Schiller Institute Labor Day Conference

War Drive Towards Armageddon or a
New Paradigm Among Sovereign Nations United by the Common Aims of Mankind?

September 5-6, 2020

PANEL 1

Overcoming Geopolitics: Why a P-5 Summit Is
Urgently Needed Now

Opening Remarks by Dennis Speed

Note: We present here the edited transcripts of the first four panels of the Schiller Institute conference. Reports on the remainder of the conference will be published in future issues. The videos of the conference are available here.

Dennis Speed: We want to dedicate this conference to two founding members of the Schiller Institute who recently passed away, Ted Andromidas and Phil Rubinstein. These two individuals, earlier than the founding of the Schiller Institute, gave almost their entire adult lives to a cause that we are going to be discussing in great detail today.

We know that many people joining us today have recently lost loved ones in the past months because of the pandemic. This conference is also dedicated to them, and to the veterans of the Great War of 1937-1945, sometimes called World War II, and to all of the precious lives we have lost. The war that began in China, spread throughout Europe and Asia, and finally throughout the entire world, ending on September 2, 1945. Others sought to extend that war after that date in a new form—a nuclear form. And in part, we are convened here today to ensure that such a holocaust does not occur.

Franklin Roosevelt said in 1936:

It has been brought home to us that the only effective guide for the safety of this most-worldly of worlds, the greatest guide of all, is moral principle. We do not see Faith, Hope, and Charity as unattainable ideals, but we use them as stout support of a nation fighting the fight for freedom in a modern civilization. We seek not merely to make government a mechanical implement, but to give it the vibrant personal character that is the very embodiment of human charity.

By what means do we avoid that kind of destruction, which has happened, particularly in the last century, so often? To what purpose could we look at history—our past—to conceive how to make our future determine our present?

We go to a clip from Lyndon LaRouche, a founder of this organization and one of the greatest economists in the world, who passed away on February 12, 2019. We will hear him speaking at a Schiller Institute conference exactly 20 years ago on Labor Day.