Organizing Peace Requires the Poetic Principle

by Dennis Speed

[Print version of this editorial]

Dec. 18—Lyndon LaRouche began his November 6, 2000, EIR article, “Politics As Art,” with this paragraph:

Some winced or giggled, when the amiable and gifted Senator Eugene McCarthy conducted political campaigning as poetry-reading sessions. I laugh happily at what he did. Senator McCarthy’s critics did not remember, as I do, that President Lincoln had won a terrible, justified, and absolutely necessary war on behalf of all humanity, by aid of lessons adduced from Shakespeare, which he had taught, as directives, to the members of his Cabinet. No one, friend or foe, laughed at the awesome result of that instruction.

The apology recently issued by the Vatican, and accepted by Russia, demonstrated a poetic change in thinking, which was immediately and poetically responded to by Russia, thus instantaneously ending a putative, “deep-rooted, intractable, and potentially unresolvable difference” between them. Those who say “we can never negotiate with NATO” or “we can never negotiate with Russia,” may not realize it, but it is their failure to understand the role of Classical tragedy in diplomacy that condemns them to act only as “copycat” descendants of the fools that precipitated two world wars (or one world war in two parts) in the last century, destroying themselves in the process.

In a discussion with The Duran’s Alexander Mercouris, and reporter Glenn Diesen yesterday, former United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack Matlock said:

I was privileged to be in the White House advising President Reagan on his policies toward the Soviet Union from 1983, and then in 1987, I was sent as United States Ambassador to Moscow, as you have mentioned. So that I was able to witness, you might say, from the inside, the way the [U.S./Soviet] relationship developed during that period. And quite frankly, I think most people, both in the United States and in Europe, many people, maybe even most, have a very mistaken idea of how this happened.

First of all, the idea that the end of the Cold War was something like a victory of the West over the Soviet Union, I think is incorrect. We negotiated an end to the Cold War, and we negotiated it with the benefit of ending it, an equal one for both sides. This required a change in certain Soviet policies, but these changes came about, and they occurred peacefully….

President Reagan very much condemned communism, but he never condemned Russia qua Russia. He understood that the problem was the communist system—it was ideological, and not something that should be attributed to a single nationality.

Later, in response to a question, Ambassador Matlock added:

I think that if one looks deeply into the roots of the current war in Ukraine, you would have to conclude that it could have been avoided. And it almost certainly would have been avoided, if there had not been the threat of NATO expansion, and the actual military involvement of NATO countries in Ukraine after its—one could call them ‘troubles’ in 2014, when the government was changed, and became much less representative of the whole country.

There were also many things said by Ambassador Matlock during the interview with which one could, and should disagree. There is, for example, his omission of the role of Lyndon LaRouche in his White House-authorized negotiations with the Soviets on the Strategic Defense Initiative, and the public adoption by President Ronald Reagan of LaRouche’s policy on March 23, 1983. What he very usefully identifies, however, is that what most people think about what happened to cause the peaceful disintegration of the Soviet Union, and its NATO [equivalent], the Warsaw Pact, is wrong. There was no military victory—as well as no “victory by capitalism”—over Russia that ended the Cold War.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s study, “Germany’s Missed Historic Chance of 1989,” a strategic study of tragedy, is essential to read in order that the methodological mistakes made in the negotiations of 1989 not be repeated. The result of doing so might be the extinction of the human race.

Poetry Must Supersede Stupidity in Diplomacy

For example, by studying President Lincoln’s use of tragedy to educate his 1861-65 Cabinet, perhaps at least one American legislator would gain the moral strength to declare, that in a fundamental, tragic sense, the real war against Ukraine is being waged by NATO, and NATO’s puppets in Ukraine, to depopulate that nation. Compare the lost chance for peace, the March 2022 possibility for negotiations to end the war in Ukraine, to life in Ukraine tonight.

Consider the role of Boris Johnson and his controllers, or the even worse short-term Prime Minister Liz “Nuke ‘Em” Truss. If that ugly, murderous truth were faced, then many citizens, not only Americans, but people all over the world, might begin to face the fact that the fundamental war under way is the war of the British wing of the international financial oligarchy against the legacy and future of the sovereign republican nation-state, and that the central enemy against which Perfidious Albion is deployed is not even Russia, not even China, but the United States.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s interchange with Garland Nixon and Eva Bartlett during EIR’s December 17 symposium, “Peace On Earth, Or Humanity’s Doom? The Case for Negotiations,” is an illustration of the practice of organizing. While the three presentations, both separately and together, were important in different and complementary ways, it was the re-organizing of the discussion onto a higher platform by Zepp-LaRouche’s insistence that “the inevitable outcome is not inevitable,” which recalled the principle exhibited in the Vatican’s apology.

I think it does not help to just comment on things and see how mankind is moving into its final tragedy. I think we have to mobilize the population inside the United States, so that the United States takes up the offers of China, for example, to cooperate. I think even with the Russians, if there would be a serious sign coming from the Europeans as you say, I agree with that, that there is a willingness to settle this in a completely different way. A solution can be found.

We must insist that an end to the threat of species-extinction war requires the self-elevation of the peace-makers. In this way, they rise above mere opposition to their adversaries, because they qualify to be trusted by those very adversaries, entering a realm above mere opposition. It is that trust which must be coincident and can be established even between the most intractable of opposites—like Arafat and Rabin, for example. “A toast to those who have the courage to change their axioms!”

This, the true way to peace, is not the way of the pragmatic, Satanic world. The price for this approach can be ostracism, failure, violent death, or obscurity. It is the narrow path through which thermonuclear war, or worse, can be averted. It is through this passage that we must ask and organize many to walk, that billions, and perhaps life itself, might survive.