been discovered by the Hubble Telescope so far!

Just think about the long-term existence of mankind: Well, mankind has been around for a couple of million years, but really, we know in terms of verifiable recorded history, a little bit about the last 5,000 years, a little bit more through archeology, but only, really, a very short period of time. Now, do we want mankind to be the immortal species, or do we want mankind just to be like one of the many other species which come and go, and whenever you have large extinctions they disappear. It doesn’t matter, evolution then creates other species with a higher metabolism, so it doesn’t really matter if mankind disappears in the process. Well, I don’t think so. Because I think mankind, whatever we find in the universe at large, if there is other intelligent life somewhere, mankind is absolutely unique. We are so far the only discovered, creative species.

In a few billion years, the Sun will no longer function well enough for us to be able to live on Earth. Therefore, the need to colonize space, to make other planets habitable for the human species is a question of the survival of our species. I think this is eminently possible if we move away from our present condition of too many people behaving like infants, like little boys kicking each other in the shins, and develop our full potential, cooperating with other human beings, cooperating with other cultures, and fulfill the long-term destiny of mankind of being the species consciously instigating change in the universe, and that way, fulfill our true destiny as a human species.

It is up to us to make that transformation, and in that way to create the ability to get out of this crisis alive and with happiness.

Col. Richard H. Black (USA Ret.)

NATO Poses a Grave Threat to World Peace

Col. Black served in the Virginia State Senate (2012-2020) and House (1998-2006) and was the former chief of the Criminal Law Division, Office of the Judge Advocate General, the Pentagon. This is his prepared text for delivery on Panel 2 of the December 12-13 Schiller Institute conference.

Schiller Institute

Col. Richard H. Black (USA Ret.)

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I come at this as a conservative Republican, elected to 16 years in the Virginia House and Senate. I served 32 years in the U.S. Marines and in the Army. I bled for this country and risked my life hundreds of times in battle. I was wounded and my radiomen died fighting beside me, rescuing a surrounded Marine outpost. Helicopters that I piloted were hit by ground fire four times. But I am well-versed in military and foreign affairs, and I am deeply disturbed by U.S. involvement with NATO.

Today, NATO poses a grave threat to world peace. It is the centerpiece of the deep state.

In 1949, NATO was formed to defend against perceived threats from the Soviet Union, which was a nuclear powerhouse. The Soviets responded to NATO by forming the Warsaw defense pact in 1955. By the grace of God, war was avoided. When the Cold War ended in 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved, and communism was discredited forever. The Warsaw Pact dissolved that same year. By 1991, NATO had no further purpose and should have been dissolved.

The prospects for permanent peace were bright. The distance between Germany and Russia was more than 3,000 miles. That was a huge buffer against accidental missile launch or hostile military action. That buffer would have made the risk of World War III extremely remote.

In 1990, President George H.W. Bush and top NATO leaders promised Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that if he would not interfere with the reunification of Germany, NATO would not move its troops one inch further east.

But they lied, and they lied massively. Instead, NATO rapidly advanced until their troops are now within 20 miles of the Russian border. NATO’s aggressive advance was roughly the distance from the U.S. east coast to the west coast. Instead of dissolving, NATO grew from 16 members to 30 members and the list is still growing. It is rapidly increasing its military expenditures even though it faces utterly no threat from Russia. NATO did this by falsely portraying Russia as a reincarnation of the Soviet Union. But Russia’s population is half that of the U.S., and its economy the size of Italy’s. Germany considered the threat of Russian invasion so remote that it slashed its Cold War arsenal of tanks from 5,000 down to 200 today—almost nothing.

Donald Trump campaigned on withdrawing from NATO, which he considered obsolete. His pledge to normalize relations with Russia and Syria would have destroyed the raison d’être, the very reason, for NATO and the deep state to exist. That was the principal reason he faced a continuing coup, followed by massive election fraud to deny him a second term in office. The Russia hoax forced Trump’s back to the wall. He was forced to modify his anti-NATO stance to merely demanding that NATO buy more weapons. And that, of course, only exacerbated the arms race.

NATO, the military-industrial complex, and the entire deep state employ millions of influential bureaucrats. Their livelihoods depend on public perceptions of nonexistent threats. Today, millions of defense-related jobs depend on creating a public perception of danger from abroad. Americans are taught to hate at least one-fifth of the world’s population—people who present no realistic threat to America.

Except for minor border skirmishes with Mexico, America has not been invaded since the War of 1812, when we were a small and weak nation. Today, we are a global behemoth. The U.S. defense budget is $732 billion—more than the defense budgets of the 10 next largest militaries combined. It is three times China’s, fifteen times Russia’s, and 40 times Iran’s.

The U.S. Navy has three times the naval tonnage of either Russia or China, plus enormous geographic advantages. The U.S. Navy operates 11 large, modern aircraft carrier groups that project global power. Meanwhile, Russian ships are Cold War relics, and they have only one modest aircraft carrier. The Chinese Navy is second largest, but it also has just one aircraft carrier. Marine troops are a measure of a nation’s power to project military force and to invade other countries from the sea. The U.S. has 15 times as many naval troops as Russia and 18 times as many as China.

As the leader of NATO, the U.S. routinely initiates reckless, provocative actions against Russia in order to deliberately heighten tensions. We repeatedly fly nuclear-capable B-1 and B-52 jets on attack vectors aimed at Russia. In August of 2020 alone, Russian jets were forced to scramble 27 times to intercept NATO warplanes near Russian waters. In August and September, B-52s flew close to Russian borders near Crimea and Kaliningrad, practicing nuclear cruise missile launches toward Russia from the Black Sea and Estonia.

The provocations became so militant and risky that in 2019, President Putin was forced to reveal his hitherto secret development of hypersonic nuclear missiles, just to deter possible offensive action toward Russia. In 2020, he announced that Russian warships and submarines would also be armed with hypersonic missiles. With virtually no buffer between NATO and Russia, these missiles—which cannot be intercepted—can reach New York City or Washington, D.C. from Russia in about an hour. Submarine-launched hypersonic missiles can incinerate those cities in just minutes.

Russia does not want war, and it most certainly does not want a nuclear war. But it cannot fight us conventionally, so it may be forced to employ its vast nuclear arsenal in self-defense. Yet the U.S. continues to eliminate remaining buffers against war. We have dismantled nuclear disarmament treaties that were painfully negotiated over decades. And now, we are developing small yield weapons whose only purpose is to make nuclear war a practical reality.

As of 2020, there were over 13,000 nuclear weapons, with thousands on hair-trigger alert. The less buffer between NATO and Russia, the greater the likelihood that a miscalculation will trigger a rapidly escalating nuclear exchange.

NATO, which once defended Europe, has expanded to fighting wars of aggression in the Middle East. It has engaged in Afghanistan for 19 years. NATO is now considering expanding to confront China too. These expansions provide justification for NATO to live on and expand. But they also raise the specter of nuclear war. If World War III breaks out, it will kill vast numbers of Americans, and NATO will be to blame. The death toll will exceed any war ever fought, many times over. It would poison the earth with radiation and cause the breakdown of trade, transportation, and food production. It may end civilization altogether.

We do not need to maintain this hyper-aggressive military posture. The oceans defend America as no other developed nation is protected. Unless we threaten others, we have no genuine fear of war. And ordinary Americans gain nothing from the endless push for war that kills and cripples our troops, bleeds our treasury, and soils our moral reputation across the globe.

When the nuclear balloon goes up, top government officials and global oligarchs will shelter in underground cities. But the rest of us will be incinerated by their folly. We will have NATO and the deep state to thank for our demise.

Schiller Institute Conference

The World After the U.S. Election: Creating a World Based on Reason

December 12-13, 2020

PANEL 3

Overcoming the World Health Crisis and the Hunger Pandemic

Thinking on the Level of

The Coincidentia Oppositorum

by Marcia Merry Baker

Dec. 13—The Sunday morning panel of the Schiller Institute Conference, “Overcoming the World Health Crisis and the Hunger Pandemic: Thinking on the Level of the Coincidentia Oppositorum,” brought together 12 specialists in medicine, public health, logistics, agriculture and other fields, who conferred for close to four hours on the pandemic and world hunger crisis from the point of view of taking action.

The urgency to act was underscored by two messages. A video clip from Fouad Al-Ghaffari in Yemen, reported how the situation for 30 million people there is impossible without immediate aid. He said, “The famine is a war crime.” Ramasimong Phillip Tsokolibane, Leader of the LaRouche Movement in South Africa, speaking for the continent, said that, “Death stalks the planet.” He called for a global mobilization of food and medical care, or “hundreds of millions of people are as good as dead. Africa does not need sympathy. Africa needs bold action.”

In June, Helga Zepp-LaRouche had issued a call for action, given the fast-worsening pandemic and food shortage situation, and the lack of full-scale government or global institutional response. She put forward the idea of acting under the Coincidentia Oppositorum concept of Renaissance leader Nicholas of Cusa, who mandated thinking and acting on a level higher than that of any apparent opposing factors and parties you encounter. Two speakers on the panel addressed this concept explicitly, Jason Ross and Daniel Burke, who spoke on “Cusa’s Method.”

Since June, an initiating group formed and issued a statement inviting others to join in getting emergency action going as soon as possible. See, “Statement to Form the Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites (Coincidentia Oppositorum).

The proposal is to launch one or more pilot projects involving such things as U.S. medical care specialists delivering care and training at points of need in Africa, or elsewhere, including the training of local and also American and other youth. There is the idea of U.S. farmers collaborating on providing food and training. Such initiatives, at the same time as having an immediate, direct effect, also draw attention to the necessity of rectifying the inadequate, privatized health care and agriculture systems in the U.S. and other nations.

Zepp-LaRouche today said at the close of the discussion, “We have the solutions, we need implementation.” All that is needed are “marching orders.” Referring to the expertise among the speakers, she said that “The potential to solve things is on this panel. They can turn this into a political force” that can make all the difference in the world, in forcing a shift in policy response to the pandemic and famine. She called for three or more volunteers to be active advisers in this new initiative of the Schiller Institute in the coming days.

This point of taking action was emphasized in the words of Lyndon LaRouche, shown in a video clip from his answer to Dr. Jozef Mikloško, the former deputy prime minister of the Czech and Slovak Federated Republic, at Schiller Conference on September 1, 1996. Dr. Mikloško asked then how can we create a situation so that the kind of horrible politicians faced in the past do not arise once again.

Mr. LaRouche began his response, saying:

Well, one of Christ’s most powerful sermons was throwing the money-changers out of the Temple. The essence of politics is leadership. It’s intellectual and moral leadership. It is like the commanding of military forces. The first thing, is you get people out of the barracks. You have people sitting at home, with sordid entertainments. You have women on the phone, and not only women, but also their daughters and sons, spending hours of precious money on the phone, gossiping! Which is a degraded, immoral practice. And, when people are in the barracks, they may shoot dice or play cards, or engage in other things; or they go out looking for trouble, or they go out delivering trouble. What you do with an army, is you know the army can easily degenerate into that, and you move them!

The job of the politician is to—not to tell people, “I want to get your money and your vote, and I’ll come back and see you next year.” The job of the politician is to be an active leader of people, in the sense of when something has to be said, you say it, get the word out to the people. Decide what has to be moved upon and you move. There’s always something to move on, as Dr. Mikloško knows very well. He’s one of those people who likes to move things all the time. He’s one of the best organizers I’ve seen, and I’ve met a lot of good ones in life. But it’s very simple. You become a good organizer by doing it all the time. You organize this, then you organize this, then you organize this, then you organize this—you’re always organizing something! And that’s a real political leader.

Zepp-LaRouche posed two points of action: First, there must be a change of policy away from viewing health care and food as categories of activity to be privatized and cartelized, and just treated as an opportunity for profits. Second, there must be immediate aid, given that 30 million people face starvation over the next four months. This situation defines what one or more pilot projects can address, and create the environment for large-scale response. Such an initiative can be used as an organizing tool to provoke, induce and back-up action by governments, and agencies such as the World Food Program and World Health Organization. Look at groups in action, for example, the farmers are on the streets again in Germany, with their tractors decorated for Christmas, to make the point that the cartel food system must stop. People must eat.

Dr. Joycelyn Elders, former U.S. Surgeon General, spoke out strongly for action, saying that we should “invent a new coincidence of opposites,” and stressed that she does not mean a one world public health system, but the kind of system where a breakthrough in one country will be shared by all. She encouraged people, facing today’s frightening crises, by referring to an image used by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., saying that today’s “dialogue will carve a stone of hope out of a mountain of despair,” and people should get moving.

At the conclusion of today’s panel, lasting close to four hours, Ramasimong Phillip Tsokolibane praised the spirit of discussion involved—“spiced with charity, agapē” and he told the participants, “Let’s go out and enjoy ourselves in fighting for humanity.”

Military Logistics

Two panelists addressed the role of the military in delivering aid, and related contributions. Brig. Gen. Peter Clegg (USA ret.) said that the military has the logistics capabilities for short term, emergency deployments, and also for work on many “worthwhile projects to meet unmet needs.” However, the military is designed to defend the country, so we can’t expect the military as such to solve certain problems, but to respond to emergencies. Plus, “an international commitment” is what we need, he said. Gen. Clegg himself was involved in U.S. Army deployments in the Caribbean, in medical work in “multiple small projects, which were not just do-gooders, but for training purposes.”

Gen. Clegg stressed training, and related aspects of benefits to youth engaged in this kind of work, in what he called the “ancillary” benefits of military deployments in projects. He pointed out that the U.S. has not had a draft since 1973, and young people have come to have a lessened sense of duty, and a heightened sense of “rights.” They have not had the experience of “behaving yourself,” and “reporting to the boss,” and so on. He regards the Peace Corps as a relevant model, but voluntary. We should make clear and attractive the benefits of public service for people in what we plan. He reviewed the benefits to the nation of the Civilian Conservation Corps and Works Projects Administration in this regard.

Dr. Walter Faggett, currently Professor of Family Medicine at Howard University Medical School, and retired U.S. Army Colonel (82nd Airborne), also addressed what the military can do. He himself served in Grenada, Korea and elsewhere, and in the Caribbean had experience working with the civilian community. He also trained civilian teams at Ft. Sam Houston, Texas. Dr. Faggett was Chief Medical Officer for the District of Columbia Department of Health (2007-2008).

Faggett pointed to the military contribution in fighting the H1N1 pandemic, and the e bola epidemic in West Africa. He said that among the many lessons to be learned from these are how to have mobile systems to serve communities. The interface on those missions for West Africa included youth from America, through Howard University and George Washington University. The mobile health unit is a key component of providing medical assistance under makeshift and emergency conditions, and also training of nurses and other staff. He described the importance of the “ebola brigades and battalions of well-trained people.” He reported on many countries of Africa where teams have worked from historically black colleges here.

Medical Aid, Public Health

Dr. Khadijah K. Lang, in California, continued Dr. Faggett’s theme. She is the Chair of the Council of International Affairs for the National Medical Association (NMA), which has 50,000 members. She also is Chair of NMA Region VI. She reported on many programs in Sub-Saharan Africa, and raised the point that it would be good to have the resources to do research at the same time as provide care and training. She stressed that we must not ignore good health in general. “Baseline good health is protective in famines and pandemics.”

Dr. Don Jones, who is President of JRC Management Consulting Inc., for medical technology, reported on many machines for field use, including showing a photograph of a portable urgent care facility. His company produces such equipment as a hand-held ultrasound device, portable EKG and X-Ray machines, oxygen concentrators and many more, including platforms for telehealth. Their equipment has been used in Puerto Rico, for example, under tough conditions. The idea is to mimic emergency room and urgent care stations.

Dr. Virginia Caine, Director of Marion County (Indianapolis) Health Department, and Associate Professor of Medicine, Indiana University School of Medicine, began by addressing the food and nutrition question, reviewing the world picture of hunger, and the food insecurity inside the United States. She said, “The hungry can’t learn; the starving can’t work.” When asked about the new COVID-19 vaccine, she spoke of the work being done right now to get out reliable information, by the NMA, under its President Dr. Leon McDougle. Dr. Lang herself has been associated with vaccine development, serving on a Federal science board.

Dr. Alim Muhammad, who has a special program, “Your Immunity Project,” stressed on the matter of the pandemic and famine, that he regards “information suppression” as the real problem. There is an embargo on knowing anything about science and technology.

Food for All, Break Up the Cartels

Joe Maxwell, President and co-founder of the Family Farm Action Alliance, addressed the world famine situation with a report on the ruinous lock of the food cartels over independent family farms in the U.S. and around the world. He said this transnational agrifood system must be ended. The cartels are controlling governments, whether “left or right,” it doesn’t matter. Independent family farms are being forced under.

A former Lt. Governor of Missouri, Maxwell is a fourth-generation farmer, now raising livestock and grains. He also served in the state legislature and Missouri National Guard. He spoke in support of the farmers in India, who are now staging a mass protest against the cartels’ attempted assault. (See the separate article in this issue on this subject.) He denounced the cartels’ extraction operations in Africa, which impose hunger and poverty. “We have to break the back” of these cartels, he said, inviting people to look at a report his organization released in November (See farmactionalliance.org, “The Food System: Concentration and Its Impacts.”) Maxwell said of the global food cartels, “They don’t feed people, they feed their profits.

Zepp-LaRouche, in the discussion, referred to how the Schiller Institute collaborated on food and medical care emergency initiatives in the early 1990s, to relieve the suffering among children in Iraq, and to affect world foreign relations. U.S. farmers from 26 states organized multiple airlifts of shipments of U.S. milk powder which provided milk to several hundred children for a year. Some of the children needing medical treatment were brought to Europe for specialized care. At the time, farm spokesmen made a point of the principle involved—a coincidence of opposites—in both saving farmers from ruin, and saving people from dying for lack of food, by bucking the system. Wisconsin dairyman Greg Blaska, spokesman for the 1991-1992 milk-lift, said that the powder donations were for the children, and were also to spotlight how dairy farmers were being ruined by the lowest prices since the Great Depression.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche

The Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites

This is the edited transcript of Mrs. LaRouche’s presentation, which opened Panel 3 of the Schiller Institute conference, on December 13, 2020. The idea for the Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites was initiated several months ago.

Well, if you were to look at the condition of the world, you might think that all the governments and all people of good will would have to immediately say, this cannot go on, this has reached a point of moral civilizational breakdown. We have a situation where, due to the pandemic COVID-19, so far about 1.6 million people have died. Many of those have died for no good reason, because if you would have applied different economics, you would have health systems in every single country.

Biological Holocaust Task Force

My late husband, Lyndon LaRouche, was very aware of that, so in 1973, he put together a Biological Holocaust Task Force, which had the job of studying the impact of the IMF conditionalities policy on the developing sector. Because, at that time, this was in the aftermath of President Richard Nixon’s dismantling the old Bretton Woods system, and starting the kind of IMF conditionalities which prevented the Third World countries from investing in health care, in education, in infrastructure, in order to be refinanced. These were the famous, or infamous IMF conditionalities.

My husband clearly recognized that this would be the seed of future pandemics, the reemergence of old diseases, and the emergence of new diseases, because he argued—and this was supported by the study, or actually six studies over the years were made—that you cannot lower the immune system of entire continents over long periods of time, which is the effect of these policies, without inviting new diseases and making the people helpless against the pandemics which would emerge. This is clearly proven.

Despite all the incredible lies being circulated about China and its role in supposedly spreading the pandemic all over the globe, it is not true. Maybe China or some local authorities did make some mistakes in the first days. If an unknown new disease emerges, that could happen. German doctors made mistakes afterwards when it was already clear that it would be a pandemic.

Nevertheless, China was able, with very rigid means, within two months in Wuhan, to basically eradicate the pandemic, and has been able since then to pretty much contain it—as did other Asian countries, like Vietnam, Laos, South Korea, and a couple more. Which proves that if you have a functioning health system and you apply the known methods to contain a pandemic, these are standard methods, you can do it!

But if you don’t have a health system, you can’t do it and that is why the Schiller Institute, from the very beginning when it was clear this was a pandemic, we said that we have to fight until every single country on this planet has a modern health system, so that not only COVID-19 can be contained, but future pandemics, and they are threatening at any time. It’s already clear that the next probable pandemic will be from the SARS virus. There are already doctors in Germany who are studying it, because they anticipate that this will happen.

A Modern Health System in Every Country

The final aim of our efforts is to make sure that there is a modern health system in every single country, because otherwise, if you can’t protect the weakest ones, you will not be able to contain it. This, by the way, was the idea of Mahatma Gandhi, that you have to absolutely leave no child behind, or leave no nation behind, and this actually went into the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations for 2030. So the idea to help the very poorest to acquire such modern health systems is what needs to be official policy.

Now, this is not happening. And that is why I think we need to catalyze this private initiative first, the idea of a Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites. Yesterday we discussed the philosophical foundations of what that concept means, and why it can be applied to all major problems, but especially these present ones of the pandemic and the famine. Unfortunately, we have already lost some precious time, for reasons which are not to be discussed here now, but there were some internal reasons, inside the United States, why it did not go forward in a necessary way. But now, it is clear, it is more urgent than ever, and we are very happy to have on this panel today some very experienced, top professionals, who already have experience in how to do that.

The original idea was that we create an initiative whereby medical experts, doctors, nurses, universities, make partnerships with states and appropriate institutions in Africa, to start with, and start training programs for young people. Young people need a mission in life, because you see right now, it’s not just Africa, but you have something like one-third of the United States being in a condition almost like a Third World country, and it’s mostly colored people but not only—you have a lot of poor white people as well—who are left behind and who are suffering the most from this pandemic.

These people must be engaged in this effort, especially young people must be trained, according to the model of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps program. And then you need to collect medical supplies. Vaccines are a big aspect of that. Then start training programs in the United States, but especially in African countries. Phillip Tsokolibane, in an earlier call about two months ago, pointed to the fact that everybody who has been in Africa, knows, that many places have no infrastructure; they only have dirt roads or not even that. Phillip pointed to the fact that you need the help of the military, because the problem is so big, that you need the vast logistical capability of the U.S. military, hopefully working together with the militaries of other countries to address the problem; because if you want to bring the aid—both medical and food—into the remote areas of these countries, you need a gigantic effort.

Jump In and Help

What we want to do with this committee is to catalyze an action, and since it’s a private action, it can only be of a catalytic nature; but hopefully, by demonstrating what should be done, we can inspire governments—especially the U.S. government, but also other governments—to jump in and help.

The problem is big. The pandemic will probably be with us—the worst expectation is it will be a couple of years—because even if you have the infrastructure for the distribution of the vaccine, this is not something which can be done in only a few months. And naturally, the food problem—I think David Beasley is talking now about 270 million people dying of hunger in 2021, which is completely unnecessary! We have farmers in the United States and in Europe who would help immediately, who are willing to double food production to help to start shipping the food and then also help the agriculture development in the developing countries, so that they can then carry on, on their own.

But this requires now a real mobilization, because it is clear the G20 should have done it already. They have not. So, this is why I’m very, very happy that we have this group of extremely distinguished individuals here, today, with us. We will learn from them, because they have experience; and hopefully we will come out of this conference with a plan of action to move this, and avoid the greatest tragedy at least since World War II, which is about to happen, and is happening already.

Dr. Joycelyn Elders

Schiller Institute

Dr. Joycelyn Elders

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Dr. Elders is a physician, former Professor of Pediatrics, and the former Surgeon General of the United States. The following is her text as prepared for presentation to Schiller Institute International Conference on December 13, 2020.

I am always happy, as I am today, to address the Schiller Institute conferences. Thank you for having me. I would like to take this occasion to make the audience aware that as a former Surgeon General of the United States, I am a member of a branch of the uniformed services of the United States. That is, a branch of the military which does not carry arms. The name of the branch is the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps.

At the end of 2020, we are in a turning point in our battle, not only with COVID-19, but with ourselves. We have to grow up and realize that the world’s nations must each have a reliable health response system, a prevention system, and an emergency warning system, in order to prevent the spread of pandemic. Old ideas of division in a situation of such a public health emergency, are even more lethal now than the disease itself. Luckily, though we now have more infections, we also have more information. Though we have more hospitalizations, we also have more knowledge of effective treatment. Though we have more deaths, we have the embryo of a solution in the form of vaccines, now being developed, tested, and applied.

Thanks to the success of initiatives, including Operation Warp Speed, the world is now poised to launch a life-saving mobilization in depth. We cannot be successful, however, without a corresponding mobilization of trust. Each community has to be informed, consulted, and then requested to participate. We have to also note that the psychological effects of the disease are every bit as devastating as the physical effects. We need a mobilization of hope.

Carving a Stone of Hope out of a

Mountain of Despair

Dr. Martin Luther King once talked about carving a stone of hope out of a mountain of despair. To do that, to carve hope out of the present situation, requires scientific knowledge, medical discovery, and disciplined, rigorous crafting of the tools for the delivery, use, and improvement of the antidotes, treatments and medicines. In addition, this needs to be done worldwide, precisely in order to note negative reactions to vaccines, as well as the potential for transmutations of the disease, or even the emergence of a new disease, even as we fight the old one. If that kind of collaboration had pre-existed the eruption of COVID-19, before COVID-19, we would not be facing millions of deaths worldwide now.

We of this committee are fully agreed on one principle: there must be a worldwide mobilization in depth, involving collaboration among different communities. Military capabilities, medical capabilities, and scientific research and development, at all levels, and from all nations. In a sense, all persons that are susceptible to the disease have now become accidental draftees in a war for public health.

David Beasley of the United Nations World Food Program has just informed the United Nations that as many as 270 million people may be facing death by starvation—not by COVID—over the next six months or more. This does not change the focus of our health initiative. Rather, it underscores the magnitude of the immediate emergency, in that generally unhealthy people are likely to spread the disease even more rapidly. Hence, today, at this conference, we have assembled a cross-section of persons from military, medical, agriculture and governmental fields to speak to the world, and particularly to youth of the world. We need everyone, and the ingenuity of everyone, to invent a new coincidence of opposites among nations, civilizations, and societies, each of which at least agrees on the necessity of surviving. This dialogue will carve a stone of hope out of a mountain of despair.

A Public Health Workforce

This dialogue involves the creation of an international public health response. This kind of idea was being discussed at the end of the Second World War. The time is come to create it. This does not mean a “one world” public health system; it means that each nation, participating especially through brigades of youth, is engaged in ensuring that any breakthrough made by one, can be made available to all. About the United States, I said in September:

A public health workforce can do far more to maintain our health, than 100 surgeons. Public health workers in these public health care systems are not doctors or nurses. Giving out masks, taking temperatures, and even contact tracing and some diagnostics, does not require one to have a medical degree, or to go to school for 12 years.

This would be a public health corps that could be interfaced with the Army Corps of Engineers, and many other agencies throughout the government. We need millions of public health workers in the United States, and the world needs tens of millions.

That’s what I said in September, and it’s even more true in December. It will be even more true in February, March, April, or May. So we don’t need to wait to get started, to talk about this during these six months, and say, “You know what? You were right about what you said.” We know we are right. Now, we have to do what is right.

International Schiller Institute Conference

December 12-13, 2020

The World after the U.S. Election:

Creating a World Based on Reason

PANEL 1 ‘Hang Together or Hang Separately’: Free and Sovereign Republics, or Digital Dictatorship?

Introduction to Conference

Helga Zepp-LaRouche (Germany)

Report from the International Investigative Commission on Truth in Elections

Marino Elsevyf (Dominican Republic), David Meiswinkle (U.S.)

The Crucifixion of Julian Assange, A Journalist Committed to Truth and Peace

Viktor Dedaj (France)

What Are the Principles and Facts Concerning the Recent U.S. Election?

Harley Schlanger (U.S.)

The British Empire’s Digital Dictatorship: Censorship and Mass Social Control

David Christie (U.S.)

PANEL 2 Escaping the Danger of World War III: A Strategic Order Based on the Common Aims of Mankind

Keynote: Cusa and Mankind the Immortal Species

Helga Zepp-LaRouche (Germany)

The Chinese Economic Model

Dr. Yan Wang (China)

China and the U.S.: Rivalry, Confrontation, or Cooperation

Marcelo Muñoz (Spain)

A Salutogenic Symphony with Ancient Chinese Philosophy—Harmony as Polyphonic Accord and Peace as Expressive Equilibrium: Can We Make It Work?

Dr. Ole Döring (Germany)

What Is at Stake in the Ongoing Renovation of Nuclear Doctrines and Ballistic Treaties: What Agenda for the European Countries in the Context of a Strategic Autonomy of Europe

Prof. Emmanuel Dupuy (France)

NATO Poses a Grave Threat to World Peace

Col. Richard H. Black (USA Ret.)

If We Listen to Hjalmar Schacht, Greta Thunberg Will Not Be Necessary

Paul Gallagher (U.S.)

Ordered Debt Cancellation: Historical Precedents and Present Relevance

Marc-Gabriel Draghi (France)

PANEL 3 Overcoming the World Health Crisis and the Hunger Pandemic: Thinking on the Level of the Coincidentia Oppositorum

Act in the Spirit of FDR, or Face the Worst Genocide in History

Ramasimong Phillip Tsokolibane (South Africa)

The Role of the Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites

Helga Zepp-LaRouche (Germany)

Carve a Stone of Hope Out of a Mountain of Despair

Dr. Joycelyn Elders, M.D. (U.S.)

The Role of the Military in Responding to Humanitarian Emergencies

Maj. Gen. Pete Clegg (USA Ret.)

Interfacing Rescue Missions with Civilian Communities

Walter Faggett, M.D. (U.S.)

Portable Urgent Care Facilities and Field-Useable Medical Equipment

Dr. Don Jones (U.S.)

Sub-Saharan Healthcare Programs and the Need for More Care, Research, and Training

Khadijah Lang, M.D. (U.S.)

Cusa’s Method: The Coincidence of Opposites

Jason Ross (U.S.), Daniel Burke (U.S.)

World Hunger, U.S. Food Insecurity and Healthcare

Virginia Caine, M.D. (U.S.)

Break Up the International Food Cartels To Feed All Humanity

Hon. Joe Maxwell (U.S.)

The Real Problem Is Information Suppression

Alim Muhammad, M.D. (U.S.)

PANEL 4 A Human Future for Youth: A Beethoven-Driven Renaissance of Classical Culture

The Necessity and Pathway of a New Classical Renaissance

Jacques Cheminade (France)

Bring Schiller and Beethoven to Today’s Youth

Helga Zepp-LaRouche (Germany)

Namenlose Freude

David Shavin (U.S.)

Romeo and Juliet in Your Society

José Vega (U.S.)

What Does It Take To Really Understand Beethoven?

John Sigerson (U.S.)

To Be Good? Or To Be Sublime?

Anastasia Battle (U.S.)

Central Bank Digital Currency: The Green Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

Madison Hirst (U.S.)

Schiller in a Time of Pandemic

Carolina Domínguez (Mexico) and youth leaders from Venezuela, Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Mexico

II. Indian Farmers Challenge Global Food Cartels

Mass Farmer Protest in India Is

Front Line Against Cartels and Famine

by Marcia Merry Baker and Ramtanu Maitra

CC/Randeep Maddoke

An estimated 300,000 farmers protest changes in farm-related laws in New Delhi, India, on November 26, 2020.

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Dec. 12—As-of mid-December, the showdown continues in India between farmers who want to have the conditions necessary to continue producing food, and cartels of transnational food companies, seeking more power through new government laws to deregulate agriculture. In New Delhi, an estimated 300,000 farmers are now in and around the city, in protest. They have been there for over two weeks, with tractors and trucks, in makeshift camps, at the same time as demonstrations have been taking place all over India for two months, involving nearly 250 million people. A familiar sign is, “No Farmers, No Food.”

These major actions concern the food supply for the nation of 1.38 billion people, and India’s role as producer of a major share of world annual food output. For staple grains, India is number two after China in volume of output for both rice and wheat. India produces 24 percent of the world’s annual rice harvest, and produces 14 percent of world wheat. Any undercutting of India’s productivity guarantees food shortages, even famine. The confrontation is between agriculture for food in the public interest, against corporatist control, and potential devastation.

At issue in India are three new national laws billed as agricultural “reform,” but whose measures de-regulate farming in ways to further more “free market” exploitation of food producers, and endanger food supplies. The proposals were first put forward in June 2020, then rammed through the Parliament in September. In the past 10 days, farm leaders have had five rounds of meetings with government leaders, ending in stalemate December 9. The farmers want the new laws cancelled. They demand a call-up of a special session of Parliament to repeal the laws. Opposing this, the government has been offering certain concessions as amendments, culminating in a 20-page offering December 9, forwarded to the farm leaders by the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare. This came after the December 8 meeting between Home Minister Amit Shah and 13 representatives of the farm unions. But no resolution was possible.

After the failed December 9 talks, the media were briefed by spokesman Rakesh Tikalt for the farm organization Bharatiya Kisan Union, who said that, “Farmers won’t go back. It’s a matter of their respect. Will government now withdraw the laws? Will there be tyranny? If the government is stubborn, then so are farmers. The laws have to be withdrawn.” On the next step, he said, “The government will prepare a draft and give it to us. They said they will consult the states too. Discussions were held on the Minimum Support Price (MPS) as well, but we said that we should also take up the laws and talk about their rollback.”

CC/Randeep Maddoke

Thousands of farmers on their way to New Delhi, November 27, 2020.

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The farmers have issued a multipoint action plan, which includes December 14 as a day of national strike, with prior protests to include shutting down all toll plazas in the nation on December 12, and also shutting the major highway from New Delhi to Jaipur. Blocking railway tracks is also under discussion, not limited to the states of Punjab and Haryana—from where, along with Uttar Pradesh, most of the New Delhi protesters come—but nationwide.

Why Farmers Are Protesting

For decades, discontent has been brewing in India’s farmlands. The recent upsurge by the farmers, however, has its source in the Modi government promulgating three ordinances last June relating to agricultural marketing. Subsequently, the administration rammed them through Parliament, transforming them into legislative bills without adequately discussing the ramifications.

Among the three laws, one concerns bypassing the APMC Act of 1964 (Agriculture Produce Marketing Committee), which mandated government-regulated markets, called mandis, through which traders buy farmers’ goods. The traders typically require a license, and pay fees, which go to the state governments. The APMC Act has gone through a number of reforms over the years, but now, for the first time, it is proposed that there be trade outside the APMC-regulated mandis. That means private mandis can be set up across the country where anyone can buy produce from farmers. Licenses that buyers are required to possess to be in the APMC are no longer necessary in those private mandis. Traders in the private mandis are also exempt from paying any taxes or fees. It is evident that these private mandis will be set up by the major food and commodity corporate interests.

The Modi administration claims this privatization shift will provide the farmers more choices to sell wherever they want. Farmers counter-argue that instead of providing them more choices for securing better prices for their produce, it will leave them at the mercy of a few private players who will organize as cartels, thus setting the price. Also, farmers note that since the private mandis will not require the buyers to have licenses or to pay taxes, most buyers will leave the APMC regulated mandis, and eventually those mandis will be abandoned. This leaves all farmers at the mercy of these corporate-run mandis. That is the reason why one of their slogans is: “Corporate bhagao, farmers’ bachao”—“Drive out the corporate crowd, save the farmers!”

The second law backs contract farming. This law, if implemented, means that an agreement can be made between the farmer and the buyer before the crop is sown, under which the farmer is contracted to sell his/her produce to the buyer at a predetermined price.

There already is contract farming to a limited degree in the sugar and dairy sectors. The government claims it ensures income certainty and even some financial help from the contractor, coming as input before and after sowing. Farmers, in opposition, point to a report that notes that contract farming in parts of Maharashtra rendered participating households vulnerable to indebtedness and loss of autonomy over land and livelihood decisions. Agriculture economist Sukhpal Singh has said that contract farming in India involves many kinds of malpractice against farmers including “one-sided (pro-contracting agency) contract agreements, delayed payments, quality-based undue rejections and outright cheating, besides poor enforcement of contract farming provisions by the state government.”

Thirdly, there is the matter of the Minimum Support Price (MSP): This is at the heart of the protests. An MSP has been announced annually for 23 designated crops, but now, farmers fear that with the three new laws, the government is signaling that it is moving away from the current patterns of procurement under the MSP. The farmers’ fears are well-grounded. Some economists have argued that the MSP regime, as it exists today, is unsustainable. There is growing discussion that minimum support for farmers should be reduced, as part of reducing subsidized food for the poor, which proponents say should be done.

Fundamentally, farmers simply do not trust the government, after a series of broken promises during these last six years. Farmers are afraid that the government is paving the way for its withdrawal from procurement at MSP levels, by promulgating the APMC “bypass law,” which will lead to private, cartel buyers replacing the mandis. Farmers are demanding that the government pass new legislation which deems MSP as a legal right. This demand has a long history, but it was never met. In response, the Modi government claims that Center—the administrative agriculture office—has said that it will provide “written assurance” that the existing procurement mechanism will continue, but the farmers do not trust such promises.

The Punjab assembly has already passed such a law, but it is still to get the assent of the president. Even if the assent does come through, it remains unclear how the law will be implemented.

MSSRF Media

M.S. Swaminathan, Chairman of the National Commission on Farmers (2004-2006), an internationally renowned agricultural leader in scientific crop innovation.

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The farmers have put forward another demand regarding the MSP, that it be determined based on the calculation of cost-plus-50%. This calculation was recommended for farmers by the National Commission on Farmers (2004-2006) chaired by the esteemed M.S. Swaminathan, the Green Revolution agricultural leader. Prior to 2014, the BJP—the Bharatiya Janata Party—had promised to implement this MSP formula once it came to power. But the Modi administration has not done it, though it claims to have met most of the commission’s requirements.

One of the reasons for the Swaminathan Commission’s formation, was to put forward policies to end the nationwide disaster of farmer suicides. This is a crisis today. In 2019, there were more than 10,000 suicides in the farm sector in India.

Along with the three new laws unacceptable to farmers, are still more objectionable by-laws. One such measure is the Electricity Amendment Bill, 2020. Indian farmers get subsidized electricity. They pay the subsidized rate to the DISCOMs—electricity distribution companies—and the balance amount owed is paid by the state governments. These payments are often delayed. The effect of this, and other factors, has resulted in a situation where the balance sheets of the DISCOMs are in a state of disorder and nonpayment.

The new Electricity Amendment Bill of 2020, which farmers are protesting, changes how the subsidy is paid. As per the new bill, farmers will have to pay the full charges for electricity to the DISCOMs. Then the state government will transfer a subsidy amount to the bank accounts of farmers. Again, farmers do not trust that this mechanism will work as laid out, and fear that while their electricity charges will go up, the transfer might not be enough to cover the increase.

Corporatist Agriculture, ‘Corporate India’?

There is yet another reason for the mass demonstrations in India. In addition to the farmers’ wrath, there is a growing concern among many that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has embraced “corporate India” as his anchor for future economic development. Farmers, in particular, are concerned that a large-scale “invasion” by the corporate sector into agriculture, with the blessing of the Indian government, will undermine their control over their own land and livelihood.

The huge food processing sector in India already boasts several of the biggest transnationals in the world among its top ten companies, in particular, Unilever and Nestlé, from the Anglo-Dutch-Swiss cartels. In both processing and agro-inputs, Cargill is on the move. Over recent decades there have been several major clashes between Cargill and Indian farmers. In retail as well as processing, Walmart, infamous for driving down prices to food producers, is pushing hard in India.

The context for India’s new “free market” laws, rejected by India’s farmers, includes the fact that the commodities wing of the City of London/Wall Street networks has been consolidating its global control over all aspects of agri-food systems, including key inputs to agriculture—seeds, chemicals, and so on. Only China, and now to a degree, Russia, stand outside this domain. The global consolidation has been tightening especially since the 1995 World Trade Organization enactment, and the extreme lack of anti-trust action in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere in deference to the City of London and Wall Street, even going back to the old colonial trade and plantation patterns imposed by the Anglo-Dutch empire.

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Figure 1 above summarizes “global market concentration” in the areas of agriculture inputs. It is from a new study, “The Food System: Concentration and Its Impacts,” a Special Report by the Family Farm Action Alliance, released November 19, 2020, which is mostly focused on the U.S. But Alliance President and co-founder Joe Maxwell stressed, in prepared remarks to the Schiller Institute conference of December 12-13, 2020, that “these big corporate giants” moving in India this way, are an enemy of everyone, anywhere. He said of the Indian protests, “I’m proud of farmers there, standing up, getting ready to charge forward with a plan to protest. ‘Go get ’em,’ is what I say. Clearly, we have to work together and in solidarity around the world, as farmers who want to take care of the land, their animals, and want to feed our neighbors healthy, safe food.”

The True Green Revolution—Unfinished Business

At the heart of the ongoing farmer protest in India, however, lies a problem that is now decades old. One government after another has virtually ignored major capital investments in furthering the agricultural revolution—the original Green Revolution—by not investing in water projects, soil fertility, power, and land improvements. Yes, farmers are right and courageous to ensure that they do not get pushed aside by the corporate crowd and lose their lands, but critical in this battle, is to put forward the demands for improvement of land fertility through better irrigation, better seeds, timely fertilizer applications, and other aspects of advanced agronomy.

India’s grain and pulse productivity is way below that of the East Asian countries. In India, the food surplus situation exists because of the large area of arable land under cultivation, not because of yields per hectare. This point is underscored by how India is the world’s biggest cotton producer, but with a relatively low output per hectare. Its top rank in cotton output comes from having 40 percent of the world’s cotton crop area.

The farmers are protesting against Modi’s Administration for its decision to assert that its new laws will enhance “efficiency” by increasing competition among the farmers, and with new freedoms for the big corporations. This fight is the right thing for the farmers to do. But the farmland itself has been neglected for decades, and as a result, the farmers have remained vulnerable.

Consider another side of this, that farmers must have the means to care for resources for future productivity as well as present production. Look at how this was embodied in the concept of how to calculate the MSP, when the Swaminathan Commission issued its 2006 recommendations. The concept is that if an adequate MSP level is given to farmers—based on cost-plus-50%—then farming families will benefit significantly, and have the wherewithal to carry out—alongside government, scientists and others—the measures needed for soil, drainage, and other farm improvements.

This principle of the MSP is akin to the traditional American System “parity pricing” for farmers. This was implemented during the Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, through Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace, who had also initiated the institutions which created the “Green Revolution,” in which Swaminathan played an outstanding part, alongside famed crop scientist Norman Borlaug.

One counter note to the farmers’ protest, is that many of its leaders are letting themselves be “played” against the Modi BJP Government and its corporate allies, by the anti-BJP state governments and commodity middlemen—those who maintain the mandis, and pay taxes to the state governments. These people have no good intentions for the farmers in their heart. The farmers are falling into alignment with them, only by seeing the Modi government and corporate cronies as the “greater enemy.” It’s the “Big Picture” that’s needed now.

III. Relations with China

U.S. GOVERNORS’ FORUM

How Pompeo’s War on China

Has Destroyed the U.S. Economy

by Michael Billington

Left: DoS/Ron Przysucha; right: C-SPAN

Left: Michael Pompeo, Secretary of State; right: John Ratcliffe, Director of National Intelligence.

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Dec. 10—Four former U.S. governors held a Zoom forum on December 7 to present a picture to the American people of the extensive damage that has been done to the economy and social fabric of the United States by anti-China hysteria. That hysteria has been fostered under the direction of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and FBI chief Christopher Wray, helped by trade-war tariffs and dozens of sanctions on Chinese individuals and businesses imposed by the Trump Administration. Two Republicans and two Democrats presented case studies from their states—Missouri, Utah, Washington, and Michigan—and their insights on modern China and the deteriorating conditions in the United States. The message was clear, and devastating—the anti-China campaign has had a far more destructive impact on the United States than on China, and it must be reversed.

The role of the governors is particularly important given Pompeo’s threats to the National Governors Association Winter Meeting on February 8, 2020. Ranting about China’s “malign influence,” Pompeo threatened the governors “not to make separate individual deals” with Chinese companies, since it “affects our capacity to perform America’s vital national security functions.”

In a September 23 speech to the Wisconsin legislature, Pompeo quoted Chinese President Xi Jinping speaking to economists: “We must actively develop cooperation with all countries, regions and enterprises willing to cooperate with us, including states, localities and enterprises in[side] the United States.” This sounds like a wise, constructive offer for cooperation among nations and peoples. But Pompeo then declared he would “translate” Xi’s words for the misguided and manipulated governors: Xi, he said, was intending to “use subnational entities to circumvent America’s sovereignty. He thinks local leaders may well be the weak link.”

John Ratcliffe, the Director of National Intelligence, went further in a December 3 Wall Street Journal op-ed, declaring that China “intends to dominate the U.S. and the rest of the planet economically, militarily, and technologically.” China, he said, “poses the greatest threat to America today, and the greatest threat to democracy and freedom world-wide since World War II.” A psychotic notion, aimed clearly at preventing China’s rise, to prevent the Belt and Road Initiative from bringing real development to the developing world based on the economic model which has transformed China into a leading scientific and cultural nation, the first nation to eliminate abject poverty entirely, and one which is experiencing a Confucian Renaissance of world-historic significance.

Left: U.S. Army National Guard/Jim Greenhill; right: CC/Mandy3k

Left: Rick Snyder, former Governor of Michigan; right:Gary Locke, former Governor of Washington.

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The Governors’ Urgent Message

In response to a question from EIR during the governors’ forum, asking if Pompeo’s speech to the National Governors Association meeting had influenced their thinking, former Washington State Governor Gary Locke responded simply: “No, it did not impact us. We know how important China is.”

Indeed, the former Republican Governor from Utah Jon Huntsman, who had also served as Ambassador to both China and Russia, remarked:

The U.S.-China relationship will define the rest of the 21st century—it is the most important relationship in the world. The trade war has drastically harmed our farmers and ranchers. Tourism to our beautiful state, which I built up during my China trade missions as Governor, caused a tremendous spike in visitors from China over the past 15 years, with an economic multiplier effect. Now the number is severely diminishing—not only from COVID, but from the breakdown of trust in America. When you impose tariffs, it hurts us—the balance sheet from our #1 trading partner broke down.

Rick Snyder, who served as the Republican Governor of Michigan from 2011-2019, described during the forum the deep depression in Michigan following the 2008 financial and industrial collapse, which, he said, provoked him to run for governor:

The main reason I was successful in rebuilding our manufacturing and our economy is that I went to China. It was difficult at first, because many people blamed China, that our jobs had gone to China. But the real cause was the collapse of our own productivity. We opened up to China and restored our manufacturing, and our agriculture. Now it is in trouble. The tariffs cost jobs on both sides. The tariffs on capital goods has stopped several Chinese companies which wanted to establish production here, but the cost of bringing in the machine tools became too much with the tariffs. These broad brushstrokes have unintended consequences. We need to work together—the world will be a safer place.

Gary Locke, the Democratic Governor of Washington from 1997-2005, and then the Ambassador to China, noted that one-third of the jobs in Washington State are tied to trade, mostly to Asia:

The trade war has caused a collapse of trade with China, our #1 trade partner, in apples, cherries, wheat, Boeing aircraft and more. Trade is down 65% since before the trade war. China has not bought a single aircraft from Boeing since 2018, even though there is no new Chinese tariff on aircraft—it is an implicit retaliation for the U.S. tariffs. There is a 60% drop in both imports and exports. We had 100,000 jobs in the ports before 2019. The cost of doing business has gone up due to the increased cost of parts from China, due to the tariffs.

There is an impact on consumers. The New York Fed estimated the cost to families from the trade war is $600-800 per year in raised prices. Tariffs on American goods make goods from other countries cheaper for the Chinese, so they buy elsewhere. Our “go it alone” strategy helps foreign competitors. We must cut the tariffs. There are things that need to be fixed on the China side, but the tariffs are not fixing them. They only hurt American farmers, industries and consumers.

Asked about Pompeo’s warnings concerning national security, Gov. Locke responded:

We must be concerned about security, but helping farmers and manufacturers sell goods is not harming national security. These are good paying jobs. China has huge needs—jobs, environment, education—we should press them on intellectual property and rule of law, but through cooperation.

The Impact on Higher Education and

Scientific Research

One area stressed by all the governors is the devastating impact on America’s institutions of higher learning and the scientific research institutions associated with them. Gov. Snyder:

Our wonderful universities, where the Chinese and other Asian students are paying more than the cost of the education, essentially subsidizing the American students—now they are leaving. Our Chinese student population has fallen from over 7,000 to under 6,000. Then there is the crackdown on the Chinese scientists at our university research facilities, creating a negative environment.

None of the governors mentioned President Donald Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, or FBI Director Christopher Wray by name, clearly having decided they needed to get the message across free of the political divide in the U.S. But Pompeo’s anti-China crusade, and the McCarthyite witch hunt under Wray’s direction against anyone with a Chinese name, including American citizens of Chinese descent, was clearly on their minds. Gov. Locke:

There has been a large drop in students from Asia, especially from China. To say all students are spies is ridiculous. People think the U.S. is no longer a safe place to visit or to study.

Gov. Huntsman added:

Resolving the crisis with the visa restrictions is also crucial. Chinese students in the U.S. always have a deeper understanding of the U.S. There are few people in leadership positions in China today who were educated the U.S. Those who study here have a better understanding of how our system works. Making our country more exclusive is doing great long-term damage.

Gov. Locke, a third-generation Chinese American, also addressed the expanding anti-Asian racism resulting from the hysteria against China in Washington and in the media:

There is a troubling aspect about human rights for Asians in America. It was Chinese workers, who knew how to use explosives, who solved the problem of getting through the mountains for the Transcontinental Railroad. But then there was hostility—the Chinese Exclusion Act, limits on land ownership, the detention camps for the Japanese during World War II. Now we are backsliding—all things Chinese are suspect: students, scientists, companies. Even subway cars and buses made by Chinese companies are accused of spying, and the list goes on. They call it the China-virus, the Wuhan-virus, the Kung-fu-virus—this is disturbing. It causes anti-Asian racism. We need moral leadership.

Left: DoS; right: Missouri State Treasurer’s Office

Left: Jon M. Huntsman, Jr., former Governor of Utah; right: Bob Holden, former Governor of Missouri.

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Education for the Future

The urgency that American youth be educated in the Chinese language and culture was emphasized by all the governors. Governor Huntsman:

I began a Chinese-language immersion program in Utah while I was Governor, which is very popular. It is not only that they learn the strategically important language, but in learning the language, the students learn to understand the culture. How can we prepare the next generation for the future? They will be running into China no matter what their field. Knowing the Chinese culture is the most important thing. It is the most important investment we can make.

Gov. Bob Holden served as the Democratic Governor of Missouri from 2001-2005. In 2003 he co-founded what is now called the United States Heartland China Association, together with Sen. Adlai Stevenson III, which now represents the 20 states between the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico. This association, together with the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, sponsored the December 7 governors’ forum.

Gov. Holden also emphasized education and people-to-people relations as essential to preventing the deterioration of relations and to working together for the good of mankind:

The decline of U.S.-China relations damages our infrastructure, our businesses, our agriculture and our colleges and universities. The people-to-people relations are critical—before COVID, I took city officials to China and they came back amazed at what they saw. We must link our elementary and secondary students with China.

The governors’ rejection of the anti-Chinese policies is paralleled by the recent, successful launch of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) on November 15 by the ten Southeast Asian nations, as well as China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand. This follows an intensive series of visits to nearly all of China’s neighbors by Secretary Pompeo, reading them the riot act, demanding that they break from China, economically and politically. The Asian nations, even the U.S. “allies,” are not suicidal, and prefer development through cooperation, rather than war through geopolitics.

Decoupling Means War

The State Department and the Commerce Department, as well as the media and the Congress—both Republicans and Democrats—have been on a drive to demonize everything Chinese, to impose, nearly daily, new sanctions, and to generally decouple the U.S. and the Chinese economies.

This insanity comes at a time in history when humanity is experiencing the worst pandemic in a century, the most massive financial bubble in all of history, a famine sweeping Africa and parts of Asia and South America described as catastrophic and of “Biblical proportions” by World Food Program Executive Director David Beasley, and the immediate threat that the “Green Finance” regime being implemented by the City of London and Wall Street will bring about a new regime of Malthusian depopulation and deindustrialization.

Gov. Huntsman noted that the danger of world war is palpable, warning that if Joe Biden becomes President, his very first step must be “to deal with the greatest vulnerability: the danger of military conflict. First order of business: establish communications to deal with any incident that may arise in the maritime area with China.”

There is no time to wait to see who will be sworn in on January 20.

President Trump has taken actions, since the election, to clean out the war party from the Pentagon and to bring American troops home from the “endless wars” launched by Bush and Obama. He began his term by acknowledging China as a great nation and Xi Jinping as a great leader, exchanging highly successful diplomatic visits. He has expressed his intention to accept President Vladimir Putin’s proposal for a Summit of the Permanent Five Members of the UN Security Council, which would bring Putin, Xi, and Trump together, to address the urgent transformation of relations among sovereign nation states toward a new paradigm, to end British imperial geopolitics for good, and work together to resolve this crisis of civilization. If it means cleaning out the China-bashers, as he did the war party, so be it. History would be most grateful.

Direct quotes in this article from the December 7 meeting, cosponsored by the United States Heartland China Association and the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, are all paraphrases from the author’s notes.

The Trump-Xi Big Deals of 2017

Worth $253 Billion for China-U.S.A.

by Marcia Merry Baker

Dec. 14—The map and the accompanying descriptions of the $253.5 billion in agreements for Chinese investments in the United States, which were reached between Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping during Trump’s visit to China in November 2017, were originally published in the 2018 Schiller Institute report, The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge, Volume II. With the exception of the grain purchases negotiated by President Trump in the trade negotiations, all the other investments were sabotaged by the McCarthyite anti-China campaign led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

The headline on the accords in the China Daily “China Watch” supplement, published in several U.S. newspapers on November 29, 2017, was “Sino-U.S. Ties at New, Historic Starting Point.”

Gas, Oil, and Petrochemical Industry

West Virginia: $83.7 billion in projects for the development of shale gas in the tri-state region, involving pipeline infrastructure, a new storage hub in the state, and petro-chemical manufacturing. China Energy Investment Corp., Ltd. signed a Memorandum of Understanding with state Commerce Secretary Woody Thrasher for plans covering 20 years. The idea is that this region will become the second petro-chemical center of the United States, after the Gulf Coast.

Alaska: $43 billion of investments to build a new 800-mile gas pipeline, and agreements for China to import Alaskan LNG were signed as a Letter of Intent by Sinopec, the China Investment Corp., and the Alaska Gasoline Development Corp., a state sponsored entity. Bank of China is ready to provide financing. The pipeline will run from the North Slope southward to the Kenai Peninsula.

Texas: A $32 billion package of new and already agreed-upon deals was set, involving the energy sector. Among the elements: a 700-mile pipeline from the Permian oil and gas fields in West Texas to the Gulf Coast; a new storage facility on the Coast, as well as expansion of the existing Limetree hub in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. Houston-based American Ethane Co. signed a $26 billion contract with China’s Nanshan Group for supplying ethane gas over a 20-year period.

White House/Shealah Craighead

President Trump participates in a business event with President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People, Thursday, November 9, 2017, in Beijing.

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Aviation and Electronics

Washington: $37 billion to Boeing Co. (headquarters, Chicago) from orders and investments by China Aviation Supplies Holding for 300 aircraft over the coming years. Boeing’s largest factory is in Everett, Washington, which, with factories in other states, will produce 260 narrow-body 737s, and 40 wide-body 787s and 777s.

California: $12 billion in orders to Qualcomm were made by three Chinese firms for the purchase of semi-conductors over the next three years. The buyers are Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo. Qualcomm, headquartered in San Diego, outsources most of its production, meaning that some of the work to fulfill these orders, may come from China itself.

Indiana: $3.5 billion in deals were made by General Electric Co. with Chinese buyers, for GE to supply aviation and power generation components. Headquartered in Boston, GE has factories in many states, including, especially, engine manufacturing sites in Indiana, Ohio, New Hampshire, and Alabama.

Agriculture

Illinois: $5 billion in increased commitments by China to buy U.S. soybeans over the 2017-2018 marketing year were made between Chinese buyers and the U.S. Soybean Council (based in Missouri). The top five U.S. soybean producing states are Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Indiana. The letters of intent called for an additional 12 million metric tons, over the levels of U.S. soybean exports to China already expected.

Montana: A $300 million deal was made between the Montana Stockgrowers Association and the Chinese giant e-retailer, JD.com, for the company to invest $100 million in a new feedlot and packing plant in the state, and to buy $200 million worth of cattle, for marketing Montana brand beef in China. This deal came on top of a growing volume of U.S. beef exports to China, which were resumed in Summer 2017 after China had banned U.S. beef imports since 2003, over disease concerns. The export approval came after the April 2017 Mar-a-Lago meeting between President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping.

A Tale of Two Think Tanks:

Canberra Escalates McCarthyism, Defunds Diplomacy

by Richard Bardon

The following article was first published June 17 in the Australian Alert Service, a publication of the Australian Citizens Party. The ASPI think tank, prominently noted here, has been consistently identified in the Chinese press since the summer as a source for anti-China slanders across the “Five Eyes” media outlets.

CC/Nick-D

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which speaks for the Anglo-American military-industrial complex and intelligence apparatus.

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Signs are mounting that Australia’s political establishment is fully committed to a needless Cold War against China. Cheerleading for conflict, as always, is the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), the supposedly independent think tank that speaks for the Anglo-American dominated “Western” military-industrial complex and intelligence apparatus, whose latest policy paper effectively demands an end to Australia-China relations for fear of Communist infiltration and subversion of our “democratic” political institutions.

At the same time, Australia’s leading think tank concerned with bilateral business and diplomatic relations, China Matters, looks set not only to lose the federal government grants and commissions that fund much of its research and outreach work, but to have its tax-deductible status revoked to discourage its corporate supporters from filling the gap.

As the Australian Alert Service has reported, official relations are in their worst shape ever, federal government ministers are personae non gratae in Beijing, and what relationship remains is being kept alive mainly through semi-official diplomacy by state governments, business, and other interest groups.[fn_1] The government and mainstream media’s attack on perhaps the leading facilitator of the latter suggests that Canberra has decided to kill that off as well, setting the stage for a shutdown of relations that risks collapsing an Australian economy made over-reliant on China by decades of Canberra’s own disastrous policies.

ASPI calls itself “an independent, non-partisan think tank,” but it is nothing of the sort. Established in 2001 by the Howard government, ASPI is funded partly by an annual grant from the Australian Department of Defence. It is otherwise sponsored by a Who’s Who of multinational weapons-makers, including missile manufacturers Raytheon Australia and MBDA Missile Systems; U.S. aerospace giants Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman; European conglomerates Saab AB and Thales; and shipbuilders Naval Group, the French government-owned company that might eventually get around to building Australia’s new submarines, and Western Australia-based Austal, whose main contracts are with the U.S. Navy.

Ironically, thanks to the Foreign Interference Transparency Scheme (FITS) introduced in 2018, for which it was instrumental in (literally) scaring up support, ASPI was forced to reveal that it is also funded directly by foreign governments and supranational bodies; its donors in 2019 included the governments of the U.S.A., the UK and Japan, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

On June 9, ASPI released its latest anti-China screed, “The party speaks for you: Foreign Interference and Chinese Communist Party’s united front system.” According to its acknowledgements page, the paper was paid for by an $80,000 grant from the Foreign Ministry of the Kingdom of Netherlands, and published by ASPI’s in-house International Cyber Policy Centre (ICPC), whose own long list of sponsors includes U.S. tech giants Microsoft, Google and Amazon.

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Alex Joske, an ASPI anti-China analyst, gets his twisted ideas from “former” CIA officer Peter Mattis.

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Peter Mattis, a Visiting Fellow at ASPI.

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Moreover the report’s author, ASPI analyst Alex Joske, credits the concept for the paper to Peter Mattis, the “former” U.S. Central Intelligence Agency officer who in 2018, as a China expert for neoconservative-aligned Washington, D.C. think tank the Jamestown Foundation, praised then Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull for the FITS, and mooted that New Zealand be expelled from the Anglo-American “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance for failing to follow suit.[fn_2] In 2019 Mattis was a visiting fellow at ASPI, where he and Joske co-authored several articles casting the Chinese government’s every effort at international outreach, whether by diplomats or via business and community organizations, as part of a plot to take over the world. As may be judged by its title, “The party speaks for you” is more of the same.

Conspiracy Theory

Joske claims authority on China on the basis that he is half Chinese (from his mother); speaks and reads Mandarin; and lived in Beijing for seven years in his childhood and teens, including when his father, former Australian Treasury official and Office of National Assessments (ONA) senior China economic analyst Stephen Joske, was senior Treasury representative at the Australian Embassy in 2004-07. It would therefore be reasonable to expect the younger Joske (who is reportedly now 23 years old) to have a better than average grasp of modern Chinese political history, in which light his misrepresentations can only be seen as deliberate.

According to Joske:

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is strengthening its influence by co-opting representatives of ethnic minority groups, religious movements, and business, science and political groups. It claims the right to speak on behalf of those groups and uses them to claim legitimacy. These efforts are carried out by the united front system, which is a network of party and state agencies responsible for influencing groups outside the party, particularly those claiming to represent civil society. It manages and expands the United Front, a coalition of entities working towards the party’s goals. The CCP’s role in this system’s activities, known as united front work, is often covert or deceptive.

In a bizarre leap of logic, he then asserts:

The united front system’s reach beyond the borders of the People’s Republic of China (PRC)—such as into foreign political parties, diaspora communities and multinational corporations—is an exportation of the CCP’s political system. (Emphasis added.)

But Joske gives no examples of it having tried to do so. He then goes on to equivocate that, “Overseas united front work taken to its conclusion would give the CCP undue influence over political representation and expression in foreign political systems.” (emphasis added) To maintain this impression, Joske misrepresents historical events and institutions, and quotes Chinese revolutionary leaders outside their historical context, in order to paint their invocation by modern-day counterparts as evidence of ill intent.

Flickr/Paul Kagame

Alex Joske transforms the United Front tactic of Zhou Enlai (left), used against the Japanese invasion of 1937, into a modern plot by Xi Jinping (right) to take over Australia.

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Historically, the term “united front” (or “patriotic united front”) referred to the uneasy alliance between China’s rival—indeed, warring—political factions in the face of Japanese invasion and occupation during the Second Sino-Japanese War, from 1937 until Japan’s defeat in September 1945, in what by then had become known as the Second World War. China’s civil war resumed thereafter, from which the Communist Party emerged victorious in 1949.

Since then, the term has referred to the process by which China’s eight other official political parties (whom Joske blithely dismisses as illegitimate because they are “all socialist”); business peak body [business association], the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce; and various religious, ethnic, and other groups participate in what China calls its “socialist consultative democracy.”

The body tasked with furthering this process, including via outreach to the global Chinese diaspora (and thence to its host countries), is the United Front Work Department (UFWD). The UFWD is itself a subset of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Congress (CPPCC), which is roughly analogous to the House of Representatives in a Westminster parliamentary system like Australia’s; and it reports to the Communist Party’s Central Committee, the nation’s executive government. In other words, aside from its scale (and the same may be said of most things pertaining to China), international “united front work” differs little if at all from the informal diplomacy every nation conducts.

Joske however insists that the UFWD and every organization with which it can be “linked,” in or outside China, comprise a vast international infiltration and subversion operation. To support this contention, he cites Zhou Enlai, “one of the PRC’s founding revolutionaries and a pioneer of the CCP’s United Front, [who] advocated ‘using the legal to mask the illegal; deftly integrating the legal and the illegal’ … ‘nestling intelligence in the United Front’ and ‘using the United Front to push forth intelligence’.”

And so he did—in 1939, during a desperate war of resistance against a genocidal imperial invader. Similarly, Joske takes President Xi Jinping’s invocation during speeches in 2015 and 2017 of Communist Party founding leader Mao Zedong’s 1939 description of the United Front as one of three “magic weapons” (the others being “armed struggle” and “party building”) that kept China intact and eventually secured victory against Japan, as indicative of a militaristic intent behind present-day efforts to end poverty and resolve political discord at home and abroad. Would Joske also construe Australian politicians’ constant invocation of the “ANZAC spirit” as proof of a plot to invade Turkey?

Other sources Joske cites to support his conspiracy theory of an attempted Chinese Communist takeover of Australia include numerous overwrought mainstream media reports from recent years, wherein various Chinese and Chinese-Australian businessmen and organizations are asserted, without evidence, to be fronts for the UFWD; and allegations by various Australian and U.S. politicians and academics. In all, readers of his paper would be well advised to note the disclaimer inside the front cover:

This publication … is provided with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering any form of professional or other advice or services. No person should rely on the contents of this publication without first obtaining advice from a qualified professional.

Commonwealth of Australia

Christian Porter, Attorney-General of Australia, is reconsidering his department’s funding for the non-partisan, pro-Australia think tank, China Matters.

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Real China Experts Shunned

Meanwhile, another establishment think tank—one that really is nonpartisan and dedicated to Australia’s national interest—has been shut out in the cold. “China Matters, a high-powered body backed by some of Australia’s most senior business leaders, diplomats and academics, has fallen out of favor in Canberra,” News Corp journalist Ellen Whinnett reported June 14, “with MPs concerned it was using taxpayer funds to boost Beijing’s agenda.”

Supposedly a “News Corp special investigation”—for which read, a dossier leaked by the government—revealed that “the group, which has taken $1.86 million from five government agencies since 2015, will get no further grants from three departments—Prime Minister and Cabinet, Defense, and Foreign Affairs—from June 30,” while Attorney-General Christian Porter was reconsidering another three years’ funding his department had “agreed ‘in-principle’ ” to provide.

“Further, the Government has reversed a decision to grant China Matters ‘deductible gift registration’ status, making it more difficult for the organization to raise funds from donors.” Whinnett also implies that China Matters has defrauded taxpayers by using public money to “[fly] several MPs … on all-expenses-paid study trips to China, where they met with Chinese Communist Party government officials and leaders of … a think tank with links back to Beijing’s propaganda outfit United Front.”

In fact, this work was commissioned by the government. As China Matters’ chairman Kevin McCann AO [Officer of the Order of Australia] wrote in a letter of response posted on its website on June 16:

China Matters does not have an institutional view. It is for this reason that heads of Federal Government Departments have for five years supported its work…. Department heads and other senior public servants have welcomed the diversity of views China Matters brings to its national meetings and briefings, and commended China Matters for including in these meetings representatives of all political parties and factions.

Department heads have also welcomed the expertise about the People’s Republic of China (PRC) which China Matters provides, which they have said helps them inform policy deliberations.

China Matters does not, has not, and will not lobby against Australia or the Australian national interest. Advocacy of ongoing engagement with the PRC does not make one a stooge of the Communist Party of China or an agent of influence. (Emphasis added.)

It seems that China Matters’ real transgression was that it dared pour cold water on the establishment’s Cold War hysteria. In November 2019, its then-CEO Alistair Nicholas called for Australia to sign a Memorandum of Understanding with Beijing on the Belt and Road Initiative to ease tensions with Beijing; and its director Linda Jakobson urged the Turnbull government in 2018 not to rush the FITS into law without proper debate. But perhaps what sealed the group’s fate was that, as Whinnett put it:

[Jakobson also] called for security and intelligence agencies to provide the public with facts about wrongdoing despite the sensitivity of classified information … [to] enable Australians to develop a sophisticated understanding of the actions of the PRC government in Australian society which are considered to be unlawful foreign interference.

In her News Corp article on China Matters, Ellen Whinnett wrote: “It would be wrong to argue that the Government should only give money to those who support it—that would make Australia no better than China.” Yet that’s effectively what has happened.

[fn_1] “Canberra’s Doublethink on China and ‘Sovereignty’,” Australian Alert Service, June 3, 2020. [back to text for fn_1]

[fn_2] “Interfering Foreigners Push Turnbull’s Foreign Interference Laws,” Australian Alert Service, June 13, 2018. [back to text for fn_2]