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EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR TUESDAY JUNE 21, 2022

World War, Civil War—Only Aesthetic Education Can End the Violence

June 20, 2022 (EIRNS)—The extraordinary power of the Schiller Institute Conference of the past weekend was in the demonstration, in “flesh and blood,” that there is no distinction between the extreme danger of global nuclear war and the equally extreme danger of the now onrushing collapse of the dollar-based global financial system. It is difficult to measure which would kill more people, whether by slow, painful starvation, or by instantaneous incineration.

Nor can we ignore the fact that the United States is rapidly descending into civil war, not primarily due to the extreme political polarization as much as to the fact that both “sides” fully agree on the insane march to world war, following on the British leash to once again provide American military might to serve the British Empire’s neo-colonial geopolitics. As Helga Zepp-LaRouche noted today in a discussion with the U.S. LaRouche Organization, the massive violence in the country, from the mass rioting of 2020 sparked by racial tensions, to the escalating murder rate in the major cities, to the riot at the Capitol Building in January, and, most emphatically the mass shooting by deranged youth and others on a nearly daily basis—all of this can not be overcome as long as the nation is waging deadly wars around the world and proudly arming neo-Nazis in Ukraine, while demonizing the political leadership and the culture of two great nations, Russia and China. Helga insisted: “There is no difference between violence in foreign policy and violence in society.”

The Schiller Institute Conference featured leading speakers from Russia, China, India, Japan, Brazil, Afghanistan, Germany, France, Italy, Greece and the United States. It included political leaders, political analysts, military, scientists, academics, farmers, economists and educators. While there were many different perspectives and some conflicting views on secondary issues, the united focus was the need for humanity to come together to stop the descent into nuclear Armageddon, and to put the now crumbling international financial system through bankruptcy reorganization through a New Bretton Woods Conference, assuring a new security and development architecture for all nations. To achieve this, the violence dominating the polity and society in the United States must be stopped, not by passivity, but by learning the lesson of nonviolent resistance taught by such great leaders as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

But achieving victory against evil through nonviolent resistance requires a transformation of the way of thinking in the population, breaking free of the drug- and propaganda-induced passivity of the citizenry. This requires access to an aesthetical education for all, in the manner taught by Plato, St. Augustine, Friedrich Schiller and Lyndon LaRouche. The Schiller Institute Conference addressed this in part through classical music—three of the panels were opened with: Robert Schumann’s setting of Heinrich Heine’s poem Die Beiden Grenadiere, capturing the perverted mind of militarism in the soldiers of the fascist Napoleon, returning from defeat in Russia; the Kyrie Eleison (Lord Have Mercy On Us) opening movement of Amadeus Mozart’s Requiem Mass, performed by the Schiller Institute Chorus and Orchestra at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston, 50 years to the day after the same Mozart Requiem was performed there as a solemn pontifical mass, in that location, in memory of the slain John F. Kennedy; and by the African-American Spiritual, Hold On (“Keep Your Hands on the Plow”), calling on mankind to persevere for the good no matter how dark the situation appears to be.

It was the genius of Lyndon LaRouche that he personified such aesthetic education, a knowledge of history, the science of human progress, classical culture, and a love for mankind as a whole, and that he knew that it is this that constitutes the true nature and mission of the human race. In 1971, after Richard Nixon began dismantling the Bretton Woods system built by Franklin Roosevelt, LaRouche forecast that the inevitable result of Nixon’s folly would be war, depression and social chaos. He warned that few people would want to heed his warning, feeling more comfortable accepting the “Bread and Circus” of crass entertainment and “go along to get along.”

But, he added, when his warning became reality, as is the case today, people will be forced to wake up, to look back to see who was telling the truth and who was lying—and that is the moment in which humanity can, and must, win.

A newly drafted international petition calling for a New Bretton Woods Conference will be issued by the Schiller Institute by the end of this week.

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