On Sept. 6 the citizens of Saxony-Anhalt in Germany voted 43.8% for a party that wants the Nord Stream pipelines reopened and the Ukraine war ended, and halved the vote of the Chancellor’s party. Eleven days earlier in Kinshasa, President Félix Tshisekedi signed a thousand-kilometer railroad deal and laid out how he connects it to the country’s future: “Our ambition is not to build a mere corridor for evacuating raw materials. We want to build a corridor of production, of transformation and of value creation.” In Moscow this week Sergey Lavrov described the five hundred years in which Europeans “lived at the expense of others”—”slavery, colonialism, exploitation, and much more.”
These are different facets of the same potential.
The determination of the Global South to end five centuries of colonialism, and the collapse of the governing parties of Europe, are two expressions of one global phenomenon. But if you were to ask typical AfD supporters whether they know anything about the anti-colonial fight, they probably would say no.
This is why partial answers keep failing, as we see in today’s news. Two researchers who build artificial intelligence said this week that it may kill everyone within a decade and that they have no plan. On the evening of Oct. 7, 2023, the Mossad director was told the civilian hostages could come home that night and answered, “We are not prepared to speak with Hamas”; two more years of war followed. President Trump posted a photograph of the Moon captioned “The Moon is Ours,” while the Outer Space Treaty (signed by the U.S.) says the opposite. Are there partial solutions to such a world civilization? Even if you find a partial solution to a regional conflict, it would only be the prelude to a next war.
Human beings can act for a future we will not see, since the meaning of a human life does not end in death.
Lyndon LaRouche responded to a question about the immortality of the soul at a Schiller Institute conference in 2002 (video link:
If you … know that the transmission of such discoveries from one generation to the next … is what enables the human race to progress, and the lack of such discoveries, or denial of such discoveries, is what causes the human race to fail, then you have a sense that, living in your space and your time, and acting creatively, is an immortal act. Because, if you take mankind as a whole, the universality of mankind is man’s development. If you are contributing to the development of the human species, you are reaching back to justify those who came before you, because you are an outcome of them. And by improving the outcome of their life, of which you are a part, you are making their life more meaningful. If they were slaves, and you are free, and you do something which is un-slave-like, you free them from slavery. Not in the flesh, but in the meaning of their lives.
So, you can now change the meaning of the lives of people who went before you, by doing good deeds that give their lives a better meaning, a better outcome, than they were able to enjoy while they were alive. So, this gives you a sense of what immortality is. It’s being a part of a universality, which is immediately the human species. You are working to make the human species better. Anything you contribute to the human species, is forever—past and future.
Our actions, taken today, will decide what five hundred years of others’ suffering will have meant.
The different facets can meet. This week Schiller Institute representative Stephan Ossenkopp spoke to a peace camp in Saxony-Anhalt itself—150 people from Germany’s regional peace groups—about the BRICS, the SCO and China. It was a new message to most attendees. “Your speech completely changed my narrow view of China,” one said. Another: “It’s exciting to hear that something powerful and positive is also happening.”
This is what the Appeal to Pope Leo XIV is for, and its new signers show it working: Alan Waltar, a past president of the American Nuclear Society, has newly signed, as has Elayne Whyte Gomez, who presided over the UN conference that adopted the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. So, too, have a rabbi from Clergy for Peace and a professor of Islamic civilization.
And on Sept. 11, the Schiller Institute NYC Community Chorus, joined by other choristers, presents a concert including Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Beethoven’s profound work demonstrates the level on which today’s solutions lie.
