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Schiller Institute Conference

Saturday, March 28, 2015
2:00 pm - 5:00 pm
New York City

New Dark Age or Renaissance?

The BRICS Option: The Only Sure Way Out of World War III


Conference Overview

Bringing the Hamiltonian Principle
into Manhattan

by Dennis H. Speed
March 2015

The creation of debt should always be accompanied with (its) means of extinguishment. This [Hamilton] regards as the true secret for rendering public credit immortal.

Alexander Hamilton, “Report on Public Credit” (1790)


Dennis Speed.

Conference Program

March 30—Alexander Hamilton’s immortality was the implicit subject of the March 28 New York City conference of the Schiller Institute. The title of the conference was “It Is Time To Create a World Without War: New Dark Age or Renaissance? The BRICS Option—The Only Sure Way To Avoid World War Three.” That just-concluded conference is the latest step in the advancement of an organizing campaign designated by economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche as “The Manhattan Project.”

What follows is a summary, not of that conference, but of the organizing process that both preceded that event, and is now ongoing, as informed by the efficient intention expressed in the keynote delivered on its occasion by Institute’s founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche (see "Cusa’s Revolution" subhead below).

The ‘BRICS Six’

A few weeks ago, a sign appeared on the streets of Manhattan that informed New Yorkers of the dynamic that was soon about to unravel, days later, the mythical “financial unity” of the bankrupt, feeble, but still purportedly hegemonic trans-Atlantic alliance. The sign, bearing the familiar photo of the BRICS leaders Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, Dilma Rousseff, Xi Jinping, and Jacob Zuma joining hands, as the cynosure of the BRICS process, had been altered to include a sixth figure. That figure was Alexander Hamilton, the spiritual leader and intellectual co-author, with Benjamin Franklin, of the American Revolution’s “American System of physical economy.”


Left to right: Vladimir Putin, President of Russia; Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India; Dilma Rousseff, President of Brazil; Xi Jinping, President of China; Jacob Zuma, President of South Africa; Alexander Hamilton..

He had been added to the photo to jolt New Yorkers into the recognition that the American System’s Alexander Hamilton—their Hamilton, an immigrant from “the Islands,” a student at what is today Columbia University, and founder of The New York Post—is the spiritual father of the entire present BRICS process, the present-day realization of which has been the work established over more than four decades, by the writings and actions of Lyndon LaRouche and his scientific collaborators and associates, living and dead.

It was LaRouche’s “Manhattan Project” associates who had inserted the “demiurge of Britain’s Nemesis,” in the form of the geist of the living Alexander Hamilton, into, not merely the photo, but the daily American street discussion and organizing of the BRICS process itself; that is the unique contribution, so far, of the LaRouche Political Action Committee (LPAC), and of the international cultural organization, the Schiller Institute. The signing and circulation of the Institute’s petition admonishing American citizens to “have the courage to reject geopolitics and collaborate with the BRICS,” has recently gained many more adherents, some from the most important institutions in the world.

The idea, however, is for each and every free citizen in the world to regard that BRICS petition as having the same function for the people of the world today, as the writing and publishing by Hamilton and his associates, John Jay of New York and James Madison of Virginia, of The Federalist Papers, had for the citizens of the fledging state of 1787 New York. The free citizens of the world, and particularly those of the United States, in order to successfully make this “new Renaissance,” must themselves undergo a change in cultural axioms: The present trans-Atlantic culture, left to its own devices, is morally unqualified to survive. And it was to this end of a cultural paradigm-shift, that the “Manhattan Project” was launched, and that the symposium held at Columbia University Faculty House was conducted this March 28.

Cusa’s Revolution


Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Helga Zepp-LaRouche introduced a new conception to the conference participants that has yet to be fully assimilated. It was located in her discussion of the great Nicholas of Cusa (1401-64). She pointed out that Cusa’s revolution in science was identical with his “political diplomacy” in unifying the Catholic Church’s Eastern and Western divisions in the 1439 Council of Florence. In fact, Cusa discovered many of his most important ideas while riding on horseback, or sailing, back to Europe from the East:

“And I assert, despite the fact that I have not been able to completely trace it (because the problem was, many of Cusa’s writings disappeared into monasteries for centuries, so it’s not so easy), but I’m absolutely convinced that it was his thinking which laid the basis for the Peace of Westphalia, which ended 150 years of religious war in Europe, because the Peace of Westphalia had this idea that you can only have harmony of all nations, if you respect the interests of the other, and if you take the interest of the other as your own, and the maximum development of the other as important as yourself; as vice versa. And that was indeed, what made the Peace of Westphalia possible and established international law.

“Now, this is very important, because we are right now in the process of not only forming a new alliance of nations, as the BRICS countries and the other countries joining with the BRICS demonstratel; but our criticism in the LaRouche movement has been, for a very long time, that, as important as international law is, and especially the UN Charter, these systems have a big flaw. And that is, that they don’t have an underpinning of an ontological, metaphysical explanation.

“And we have now reached in history, the point where we need to have an international law based on the laws of the universe. And the problem we have in the world today, is that we have erred, we have left the right way; in Chinese philosophy you would say, we have lost the mandate of Heaven, and in Confucianism, the idea is that every government must have the mandate of Heaven, that is, the task to do the common good, to take care for the people, to provide for their well being through scientific development, through other things; and when a government loses that mandate of Heaven, it is the task of the noble in the society, called the junzi, who must come to replace that government, and restore the common good.”

Creating a Cultural Shift

Other speakers at the conference took up a varied dialogue with Mrs. LaRouche and the audience, on how best to bring about this essential cultural shift.


James Hsiung.

Dr. James Hsiung, New York University Professor of Politics and International Law, in his talk, “A Cross-Cultural Paradigm and Peace Theories,” advanced the hypothesis that the Confucianist outlook had seen a resurgence in China since the mid-1990s, and that the Confucian emphasis on the “coincidence of opposites,” and on the notion of harmony, had rendered the recent Chinese economic policies not only not imperialist, but of essential economic benefit to all of its partners—what has been referred to as the “win-win” policy.

Hsiung insisted on the obsolescence of the term and practice of geopolitics, and offered the term “geoeconomics” as an alternative, stating that the Chinese motives are not only not aggressive, but come from a more advanced notion of the human identity than the predatory, competitive “joy of conflict” characteristics of present-day Anglo-American monetarism and militarism. He cited Britain’s mid-19th-Century Opium Wars against China as an example of unprincipled war.


Dr. Abdul Alim Muhammad with screen presentation on Jubilee.

Dr. Abdul Alim Muhammad, founder and director of the Abundant Life Health Attainment Center, focused on the recent call by Pope Francis for a recognition of “the Year of Grand Jubilee,” not only by the Catholic Church, but the whole world. In his presentation, “The Jubilee Year: Time for Development, not Debt,” he reminded some, and informed others, that in a Jubilee Year, debts are to be forgiven, slavery is to be abolished, prisoners are to be set free, and stolen property is to be returned. “Jubilee is like the universe’s reset button for mankind. Wall Street debt, particularly debt that is tied to the illegal 2008 bailout, and that debt paid by Wall Street to itself to maintain the derivatives bubble, is not legitimate. Glass-Steagall must be reinstated, the unjust debt that is the derivatives bubble cancelled, and by this means, not merely equity, but morality must be restored to the United States.”

Greetings to the conference were received from Father Themistocles Adamopoulos, a Greek Orthodox missionary to Sierra Leone; Edward Lozansky, president of the American University in Moscow and founder of the World Russia Forum; and Dr. Igor Okunev, vice-dean of the Political Science School of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (see boxes). Musical selections included “Why Do the Nations So Furiously Rage” from Handel’s Messiah, performed by Nathan Baer, bass, and Jason Wirth, piano, and “Worthy Is the Lamb” from the same work, performed by the New York/New Jersey Schiller Institute Chorus.


Megan Beets.

The final presentation by Megan Beets, “Jeanne D’Arc and Johannes Kepler: Creating the Seemingly Impossible,” returned to what Mrs. LaRouche had initiated in her earlier discussion, with respect to changing a nation’s or culture’s axioms by a form of “ontological diplomacy,” as Nicholas of Cusa had done. Whence does the intellectual authority come to not only shift what might appear to be universal axioms, but to create new ideas, and actions based on those ideas, that reshape humankind’s idea of the universe itself? After briefly describing the extraordinary story of Joan of Arc, the peasant girl who led the French army to victory at the Battle of Orléans in 1429, and her imprisonment, torture, and execution, Beets said:

“What we see in Joan of Arc, in Cusa—the genius of insight into what has not yet been experienced by anyone, and the service to the call of the impossible but necessary future—this commitment is no different than the work of the great scientist. Kepler was explicitly a follower of Cusa in his scientific method.”

Beets asserted an idea first proposed by Lyndon LaRouche in discussion with colleagues, that Kepler had discovered the Solar System. This shocking idea, that the Solar System did not “exist” prior to Kepler, but must needs be created by Kepler’s personal comprehension of what the nature of God’s mind must be, that such an harmonious world-system would be so composed, challenged the audience’s assumptions. Kepler’s discovery of the role of musical harmonies in the Solar System, and of the physical principle of universal gravitation, was a true revolution in all prior human thought.

Prior to Kepler, mankind did not have a concept of the actual Solar System, but merely a system of various maps of the night sky, all of them flawed. Kepler’s ideas, not those of Newton, were responsible for the human species figuring out how to get off the planet and reach the Moon, the present destination of the Chinese in the pursuit of mining helium-3 for their future commercial fusion energy applications program.

LaRouche’s Crucial Contribution

In the same way as with Johannes Kepler, today, outside of the forecasting methods discovered and utilized by Lyndon LaRouche, there is no organized force on the planet that has the developed capabilities to plan economy from the standpoint of the future that LaRouche has demonstrated. LaRouche has made Hamilton’s agreement with LaRouche clear in his statement of June 14, 2014, from the which is drawn the following excerpt:

“The only location for the immediately necessary action which could prevent ... an immediate genocide throughout the trans-Atlantic sector of the planet, requires the U.S. Government’s now-immediate decision to institute four specific, cardinal measures: measures which must be fully consistent with the specific intent of the original U.S. Federal Constitution, as had been specified by U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton while he remained in office: (1) immediate re-enactment of the Glass-Steagall law instituted by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, without modification, as to principle of action. (2) a return to a system of top-down, and thoroughly defined as National Banking....”

LaRouche went on to state that (3) “The purpose of the use of a Federal Credit-system, is to generate high-productivity trends in improvements of employment, with the accompanying intention, to increase the physical-economic productivity, and the standard of living of the persons and households of the United States”... and (4) “Adopt a Fusion-Driver ‘Crash Program.’ ” LaRouche concluded: “The essential distinction of man from all lower forms of life, hence, in practice, is that it presents the means for the perfection of the specifically affirmative aims and needs of human individual and social life.”

The need for “an international law based on the laws of the universe” called for by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, requires that societies newly, and now, discover the identity of human creativity with the discovery and invention of universal law by mankind. Hamilton’s notion of “artificial labor,” the elevation of human labor from slave labor based on “muscle power,” to discovering the principles by means of which to increase the power of labor through technological progress, as discussed in his U.S. Treasury Report on Manufactures of 1791, incorporated this principle of discovery into the daily practice of American economic life. This determined the creation of the most powerful productive capability in human history, now largely destroyed.

The reinstatement of Glass-Steagall, the total shutdown of Wall Street’s speculation, and the simultaneous establishment of the Constitutionally mandated Hamiltonian productive credit system are the immediate tasks of the system of conferences now underway in New York. Rallies, interventions, subway deployments, and sidewalk discussions must reproduce the conditions of Socrates’ Athenian marketplace, but this time with the world’s citizens on the world stage that is Manhattan, to perform “the impossible”: To qualify Americans to immediately relieve themselves and the world of the criminal idiocy of the past 16 years of Bush (including Obama) dictatorship.

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Greetings from Edward Lozansky

This statement was recorded at the U.S. Senate on March 26, where the World Russia Forum was holding its annual conference. The conference was dedicated to the 70th Anniversary of the Allied Victory in World War II.

I’m Edward Lozansky. I’m president of the American University in Moscow. This is the 35th time we have met in the U.S. Senate to discuss the most important issues in U.S.-Russian relations. I think now we are really at a very dangerous time. I don’t recall anything worse, even during the Cold War. So, it’s time for all those who want to avoid this coming disaster, to do something. Just don’t be passive. Try to do something: a conference, write op-eds, send letters to your Congressmen. I think we are approaching a time of no return. So, please, please do something, and you know that there are many people who want to avoid this looming disaster, and so, join this group.

Thank you.

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Greetings from Igor Okunev

This greeting was recorded at the U.S. Senate on March 26, where the World Russia Forum was holding its annual conference.

My name is Ignor Okunev. I’m from MGIMO [Moscow State Institute of International Relations] University, vice-dean of the School of Political Science. I’d like to welcome you to this conference, dedicated to the dialogue between nations, and I admire the United States and its nation for its will to give freedom to people. And freedom and liberty mean different opinions. I’d like, on the international arena, to have not a monologue of one state, but better some dialogue, and different views, and during the dialogue, we could see the different views, and find the solutions that will be okay for all the parties.

Thank you.