EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR SUNDAY, APRIL 10, 2022

Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Russian Ambassador Anatoly Antonov Keynote Schiller Conference To Stop Descent into New Dark Age

April 9, 2022 (EIRNS)—Today’s Schiller Institute Conference was an extraordinary demonstration of the cooperation of all nations and cultures required to address the current threat to civilization, perhaps the greatest in all time. Political and institutional leaders from the U.S., Germany, Italy, France, Russia, China, India, Republic of the Congo, South Africa, and Colombia—most dramatically, the Ambassador of the Russian Federation to the United States—addressed the “perfect storm” facing mankind—the military and economic confrontation of nuclear powers, the hyper-inflationary collapse of the dollar-based financial system, a continuing pandemic, and a cultural decline into a new dark age. Despite differences on particular issues, all speakers concurred that only a total systemic change, a new international security and development architecture of the sort represented by the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, can both reverse the collapse and begin the necessary process to create a new era of global peace through development.

Conference convener Helga Zepp-LaRouche opened the Plenary Session, explaining that the current danger of nuclear war did not begin with the Feb. 24 Russian military incursion in Ukraine, but, as Lyndon LaRouche insisted throughout his life, when President Nixon broke the fixed-exchange-rate system of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, unleashing unrestrained speculation by the Western banking system. The current war danger was further provoked when the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s was not met by scrapping the division between East and West through cooperative development, a New Silk Road, as proposed by the Schiller Institute, but by the expansion of NATO and the “shock therapy” destruction of the Russian economy.

The unipolar world imposed by the U.K. and the U.S. thus caused greater poverty globally, reaching the point that now 1 billion people are facing starvation, which is a moral failure of civilization. The illegal and evil sanctions regime is driving Russia, China, India and others to plan a new currency system, which is needed, Zepp-LaRouche said, but we must work to get the U.S. and Europe to end their defense of the bankrupt financial institutions and join the new system based on peace through development. She further demonstrated that a new Renaissance depends on replacing hatred and prejudice with love, “the most precious good in the universe.”

Russian Federation Ambassador to the U.S. Anatoly Antonov expressed his gratitude to Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche and the Schiller Institute for offering this opportunity, in the midst of the near total breakdown in relations, to address the truth about the Russian role in the world today. He said the universal peace and development promoted by the UN Charter after World War II has been systemically destroyed by the Cold War, the demonization of Russia as an “evil empire,” and the U.S. imagining they were the “winner” of the Cold War, making up a “rules-based order” to replace international law. The multiple phases of NATO expansion, ignoring the constant protest of the U.S.S.R. and then Russia, led to Russia issuing two treaty proposals last year, for indivisible security agreements for all countries and neutrality for Ukraine, were totally ignored by the U.S. and NATO. Russians will never forget the 27 million killed in the Great Patriotic War with Nazi Germany—seeing the mass armaments being deployed on their borders today, and the open Western support for neo-Nazis in Ukraine, became intolerable.

Ambassador Antonov also took note of the cooperation between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. in defeating the scourge of Nazism in World War II, and pledged to work with the Schiller Institute to restore that kind of cooperation today, to meet the global challenges facing mankind.

Other speakers at the conference included Sam Pitroda, the former advisor to Indian Prime Ministers; leading Chinese Economist Justin Yifu Lin; Jay Naidoo, the former cabinet minister to Nelson Mandela; Chinese-American analyst Dr. George Koo; President of the Pan African League UMOJA Congo Diogène Senny; Kansas cattleman and founder of Ranch Food Direct Mike Callicrate; Africa4Nuclear Founder Princy Mthombeni; Founder of the Center for Political Innovation Caleb Maupin; Chen Xiaohan from the Chinese People’s Association for Peace and Disarmament; Alessia Ruggeri, spokeswoman of Comitato per La Repubblica, and trade union leader in Sicily; Indian journalist Saeed Naqvi; President of the Colombian CTU trade union Fraydique Gaitán; President of the Association of Officials of the General Accounting Office of Colombia Pedro Rubio; and Schiller Institute leaders Dennis Small, Jacques Cheminade; Dennis Speed, and Harley Schlanger. The four panels of the conference, “For a Conference to Establish a New Security and Development Architecture for All Nations,” can be accessed via two videos, on the Schiller Institute website or its YouTube channel.