This article appears in the May 12, 2023 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
MANHATTAN TOWN HALL, APRIL 22
Sare for Senate Campaign Disrupts
‘Controlled Environment’ in U.S. Politics
[Print version of this article]
May 6—In the early 1960s, the potential existed for sweeping change in the politics of the U.S. and the world at large. The spectacular success of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the American Civil Rights Movement, which had won the battles for desegregation and voting rights, had begun to intersect the international movement against colonialism which had been launched in 1955 with the Bandung Conference and the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement. The British, and their followers in the nascent neo-conservative movement in the U.S., were concerned that the U.S. might veer away from their control and return to the ideas of the American Revolution.
A massive effort was launched to disrupt and coopt American political activism, directed by agencies such as the CIA and FBI, and complemented by a tsunami of cash from private oligarchical founts such as the Ford Foundation. Many of these efforts were exposed to public scrutiny during the 1975 Church Committee hearings in the U.S. Congress, which brought to light such ghastly projects as COINTELPRO and MK-ULTRA.
Nonetheless, after a few unconvincing mea culpas from the “intel community,” it was back to business as usual. Before long, the Civil Rights Movement had been reduced to a caricature of itself in the form of “identity politics,” and the voices who had spoken out against imperialism had been silenced, replaced by those demanding austerity and a halt to development in the name of “environmentalism.”
The sole exception, which stubbornly refused to be manipulated, was the growing movement of Lyndon LaRouche. Consequently, the LaRouche organizations became the target of the largest and most aggressive COINTELPRO program. Huge sums were spent on propaganda to convince conservatives that LaRouche was a dangerous left-winger, and to convince liberals that LaRouche was a dangerous right-winger. These campaigns, combined with a “weaponized” Department of Justice, which managed to convict and jail LaRouche and several colleagues on preposterous conspiracy charges, created a climate of fear where only the most courageous activists in the U.S. would dare to publicly associate themselves with LaRouche and his ideas.
Today, at long last, this is changing. LaRouche’s oft-repeated warnings about the inevitable demise of the “casino economy,” and his steadfast opposition to the neocon “wars of choice,” have not gone unnoticed, and as the political situation in the U.S. becomes increasingly desperate, a new correlation of forces is emerging. This was evident on April 22 of this year, when the Sare for Senate Campaign organized a Manhattan Town Hall meeting in New York City, both in-person and online, under the theme, “Putting Away Childish Things: America in a World Without War.”
‘Putting Away Childish Things’
The Sare event saw over 120 attendees from New York and other states, along with around 90 online participants, for a four-hour discussion, with 12 speakers. The gathering brought together diverse political voices that collectively called for the United States to return to its anti-colonial philosophical roots, and to commit to building a community of sovereign nations, in the spirit of John Quincy Adams, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy.
With a nod to her own professional background as a musician, Sare opened the event by introducing a series of art songs, opera arias, spirituals, chorales, and the national anthem, performed by supporters of her campaign, to the end elaborated by poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller: for the ennobling of the emotions through beauty.
Tara Reade, a former junior staffer for Joe Biden’s Senate office, introduced and moderated the event. She cited the outrageous Federal indictment of Uhuru Movement members in St. Petersburg, Florida, just four days earlier, for what the Department of Justice called, “sowing discord,” as setting a dangerous precedent for anti-war activists. Reade also acknowledged the essential role of Helga Zepp-LaRouche and the Schiller Institute in fostering a global peace movement.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the keynote speaker of the event, highlighted the necessity of introducing her Ten Principles for a New International Security and Development Architecture into the global dialogue. Though her first seven principles may be considered obvious and programmatic, she said, the last three, which focus on the philosophical foundations of a world security and development architecture, are crucial ideas for citizens across the world to realize in order to avert the extinction of the human species, whether through nuclear war or financial breakdown. She emphasized the role of the Global South in turning away from neo-colonialism and creating an alternative, non-dollar based financial system, which has enraged many of the most lunatic “Atlanticists.” In order for the United States to avert a potential nuclear showdown with Russia and China, Zepp-LaRouche emphasized, citizens must demand that their leaders join the new paradigm, represented emphatically by China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
The rest of the panel featured significant and exciting speakers, including Janice Kortkamp, a journalist who reported on her experience in Syria; Steven Starr, a nuclear weapons expert who gave a concise picture of a theoretical nuclear conflict between the U.S. and Russia, noting that the potential is even higher than it was in the 1980s; Dennis Speed, a long-time collaborator of Lyndon LaRouche, who recalled the hope and optimism represented by John F. Kennedy’s famous June 1963 American University speech, and called upon everyone to consider the true meaning of the U.S. Declaration of Independence and restore a government in alignment with the principles of natural law; and Jose Vega, a young member of the LaRouche movement and staff member of the Sare for Senate campaign, who spoke about the interventions he and others have led to confront elected officials and members of the media establishment.
Many other speakers from various political parties, including the Libertarian Party, Green Party, and People’s Party, praised Diane Sare for helping to break the artificial left-right political matrix, and for bringing together voices to form a coalition dedicated to ending the war regime. Former Libertarian Party candidate Larry Sharpe characterized Diane’s candidacy in the following way: Unlike the candidates of the “left/right paradigm,” who only talk to their major donors, Diane will go anywhere and talk to anyone, based on issues and ideas. People’s Party National Chair Nick Brana praised Sare’s role in creating a dialogue among diverse political movements, and for “actively calling out these war-mongering politicians” through public interventions.
Other presenters included Anthony Gronowicz, history professor and former Green Party candidate for New York City Mayor; Gerald Celente, founder and director of the Trends Research Institute; and Cade Levinson, founder and director of the Scranton Powderly Forum.
Former USMC intelligence officer and UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter spoke passionately on the strategic importance of nuclear disarmament. He denounced the preemptive use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, done not to defeat Japan, which was already prepared to surrender, but simply to “send a signal to the Soviets: don’t mess with us!” He asserted that, “We live in the nation that represents the greatest threat to the world today.”
Diane Sare concluded the event, urgently calling upon people to resist the tug of primitive habits and instincts, and recognize that their short existence is only meaningful if it contributes to the immortality of the human species. She asked why Americans tolerate the deep corruption in the U.S. political establishment, citing the fact that “the whole world knows who blew up the Nord Stream pipelines,” and the recent revelation that Secretary of State Antony Blinken was responsible for deploying the CIA to create an open letter by former intelligence officials to make the ludicrous claim that the Hunter Biden laptop story was a Russian disinformation operation. She insisted that the United States needs to jump off the insane path of endless bank bailouts and financial speculation, return to a Glass-Steagall based system, and increase energy consumption from generation to generation.
Sare also recalled the unjust imprisonment of Lyndon LaRouche, showing clips of LaRouche attorney Odin Anderson’s 1995 testimony before an independent panel convened to expose Justice Department misconduct in the LaRouche and other cases. LaRouche’s discoveries in the field of physical economy, including that the cultivation of creative genius is the impetus for a sound, healthy economy, must be studied and implemented, Sare said.
The Enemy Response
The Anglophile establishment is keenly aware of these developments, and they are feeling increasingly vulnerable to any form of criticism. Under the pretext of combatting “disinformation,” they are struggling to achieve an airtight, totalitarian control over their “narrative.” However, this has been a daunting task for them, as they attempt to play whack-a-mole with an increasing number of diverse dissident voices.
In response, they have ratcheted up the censorship. The most dramatic of these measures was the firing of Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, announced April 24. This was accompanied by an extensive media smokescreen of purported reasons for the firing, including infighting at the management level of Fox, blowback from the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit, and any number of unwholesome or bigoted views attributed to Carlson (some of which he may actually hold). This was all done to conceal the actual reason: Carlson was the solitary voice on national news who criticized the neocon war agenda in Ukraine and Syria, while also inviting others onto his show to do so, including political comedian Jimmy Dore, former Congresswoman and Presidential pre-candidate Tulsi Gabbard, and Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté of The Grayzone news site. To no one’s surprise, the network’s prime-time viewership dropped by 29.6% after it fired Carlson.
During the same timeframe, the leadership of the Democratic Party, alarmed by the rising poll numbers of anti-neocon Presidential pre-candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., announced that there would be no primary debates for the 2024 Democratic Presidential nomination, hoping to silence any dissent against Biden’s bellicose foreign policy.
Meanwhile, Canada has passed a new law—the “Online Streaming Act”—that amends the Broadcasting Act. It allows the government regulations to be extended to internet audio-visual content as if it were broadcasting (which is regulated by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission—CRTC). The Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms released a statement April 28, stating:
[The Online Streaming Act] will fall under the CRTC’s jurisdiction to penalize any regulated entity found to be spreading misinformation (according to the CRTC’s definition of misinformation) and impose significant fines (up to $250,000 per day) for any breaches of the Act. Every person in Canada, whether a Canadian citizen or not, who accesses a foreign broadcaster is under the scope of this law.
The U.S. State Department indulged in a spectacular orgy of hypocrisy May 3, designated as World Press Freedom Day, with incessant tweeting and other public utterances to the effect that “Journalism is not a crime,” and with sanctimonious finger-wagging at Russia over the case of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich. The elephant in the room was, of course, the case of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, still incarcerated at the behest of the U.S., under barbaric conditions in HM Prison Belmarsh, in southeast London.
For the occasion of World Press Freedom Day, a special release by Helga Zepp-LaRouche on the Assange case was distributed at rallies in Washington and other cities. On May 5, Assange himself issued a statement as well. [See texts of both below.]
Secretary of State Blinken was reminded of the continuing injustice to Assange and to journalism generally, by CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin, who staged a brilliant intervention on Blinken during an event hosted by the Washington Post’s David Ignatius. Benjamin was a speaker at a “Free Assange” rally held later that day in Washington, which was also addressed by candidate Diane Sare and Jose Vega, who participated in the mid-day protest march—“Funeral Procession for Press Freedom”—going from the Department of Justice to the National Press Club and ending at the Washington Post.
