75TH ANNIVERSARY

Victory Over Fascism in World War II:
The Optimism of Higher Resolve

by Dennis Speed

[Print version of this article]

 

The Schiller Institute sponsored a 3-hour conference honoring VE day on May 9. The video of the entire conference is available on the Schiller Institute website. That conference was opened by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institute, and His Excellency Mr. Dmitry Polyanskiy, First Deputy Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the United Nations. Mr. Polyanskiy’s full speech follows this report.

 

May 11—It is said that in the fifth century BC, the citizens of the city of Delos, Greece, found themselves beset by a terrible, lingering, lethal plague. Unable to defend themselves against the new disease, and believing that they had somehow offended the gods, they consulted the Oracle, whose admonition was: “you must double the size of your altar.” The altar, made in the shape of a cube, was of solid gold.

When every new form of the altar built by the Delians to appease the gods was rejected as incorrect, they then consulted Socrates of Athens to see if he had any idea how they might solve the problem. Socrates replied that the meaning of the Oracle was that, because the citizens of Delos had abandoned the study of universal physical principles, as expressed in the geometric problem of doubling the cube, they had irrevocably doomed themselves, in the short term, were they not to return to those studies. That same—“Delian”—judgment now grimly haunts the entire trans-Atlantic world which, up to now, has not truly grasped the significance of the coronavirus pandemic, itself a lethal commentary upon the failed economic and geopolitical policies path taken since the death of United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on April 12, 1945.

On the verge of the world’s greatest crisis since the Second World War, the Schiller Institute convened its conference, “The 75th Anniversary of V-E Day: Commemorate the Victory Against Fascism with a New Bretton Woods System!” Though the desired Four Powers meeting of Narendra Modi, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping has not yet occurred, the necessity for it is greater now than it was when Helga Zepp-LaRouche issued a call this past January, after the killing of Iran’s Qasem Soleimani, for such a summit.

In her keynote to the May 9 conference she said:

The danger is today that we are repeating the mistakes by not paying attention to how these wars came into being. World War II was a collapse into barbarism, which was engulfing the whole world. It was a situation where things happened, crimes happened which destroyed all ideas of civilization. It was a war around the whole world. It was 65 states which were involved directly or indirectly. There were 110 million soldiers under arms. The victims were mostly civilians. All together, 60 million dead people. There was the Holocaust, there were other massacres, there were mass genocides, war crimes, and all of this was the result of the inhuman ideologies of some of the key protagonists and the way they were manipulated actually on a chess board which was orchestrated by the forces of the Empire.

The Meeting on the Elbe

Zepp-LaRouche contrasted the difference between the joint statement commemorating V-E Day issued by Russian President Putin and American President Donald Trump, and that of U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, saying:

Both [Putin and Trump] said that this event at the end of World War II and the meeting [between American and Russian soldiers at Germany’s Elbe River] at Torgau is an example of the fact that our nations—meaning the United States and Russia—can cooperate, that they can put aside differences, build trust, and cooperate in the pursuit of greater causes. They say, “As we work today to confront the most important challenges of the 21st Century, we pay tribute to the valor and courage of all of those who fought together to defeat fascism. Their heroic feat will never be forgotten.” Pompeo, on the other side, chooses a different narrative by putting out a joint statement with the Foreign Ministers of Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, the Baltic countries, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia, which is a completely geopolitical narrative with the connotation of anti-communism, anti-Russia, equating Russia with communism implicitly.

A Four Power Meeting

Veteran American diplomat James Jatras, speaking shortly after Zepp-LaRouche, agreed, saying:

A few years ago, some of us were calling for a meeting of the big three [Russia, China, and the United States].... I certainly think [India’s] Prime Minister Modi should be included in that company, that we need to have the primary responsible countries in the world come to a common agreement....

The problem is, unfortunately, again, what goes on in Washington. I think the juxtaposition that Helga made between President Trump’s statement about the meeting on the Elbe, versus the statement by Secretary of State Pompeo, illustrates this almost schizophrenia you find in the American administration, which as far as many of us can tell, basically pits President Trump against everybody else in his administration. If there’s anybody in his administration who would like to go down that path of a responsible meeting of the minds with the other principal world leaders, it will be President Trump. But then you’re very hard pressed to say, “And who in his administration actually agrees with him about that?” Certainly not Mr. Pompeo, not Mr. Esper over at the Pentagon, not Mr. O’Brien at the National Security Council.

An Indictment of Pompeo

The possible reasons behind that severe and dangerous division in the President’s administration were touched upon by William Binney, former technical director at the National Security Agency. Binney, the designer of the ThinThread surveillance program, and a master code-breaker specializing for decades in monitoring Russian activities, knows something about why the differences between Mike Pompeo and President Trump exist. It was at the request of President Trump in the fall of 2017 that Mike Pompeo, then CIA director, met with Binney, who informed Pompeo that from everything Binney could determine by a forensic work-up of the evidence, it was physically impossible that the Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee files—the central contention of Russiagate. In other words, it was a lie. To this day, Pompeo has never informed Binney as to what President Trump’s response was to his evaluation.

From all indications, Pompeo chose to do nothing to correct the still-circulated national intelligence misestimate. Bill Binney told the audience:

And so, the basic case is, for example, the Russiagate issue—and they’re still pushing the Russiagate! “The ‘Russians did it,” you know: “They hacked the DNC.” Well, they didn’t provide anything to WikiLeaks, because all that data was hand-carried to them, and it was evidenced from the metadata and the forensics that we could prove all of that data was physically transferred to WikiLeaks.

And the other thing was Guccifer 2.0. Guccifer 2.0 came out shortly after June 15, I believe it was, in 2016. And when he did that, he produced items that had “Russian fingerprints” in ’em. But when you went to the WikiLeaks publication of the [John] Podesta emails, you found some of the same ones there, and they didn’t have those fingerprints! Well, that gets back to the compromise of the CIA Vault 7 material by WikiLeaks, which showed that they [the CIA] used a program called Marble Framework one time in 2016. This program, when they used it, they could hack into sites and make it look like somebody else did it.... They could make it look like the Russians did it, the Chinese, North Koreans, Iranians or Arab countries.... That was all put in there. Guccifer 2.0 was a fabrication by CIA and elements within CIA. So we’re all being manipulated here....

Binney concluded:

You cannot cover up criminal activity using classification; it’s illegal, and that’s based on Executive Order 13526, Section 1.7: That is the governing order for all classification of the United States government, and it says, very simply, you cannot classify, maintain classified, or not declassify any evidence of a crime, corruption, fraud, waste, abuse, and other types of criminal activity.

Attend to History, Reject the Fabrications

This conscious, criminal distortion of history deviates from true universal principles respecting man and nature, and if continued will doom the very architects of the lies, who eventually wall themselves up within their own carefully constructed cave of deception.

Ambassador from Russia to the Philippines, H.E. Igor Anatolyevich Khovaev, said:

I’m convinced it’s high time to learn some lessons of history. It’s really relevant today when all of us have to face another common enemy: the coronavirus pandemic. So, we need to learn the lessons of history, because it’s high time to combine our efforts: Instead of drawing new dividing lines in the world, looking for your enemies, and playing other social political games. It’s obvious for all reasonable, truthful people that no country—small or big, it doesn’t matter—is able to efficiently cope with this new, global threat on its own: So we need to be together. We need to combine, to join our efforts, because each and every nation can, and should make its indispensable contribution to this joint struggle.

Diane Sare, the founder and co-director of the Schiller Institute New York City Chorus, added:

What I was thinking about on this anniversary of V-E Day are the remarks made by Gen. Douglas McArthur on V-J Day, Sept. 2, 1945, on the deck of the battleship Missouri, about the question of what had become very clear to him, after the nuclear bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which is, that once the human species has the capability of completely annihilating itself, then you have to find another way to resolve conflicts and disagreements, than war, and he said that it requires a recrudescence of the spirit, if we are to save the flesh.

Dmitry Polyanskiy, First Deputy Permanent Representative of the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations, in his sobering remarks, commented that,

Unfortunately, after the beginning of the ’90s, there are trends which are very worrying, when there are countries that try to rewrite the history of the Second World War, sometimes to change places between the victors and those who were the criminals during this war. We in Russia and in some of our neighboring states are doing our best not to allow such an interpretation of history, which absolutely turns the whole course of the Second World War upside down....

Earlier, he had remarked,

It’s a great honor for me to address your event, which happens on a very sacred day for us. It happens on the day of the victory over fascism, that my country—at that time the Soviet Union—made the most valuable contribution to. This day is very much enshrined in the memory of our people, because everybody in my country has some relatives who perished in this terrible war, or participated and were maimed, or were working in the real economy of our country to help to boost military production and to change the course of the war. As you know, we were not provoking this war, we were not expecting it, and this happened as a big, big problem for my country, and for the whole of mankind: 27 million of my compatriots perished....

American casualties in the entire war are today estimated at 405,399 killed and 671,278 wounded. In fact, the total number of Americans in uniform during the entire war—about 16 million—is far lower than Russian deaths, as well as Chinese deaths, which totaled about 20 million, almost ignored in many accounts of the conflict. The experience of war, for China (1937-45) and Russia (1941-45), war fought in their nations and on their soil, was far different, and needs to be comprehended, in order to competently address the present complex of crises facing the world, requiring a “Four Powers” Summit as soon as possible.

‘How Did We Get Here?’

The purpose of the May 8-9 conference was not a mere commemoration. It was an attempt to return the thought processes of the American people to “resolving the Delian paradox,” at a time of great anxiety, when the United States has in a mere six weeks been suddenly plunged into unemployment comparable to that of the first three years of the Great Depression. “How did we get here, sunk to these depths, from the summit of American power and influence in 1945?” How did Americans go from the status of citizens of a great republic to become subservient subjects of what Winston Churchill called the British “Empire of the mind”?

Only by resurrecting the study of the current history of the past 75 years—for example, the wartime disagreement between Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt on ending the dominance of the British, French, and other colonial empires over the post-war world—and by determining how that disagreement played out tragically for the world after FDR’s death, can the real and present enemies of the United States, and of forces of progress worldwide, be thoroughly understood. A new dialogue on these matters of history needs to be begun worldwide.

Conference speaker Jacques Cheminade, founder of Solidarité & Progrès in France, attacked one of the misconceptions around the leadership of the alliance:

Lyndon LaRouche wrote with me—he wrote most of it, but we had many discussions about it—a book called France after Charles de Gaulle [La France aprés de Gaulle]. There is a dark legend about the relations between Roosevelt and de Gaulle, and we should dissipate the unnecessary and evil clouds of that legend. The legend says that Roosevelt and de Gaulle utterly disliked each other, even to the level to considering themselves as enemies. Many Americans say that Roosevelt considered de Gaulle as an anti-American proto-fascist; and many French pretend that Roosevelt was an American imperialist who wanted to take over the world. It is essential today to rise above such vulgar, petty, and subordinate quarrels. Both de Gaulle and Roosevelt not only fought together for the same cause, but both overcame the prejudices and stereotypes of their time and their social environments.

There have been some efforts to rekindle the interest in the real history of the 20th century by others than the Schiller Institute. Film maker Oliver Stone, whose father played a role in the reconstruction of France after the war, is one such person. In an interview a few years ago, on the show The Young Turks, about his 12-part documentary series, The Untold History of the United States, Stone, himself a decorated combat veteran of the Vietnam War, observed:

Stalingrad was the turning point of World War II, no question about it. In Moscow, they turned back the Germans, but it wasn’t the same thing as at Stalingrad.... And the Soviets took enormous casualties, civilian and military.... And that was the exact turning point in the war, because from that point on Churchill and Roosevelt, they knew that things had changed....

Winston Churchill was trying to preserve the British Empire. And he goes to great lengths to do it. And as a result, it’s the Russians that fight the Germans on the Eastern front, who do most of the fighting, because Churchill is busy trying to keep hold of the Balkans and trying to get back into his British Empire in the east. Very interesting story, geopolitically. Roosevelt is suspicious of Churchill, and very divided, and he puts out a warm hand to Stalin. There is a relationship and alliance between us and the Soviet Union. The moment that Roosevelt dies, Churchill is working hard to change the alliance, and he gets Truman, who is a small, narrow-minded man, to fall into the British camp, and to take this strong anti-Soviet stance two weeks after Roosevelt dies.

Stone went on to discuss his view that the United States also did not need to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, since the Japanese were not only already defeated, but were actively negotiating a peace arrangement.

Stone more recently applied his earlier studies of current history, including of World War II, to exposing the truth behind the 2014 Ukraine Maidan coup, in two documentaries: Ukraine On Fire and Revealing Ukraine. The true story of Russiagate, Christopher Steele, the Barack Obama Presidency and British intelligence, is right at the center of this, which, if revealed, may well not only prevent war, but also foster real trust and cooperation with other nations subjected to the same criminal geopolitical game fight on behalf of a dying City of London-directed financial empire.

Knowledgeable Optimism

The conjuncture of crises confronting humanity—war, famine, pestilence, and death by all three—can be transcended. The conference opened with the showing of an excerpt from a speech delivered by EIR founder Lyndon LaRouche in New York City in June 2003:

So, the most important thing, in my view, in my experience in leadership, is optimism. Not arbitrary optimism, not false optimism, but knowledgeable optimism. The knowledge that we can, if we will, do the things that have to be done. I know that in the period of World War II, when the United States had gone through a great period of pessimism in the 1920s and early 1930s, we began to come out of that pessimism during the period of the 1930s and the war. We were able to meet the challenge of war and the challenge of the hope of peace, which Roosevelt represented. Because there was optimism in the people. I saw things happen in wartime, under wartime conditions, which expressed optimism. People would do what they thought was impossible, because they were optimistic.

I’m confident that the United States can change. It can change from what it is now. It can change quickly. What we’re doing now is wrong, but it can change. It doesn’t have to go on like this, and I’m determined to bring that change about.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s keynote speech identified the immediate, concrete content of this solution:

We have to go back to the idea of Bretton Woods as Franklin D. Roosevelt intended it, namely, that the main aim would have been to overcome poverty in the developing countries by providing long-term, low-interest credit lines for a real industrialization of the developing countries. This program was never implemented because of the untimely death of Roosevelt, and the fact that Churchill and Truman organized much of the environment of the actual Bretton Woods....

There is a program which can be the blueprint to start this kind of global infrastructure development tomorrow, if the political will can be mobilized. That is the program which EIR published in 2014 called The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge. This was our answer to President Xi Jinping putting the New Silk Road on the agenda, and this was a program we have worked on literally for more than 40 years. It contains a concrete development plan for Africa, which we published in 1976; it contains a program for the integration of Latin America; for the development of South Asia, the Pacific Basin, the Eurasian Land-Bridge, the Oasis Plan for the Middle East, and many more aspects. So, we have a blueprint to completely start the development of the planet immediately.

A Miracle of Changed Axioms

What is needed is, in one sense, a miracle. That miracle will rely on the sort of militant optimism through which the 17-year-old commander of the French army, Jeanne D’Arc, triumphed in the Battle of Orleans on May 8, 1429, giving that army its first victory over English forces in 100 years and liberating her countrymen. Five hundred and sixteen years later, on May 8, 1945, Europe, including Germany, was liberated from the tyranny of fascism, but the imperial, geopolitical axioms that provoked that conflict in the first place, as well as its World War One predecessor, remained.

How might those axioms be discarded? Dr. Gary H. Kitmacher, Communications and Education Mission Manager, International Space Station Program, in a written statement to the conference, said:

Hundreds of years ago, civilization’s great achievements were the great cathedrals. They would take centuries to complete and required the work of the greatest organizers, artisans, architects, craftsmen and laborers. Today that life-affirming project is the International Space Station.... It is the largest and most complex spacecraft ever placed in orbit. It’s a laboratory, an observation post and a testbed for future technologies that will one day take men and women to other worlds.... One day in the future more men and women will probably live and work in space than on Earth. Our work today will have been the critical factor in making that possible....

Only societies with the courage to change their own axioms, to look over the shoulder of their present failed state, and correct themselves, are morally fit to survive. In order to successfully resolve the Delian paradox of doubling the cube, a society must first stop being block-headed.