This article appears in the December 2, 2022 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Third Int’l Seminar of Political and Social Leaders, Much Expanded, Takes Up Principles for Durable Peace
[Print version of this article]
Nov. 26—On the anniversary of the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Nov. 22, nearly 30 speakers from a dozen countries deliberated in a day-long seminar on the urgent mission: “Stop the Danger of Nuclear War Now.” Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had shown the courage and wisdom to bring the world back from the brink of nuclear extinction in the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, and the seminar took up the issue: How do we do the same today? How do we not only stop the danger of a nuclear war—as Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche posed the challenge in her keynote address—but how do we also establish the principles for building a durable peace, giving security and development to all nations, for the one Humanity?
This was the third seminar in a process that began scarcely six weeks ago with an Oct. 7 on-line conference of current and former legislators of Latin America and the Caribbean on the topic, “Stop the War Before It Is Too Late; Eliminate the Causes of the War Danger.”
The campaign grew rapidly into an Oct. 27 Second Seminar of Current and Former Elected Officials of the World, “Stop the Danger of Nuclear War,” held both online and in a meeting room in the Mexican Congress, and addressed, among others, by current Mexican Congressman Benjamín Robles Montoya.
Coming off that second seminar, Congressman Robles and former Mexican Congresswoman María de los Ángeles Huerta issued an Open Letter calling legislators from around the world, and all political and social leaders in every country, to join in this effort—to pressure their governments to act, but also to lead in organizing a movement of patriots and world citizens from every nation to stop the escalating danger.
That call was answered in the sharply increased international participation in the third seminar, especially from Europe, Ibero-America, and the United States. Even since the Oct. 27 seminar, the danger of nuclear war had, if anything, increased dramatically, and thus, the urgency of these deliberations. From the originating region, Ibero-America, the third seminar’s panelists now included a former President of Guyana, former cabinet ministers from Argentina and Ecuador, and one sitting and four former members of national congresses.
Zepp-LaRouche commented days later in her Nov. 25 weekly webcast that political ferment and awareness are now striking areas of the world that, until recently, had been relatively passive observers. She noted,
I’m very happy that we had significant participation from Europe, especially from some people who have been in these demonstrations, especially in east Germany: craftsmen, mayors, peace activists who are taking to the streets because they really don’t want to be cannon fodder for an insane NATO war, which can only lead to the destruction of everybody. So, this time we also had mayors from France, giving support to a peace initiative from the German city of Stralsund, which has offered the city to host peace negotiations. This goes back to an initiative of that city from 1370, when they initiated a similar peace process.
Principles or Social Contract?
But just as durable peace is not simply the absence of war, protest and opposition are not the same thing as the design of a viable new international security and development architecture. Zepp-LaRouche used her keynote address to present ten proposed principles for the panelists’ consideration and deliberation, principles which would serve as the bedrock for such a new architecture. She cited the model of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia—as had Lyndon LaRouche in a video clip from his 1999 video “Storm Over Asia,” which was shown at the seminar—and noted that it took four years of intense discussion of such principles before peace could be achieved. So too with the Federalist Papers in the United States, which elaborated the political philosophy and principles underlying the new American Constitution.
Part of the problem is that many sincere opponents of today’s deadly unipolar world do not agree that such principles are required or possible—or that they even exist in a scientifically knowable form to human beings. Many hold the view that the best mankind can do is to come up with the equivalent of a “social contract” among nations, a kind of Rousseauvian pact that would carve out a multipolar world where each nation’s competing (and often contradictory) interests are balanced out against those of other countries or regions.
But the concept of Man underlying Rousseau’s (multipolar) “social contract” is in all essentials identical with that of Thomas Hobbes’s (unipolar) “Leviathan”: a beast-like individual guided by his or her pursuit of individually defined self-interest, against those of other individuals.
An entirely different, higher solution must be found, Zepp-LaRouche argued, stating in Point 8 of her proposed principles:
A solution to the existential threat to humanity cannot be found with the help of secondary or partial arrangements, but the solution must be found on the level of that higher One, which is more powerful than the many. It requires the thinking on the level of Coincidentia Oppositorum, the Coincidence of Opposites, of Nicholas of Cusa.
And in her tenth and final proposed principle, she concluded:
The basic assumption for the new paradigm is, that man is fundamentally good and capable to infinitely perfect the creativity of his mind and the beauty of his soul, and be the most advanced geological force in the universe; which proves that the lawfulness of the mind and that of the physical universe are in correspondence and cohesion, and that all evil is the result of a lack of development, and therefore can be overcome.
The first panel of the Nov. 22 seminar was titled “Stopping the Doomsday Clock: The Common Good of the One Humanity.” The second panel was on “Peace Through Development.” The texts of all of the leaders’ presentations in the first panel follows below.
