Helga Zepp-LaRouche Webcast Invitation
Beyond War and Chaos:
Creating A Vision For The Future
Sunday, November 11, 2012
5:00 PM Central Europe Time (11:00 AM Eastern U.S. Time)
Watch the webcast here: http://bueso.de/webcasts/20121111.html
Over the past weeks, the existential danger facing the human species has become clear for all thinking people. The policy of “regime change” implemented since the collapse of the Soviet Union, which “bombed Iraq back to the stone age,” plunged Libya into anarchy, turned Afghanistan into a nightmare, and victimized the secular state of Syria with foreign intervention and religious warfare, now threatens to lead to an uncontrollable worldwide conflagration in the event of military operations against Iran.
The Near and Middle East threaten to become a new Balkans, with existing alliances sparking a wildfire, just as before World War I. The unthinkable could occur, i.e,. that Mutual Assured Destruction would no longer serve as a deterrent, but would become reality as a result of thermonuclear war, leading to the extinction of the human race. Not at some point down the road - but in the weeks ahead.
The dynamic behind the war danger is also driven by the accelerating collapse of the transatlantic financial system. Ben Bernanke’s policy of liquidity expansion in the United States, euphemistically called “quantitative easing III”, is just as hyperinflationary as the unlimited purchase of state bonds by Mario Draghi’s European Central Bank. Hyperinflationary money printing, combined with brutal austerity against the population and the real economy, in the tradition of Reichschancellor Brüning, has already had a life-shortening effect upon millions of people in Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, and threatens to plunge Europe into uncontrollable social chaos.
The question we must urgently answer is whether the human species, faced with its own self-destruction, will be intelligent enough to change course in time? Will we cast off the currently ruinous paradigm that seeks to consolidate a world empire and claims war is a legitimate means of solving geopolitical conflicts, and replace it with a paradigm to ensure human survival?
To do so, we need a vision for the future. Such a vision could never be generated from the monetarist or statistical-linear way of thinking of an oligarchical system, which denies the laws of the real physical universe and of human creativity. Nor from a “consensus” on solutions to many secondary issues, i.e.,”thinking from below.” It can only come from thinking “from above,” as defined by Nicholas of Cusa in his method of the Coincidence of Opposites (Coincidentia Oppositorum), whereby the One is of a higher order of power than the Many. With that, Cusa laid the cornerstone for the principle of the Peace of Westphalia and international law, as well as for a universal method of problem and conflict solving.
That method remains valid today, which is why we must begin by defining the common aims of all mankind. Indeed, what could be more important than the ontological question of “esse” (being) - or how to secure the sustainable existence over time of the human species?
Given the anti-entropic lawfulness of the physical universe, the continued existence of mankind requires a constant rise in potential relative population density and a constant increase in the energy flux density in production processes. Thus, the new paradigm must be brought into cohesion with that order of creation, if we are to resolve the twofold existential threat to mankind - the danger of thermonuclear world war and the systemic economic crisis. We need a plan for peace in the 21st century, a vision which inspires the imagination and the hopes of mankind.
We now have all the scientific and technological means needed to overcome poverty and hunger in the world, and they must be used. There are two large regions of our planet where the lack of development cries out for solutions, one being the African continent, that was never allowed to recover from a centuries-long colonial exploitation, and the other being the Near and Middle East, which have fallen far behind their golden periods, when Baghdad was the center of world culture, or when Pamyra Tadmur in Syria was a pearl on the ancient Silk Road.
A vision for an economic and cultural Renaissance of these regions must be put on the agenda, which introduces an element of reason at a higher level than the various local, ethnic, and historic conflicts.
The type of thinking which will allow us to overcome underdevelopment on Earth is also needed to defend our planet from the dangers coming from space. With the Strategic Defense of the Earth project (SDE), Russia has made a proposal for cooperation with the United States, and potentially with others, on a joint missile defense system and on protection of the Earth from the impact of asteroids and comets. Such an approach should supersede the current geopolitical confrontation and the existential threat of an escalation. The SDE project is in the tradition of the Strategic Defense Initiative, the proposal for overcoming the nuclear war danger and division of the world into military blocs which Lyndon LaRouche developed over 30 years ago, and which President Ronald Reagan adopted as the official policy of the United States government in 1983.
The SDE project, which includes early-warning systems for man-made and natural catastrophes, as well as cooperation in manned space flight, is just the science driver that the crisis-ridden world economy needs to rise to higher levels of productivity, and to create the new scientific and technological capabilities which are also required to solve the problems here on Earth. Joint manned space travel is the necessary next step for the evolution of mankind. And with this “extraterrestrial imperative,” as renowned scientist and rocket engineer Krafft A. Ehricke called it, mankind will be able to enter an age of adulthood, leaving behind, as a childhood disease, the solution of conflicts through war.
