JUNE 10 SCHILLER INSTITUTE CONFERENCE

World Peace Is the Most Important Issue for Mankind

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

[Print version of this transcript]

This is the edited transcript of Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s keynote address, delivered to the Schiller Institute’s June 10, 2023 online conference, “The World Needs JFK’s Vision of Peace.” Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche is the founder and leader of the Schiller Institute. Subheads and an embedded link have been added. Watch the video here.

Good morning! I greet all of you. We are commemorating one of the most important speeches of the post–World War II period, the speech given by President John F. Kennedy 60 years ago at The American University, his very, very famous Peace Speech. But we are not doing it in an academic manner, we are doing it with a dramatic worldwide mobilization of as many forces as possible, and as an urgent appeal to the U.S. government to return to the outlook expressed by John F. Kennedy, that the United States must return to become a force of peace in the world, not, as Kennedy said, “a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war … but the kind of peace that makes life on the Earth worth living.”

We are concerned that the world is dangerously close to the possible outbreak of a new world war, which this time would be a thermonuclear one, and therefore mean the annihilation of all life on Earth. From this coming Monday on, in two days from now, over Germany there will start the largest NATO air war maneuver since the end of the Cold War, the Air Defender 23, with the largest maneuver transfer of 100 fighter jets from the U.S. to Germany, including the nuclear-capable stealth F-35, as well as 120 more fighter jets from other countries. The basis of the maneuver is an air war against an imaginary enemy, who as well commands a potent air force, and it is quite obvious who that would be.

Under the present condition of an escalating war in Ukraine, some military accident or the error of a pilot very easily can be mis-read as an act of aggression. There have been recently more and more Ukrainian strikes into the territory of Russia, and Russian air surveillance for sure will be on high alert observing the NATO maneuver. Russian observers, who could verify that the maneuver is not a pretext for the preparation of a nuclear attack, have not been invited. Even though this maneuver has been prepared since 2018, to actually carry it out under conditions of a hot war in the middle of Europe puts the world at risk of extinction, even if there were no intention, just a misfortune. This maneuver must be called off before it starts!

With an obviously insane proposal to drive nuclear brinkmanship to the extreme, under the headline, “The Key To Ending the War in Ukraine? Attacking Crimea,” John E. Herbst, the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, and Daniel Fried, a fellow at the Council, have now repeated the proposal by the British Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) of a year ago, to “end” the Ukraine war by creating a “Cuban Missile Crisis on steroids,” by having Ukraine attack Crimea. By destroying the Kerch Bridge, Ukraine would first take Crimea, and then fissures in [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s government would grow and he would then fall. Then Russia would accept to have lost the war.

Not one mention of the utmost danger that this would cross the ultimate red line of the presently strongest nuclear power—Russia—and a demonstrated ignorance about the lack of the kind of back-channel discussion which existed between Kennedy and Khrushchev, this proposal obviously reflects the thinking of a major faction in the Anglo-American establishment, for which the Atlantic Council is the mouthpiece.

British Army Col. Hamish de Bretton-Gordon (ret.)—a member of the Order of the British Empire and former Commanding Officer of the UK’s Joint Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Regiment and NATO’s Rapid Reaction CBRN Battalion—is asserting without the slightest proof, that President Putin would be preparing to use the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant “as an improvised nuclear weapon.” Therefore, the West “must act urgently to stop Putin” with “whatever it takes,” he says.

These proposals are sheer madness. What should cause every sane person on the planet to be alarmed to the highest degree, is not only the fact that it has become “normal” for the mainstream media to publish such nuclear war-mongering poison, but that almost all the Western establishments don’t denounce such irresponsible utterings, but go along with the official narrative about Putin’s “unprovoked war of aggression.”

The situation today is far more dangerous than during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and far more dangerous than during the intermediate-range missile crisis in the beginning of the 1980s, but the public awareness has been squashed by a relentless war propaganda, which has demonized Russia and increasingly China, and has seemingly eradicated any historic memory in parts of the population, leaving others with a feeling of despair about what to do!

What Is To Be Done?

Indeed, what is to be done, in this amazingly dangerous moment of history?

The Schiller Institute is circulating internationally an appeal to the President of the United States—that is, President Biden—to urgently return to the policies of John F. Kennedy, as they are expressed in his peace speech given 60 years ago today.

My late husband, Lyndon LaRouche, was emphatic that the Kennedy assassination, and especially the cover-up of his murder by the Warren Commission, represented a deep cut, a dramatic change in paradigm of American politics, a takeover by what President Eisenhower had called the “military-industrial complex.” And the transformation of the kind of U.S. Kennedy was talking about, of a U.S. standing for “not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women—not merely a peace in our time but a peace for all time,” into a U.S. insisting on a Pax Americana of a unipolar world, which had started to be put into motion then.

With Kennedy—his limitless confidence in the perfectibility of man and the power of his credibility—assassinated, a downward spiral into the present deep cultural crisis began. It is not exaggerated to say that the present horrible situation, with a mass shooting every 16 hours, with the dramatic suicide rates among the youth, the spreading drug addiction and the hopelessness for the poorer parts of the population, is the result of what it has meant for American society, that the assassination of an elected President and the cover-up thereof could take place without those responsible for it being held accountable.

According to the Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, on October 26, 2017, the so-called assassination records were to be publicly disclosed, unless “The President of the United States certifies that: (1) continued postponement is made necessary by an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations; and (2) the identifiable harm is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.”

That expiration date occurred during the Presidency of President Donald Trump, who had always promised that he would release these files. The date passed, and according to [New Jersey Superior Court] judge Andrew Napolitano, Trump told him, “Judge, if you saw what I saw, you would know why I can’t release them.”

So what would be a harm of such a gravity that outweighs the public interest in disclosure? I think this brings us to the crux of the matter. Robert Kennedy, Jr.—the nephew of John F. Kennedy and son of the likewise murdered Robert F. Kennedy—recently revealed what was the suspicion of his father.

What could be a harm of greater gravity, than to have a global nuclear war, which would extinguish the human species, and all memories of it, because there would be nobody left to even investigate the question of how it came to this unparalleled tragedy? Is it not the most urgent task for everybody who has some capacity, to do everything possible to release these records fully, and not in the controlled piecemeal fashion, as the National Archive is presently doing?

If it came to a nuclear war, then the murder of Kennedy and the cover-up would turn out to have been the punctum saliens in the sense of Friedrich Schiller’s definition, whereby a trajectory was started which led to the catastrophe. Likewise, if the possibility of nuclear annihilation is to be averted for good, it absolutely does require that the President of the United States return to the paradigm of Kennedy’s peace speech.

An Epochal Change

Apart from the immediate crisis around Ukraine, the world is undergoing right now an epochal change, of which only a few are aware in the West. But many more people are conscious of it in the countries of the Global South. The effort by the collective West—the U.S., Great Britain, the EU, and strangely Japan, which thinks it is part of the West—to maintain the unipolar world, which Francis Fukuyama thought would emerge after the collapse of the Soviet Union (his so-called “end of history” thesis), as a continuation of the Wolfowitz Doctrine, did not work out.

Rather than submitting to the “rules-based order”—which is a highly flexible concept, depending on where it is applied—the countries of the Global South saw it as more advantageous to cooperate with China’s Belt and Road Initiative and realize real economic development. That was their choice, rather than to remain in a de facto colonial status dictated by these rules, such as the conditionalities of the IMF; the yoke of “appropriate technologies” that denies basic infrastructure projects, the precondition for serious industrialization; the six extensions of NATO to the East, now threatening to become Global NATO; the weaponization of the dollar; and sanctions regimes against any country that did not want to fit into this unipolar world. As a result, there was an epochal blowback, clearly not anticipated by the advocates of the worldwide spread of the neo-liberal system as the only option.

In an act of self-defense, these nations are now looking for a different system which allows for the development of their economies, and many have the goal of becoming a middle-level income country in the relative short term. Over 30 of them have applied, or are trying to apply, to be members of the BRICS-Plus. The Spirit of Bandung, the great aspiration of the Non-Aligned Movement, has come back, and this time more powerfully, since it has the cooperation of China and the Belt and Road Initiative.

If the United States and the countries of the attempted Global NATO continue to try to “decouple” or “de-risk” from that overwhelming majority of the human population, which represents around 85% of mankind, it would be absolutely tragic. If the world would separate into two basic blocs, it would not only harm the world economy enormously, it would almost certainly lead to a Third World War, even if the crisis around Ukraine could be defused in the short term.

It may not be obvious to the average American or German, but it is for sure obvious to the intelligence services that the image of countries like the United States, Great Britain, and Germany have suffered tremendously. Germany, for example, which used to be admired internationally for its scientific discoveries and Classical culture, has become the laughingstock around the world: leaving nuclear energy without having an alternative. A government incapable of moving against the culprits of the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines. Or of defending its people against a deindustrialization of half of its economy, which threatens to throw all of Europe into economic and social chaos!

And As for the United States?

And as for the United States? The country which was once the beacon of hope and temple of liberty is now feared, or worse. According to a study by the Watson Institute of Brown University, the death toll of the wars after 9/11 is at least 937,000 people due to direct war violence, including armed forces on all sides of the conflicts, contractors, civilians, journalists, and humanitarian workers. But many times more have died indirectly in these wars, due to ripple effects like malnutrition, damaged infrastructure, and environmental degradation—an estimated 3.7 million. So, more than 4.5 million all together.

Many may regard as utopian the idea that the U.S. President, President Biden, could use the 60th anniversary of Kennedy’s peace speech as the occasion to find a way to make peace with Russia and China, the way Kennedy approached this question, by showing respect for the interest and historic contribution of the other. If these critics turn out to be right, all of humanity could end in a tragedy.

But maybe this vision could be one which is adopted by the American people, that President Biden should become the great peacemaker of our time, and find a place in history, that does not “end,” that does not cease to exist because of nuclear war, but that establishes a new era of mankind, where all nations live together in a “genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on Earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and build a better life for their children—not merely peace for the Americans but peace for all men and women—not merely peace in our time, but peace for all time.”

It is definitely something to fight for! Thank you.