Dennis Speed

A New Health Platform
A Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites

A few months ago, Helga Zepp-LaRouche called for a “Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites,” the idea of a completely new health platform, to address the pandemic that was already sweeping the world, itself only the harbinger of an even more horrible and terrifying future, which might wipe us out even before a thermonuclear war.

But there was another element to what she was concerned about. Seeing the social unrest throughout the United States, and throughout the world—social unrest legitimate in part because of poverty and because of racism and other things. The problem was in how to address that from the standpoint of the Schiller Institute.

Some of you know that the Schiller Institute’s Vice President was Amelia Boynton Robinson of Tuskegee, Alabama and Selma, Alabama. She was the Vice President of the Schiller Institute for 25 years; she was the woman who brought the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King to Selma, Alabama back in 1963; she was beaten and left for dead on the Edmund Pettis Bridge in March 1965.

The idea of revolutionary, creative, nonviolent direct action is something that Helga had also embraced back in 1992, at a time when Lyndon LaRouche was in prison and the Rev. James Bevel ran a campaign on his behalf as his Vice President because Lyndon LaRouche was in jail at that time. The idea of fighting as a partisan for the truth is something of an American tradition, as it is also around the world.

The challenge in this case has been to think about how to bring together, people with different political outlooks or different views in various other ways, when we’re faced with something which may be an existential threat to humanity as a whole. Our panelists are with us today to speak to this challenge.