Western European News Digest
Helga Zepp LaRouche Calls For Launching Revolutionary Youth Movement
At the yearly Schiller Institute summer weekend academy in Oberwesel, Germany, more than 200 people from 16 nations, including Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the U.S.A., gathered to discuss how to overcome the present world crisis. The seminar was opened by Schiller Institute chairwoman Helga Zepp LaRouche, discussing "How To Build an International Youth Movement."
Zepp LaRouche described the enormous dimension of the present world crisis, showing that it is worsened by the lack of leadership, outside of Lyndon LaRouche's leadership, especially LaRouche's candidacy for the American Presidency in 2004. For example, she cited U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as saying that we should not worry about the financial markets, because soon the whole world will be militarized. Others are forecasting extreme turbulence on the markets in September, and a potential for nuclear weapons being used before the end of the year.
On the other side, there are reasons for optimism: first, the growing influence globally of the LaRouche movement; and second, the laws of the universe.
Challenging the cultural pessimism of today, Zepp LaRouche talked about the law of the universe, namely that the free will of man is the driving force, as was laid out in the Monadology of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
In the history of statecraft, this principle is expressed as the method of voluntarism, as we can also study it in the great tragedies of Shakespeare and Schiller. Zepp LaRouche reviewed other examples in Plato and Nicholas of Cusahere, especially the metaphor of Plato's cave and Cusa's discovery of a biogenetic law of evolution. From this principle, she moved to the work of Vladimir Vernadsky, and how LaRouche's work on the concept of anti-entropic physical economy is the further development of Vernadsky's ideas of how the "Noosphere" is governing the "Biosphere." She described how Vernadsky saw our epoch as a new epoch for mankind, in which man is becoming the most important geological factor in the physical universe, having already worked 20,000 to 30,000 years in preparing the Noosphere to rule over the Biosphere, but indeed there is no limit in this potentiality. And, despite all the multi-millennia of bloodshed in mankind's history, the Noosphere is moving inevitably to higher forms of creation.
If we want to change history today, Zepp LaRouche argued, if we want to change the behaviors and the axioms of great masses of people, we must understand that only a spiritual improvement or development can help. What we have to do, is, first, build the basic infrastructure, making the deserts bloom, and come to a higher state of organization of the Biospherebut then, we must develop this process of spiritualization. Maybe the universe does us a favor by rejecting our wrongdoings and by punishing us, to force us to turn around. In this sense we need a commitment for the spiritualization, in which the political order must be in coherence with the cosmic order. That's the task of the revolutionary youth movement. A moving dialogue with participants, especially young people, took place at the close of her remarks.
EIW will be publishing Zepp LaRouche's speech and dialogue with participants in a future issue.
Pope John Paul II Writes on Beauty as Truth
In a message sent through Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Angelo Sodano, to the XXIII Meeting for Friendship among Peoples in Rimini, Italy, Pope John Paul II issued a small manifesto on Beauty as Truth, and called on contemporary artists to go back to Beauty as a pedagogical instrument for evangelization. This remarkable intervention comes on the heels of his equally remarkable visit to Poland, which began on Aug. 17.
"In this world of ours," the Pope said, "the thought tends often to insist that truth should be extraneous, as such, to the world of art. Beauty would even concern sentiment alone and would represent a sweet evasion from the iron laws ruling the world. But is it really so?
"Nature, things, persons, are truly able to astonish us through their beauty. How not to see, for instance, in a mountain sunset, in the immensity of the sea, in the traits of a face, something that attracts us and, at the same time, invites us to deepen the knowledge of the surrounding reality? Such a reflection brought Greek thought to insist that Philosophy is born out of Wonder, never decoupled from the charm of Beauty. Even what escapes the sensible world has its intimate beauty, which strikes the spirit and opens it to admiration. Think of the power of spiritual attraction exercised by an act of justice, by a gesture of forgiveness, by the sacrifice for a great ideal lived with joy and generosity."
Anyone who is familiar with Friedrich Schiller's and Lyndon LaRouche's characterization of the Sublime, can notice the similarity with the Pope's description.
"In the Beautiful, Truth reveals itself and attracts through the unmistakable charm which emanates from great values. Thus, Sentiment and Reason find themselves radically united by a call to the person as a whole.
"Beauty possesses a pedagogical power of its own in effectively introducing us to the knowledge of Truth."
Ratzinger Speaks of Plato, St. Augustine, and Bach
In a message to the same conference, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger continued on the same theme, which he called "The Contemplation of Beauty," citing Plato, St. Augustine, and Johann Sebastian Bach.
Ratzinger posed a paradox represented by two apparently opposed interpretations of Psalm 44, contained in Christian liturgies. The first interpretation, referring to Christ, stresses the verse "you are the most beautiful among Man's children"; the second one, introduces Isaiah 53:2, where it says that the Suffering Servant (Christ) "has neither beauty, nor appearance ... a face distorted by pain," which Christians consider a reference to Jesus's Passion.
How to reconcile this apparent contradiction? "Augustine, who in his youth wrote a book on the Beautiful and on the Convenient, and who appreciated beauty in words, in music, in figurative arts, felt this paradox very strongly, and realized that in this passage, the great Greek philosophy on Beauty was not merely rejected, but even dramatically called into question: What is beautiful, what does beauty mean? should be again discussed and experimented."
Citing Plato's dialogues the Phaedrus, and the Symposium, Ratzinger further discusses the idea, saying:
"Beauty wounds, but right in this way it recalls man to his ultimate Destiny. What Plato states ... has nothing to do with superficial aesthetics and irrationalism, with [their] fugue for clarity and importance of reason. Beauty is knowledge, certainly, a superior form of knowledge because it hits man with the full greatness of truth."
Especially today, Ratzinger says, beauty can be the starting point to discover truth in a world where different opinions confuse reality. "Everything fills the senses, is so convincing, whom should we trust? The encounter with beauty can become the arrow strike that wounds the soul and in this way opens the soul's eyes, so much that the soul, now, starting from experience, has criteria of judgment and is also able to correctly evaluate arguments. It is still an unforgettable experience: the Bach concert conducted by Leonard Bernstein in Munich after Karl Richter's premature death. I was sitting beside Evangelical [Protestant] Bishop Hanselmann. When the last note of one of the great Thomas-Kantor cantatas triumphally ceased to sound, we spontaneously turned our eyes towards each other and as much spontaneously said: 'Whoever has listened to this, knows that Faith is true.' In that music, such an extraordinary power of present Reality was perceptible, to realize no longer through deduction, but through the impact of the heart, that this could not originate from nothing, but could be born only through the power of Truth which actualizes itself in the composer's inspiration."
Ratzinger exposes the "lying beauty," the mere satisfaction of the senses which leads to hedonistic possession and away from happiness. "Thus, Christian art is today (and maybe always) between two fires: It must oppose the cult of ugliness which tells us that anything else, any beauty, is a deception and only the representation of cruelty, low, vulgar, would be the truth and the true illumination of knowledge. And it must contrast the lying beauty which makes man smaller, instead of making him great and which, because of this, is a lie."
The full text in Italian can be found at the website www.meetingrimini.org
Opposition to Iraq War at Highest Levels in Europe
The following summarizes leading developments in the European and British establishments' growing opposition to the irrational U.S. drive for war against Iraq. On Aug. 23, former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and Madelaine Albright declared on the "high-brow" PBS News Hour show that the European critics will "eventually" fall into line. However, it appears that Kissinger is alarmed that more critics in the U.S. are instead joining the Europeans, especially in the environment created by the U.S. mobilization against the war, led by 2004 Democratic Party Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche.
This week in Europe:
*The majority of the British Cabinet of Tony Blair opposes an Iraq war, high-level sources told EIR. On Aug. 18, Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott confirmed that "there are debates inside the Cabinet." Prescott also said that he thinks the public must be properly informed by the government before any military action, an implicit attack on Blair's policy of "secrecy."
*Inside the Labour Party, party official Tony Lloyd attacked U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice on Aug. 16, for her remarks in an interview with BBC two days earlier, saying that her call for war on Baghdad resembled "the kind of rhetoric we know as coming from tinpot regimes all over the world."
*Agence France Presse reported on Aug. 22 that British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told BBC radio that if Iraq were to accept inspectors, then there would be no question of military action. But Straw rejected the view that is growing rapidly in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, that the Bush Administration would take unilateralist action. "I don't believe from all my discussions with the Americans that they think military action is the option of choice. I happen to know that they would much prefer this to be resolved in a peaceful manner," said Straw, "because the risks for them and their interests, as well as for everybody else, are so much greater."
*"Blair is losing this political battle. The rate of opposition to the war has greatly taken off.... The key turning point was when the former Chief of the Defence Staff, Lord Bramall, expressed his reservations, in a letter to the London Times. This opened the floodgates," a British Establishment figure told EIR.
*In the London Independent on Aug. 18, Sean O'Grady wrote an article headlined, "Going To War with Iraq Could Bring Blair the Mother of All Party Splits," adding that "the coalition of forces facing Tony Blair within his own party, now looks somewhat more impressive than the one facing Saddam." The most dangerous factor facing Blair, internally, is the likelihood that Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown will join the opposition to the war. O'Grady concludes that Blair will probably stick with the Bush Administration, despite the domestic opponents.
*The Aug. 19 Daily Telegraph added that growing opposition to an Iraq war is "set to dominate" the Labour Party conference in Blackpool next month. One Labour MP, Bob Marshall-Andrews, warned that an attack on Iraq threatens to create the biggest inner-party split in 20 years. He told BBC, "I have never known anything as serious as this." The party is heading toward self-inflicted "mass destruction."
*Germany's opposition Christian Democrats also oppose the Iraq war. Confusion spread by pro-intervention remarks by some leading Christian Democrats, was ended Aug. 16, when Michael Glos, chairman of the Bundestag parliamentary group of both conservative parties CDU and CSU, said on the national TV channel ARD: "There is no intention whatsoever, and that I can also state for the Chancellor candidate [Bavarian Gov. Edmund Stoiber], to take part in a military adventure anywhere in the worldand least of all in Iraq."
German Ambassador Wolfgang Ischinger Opposes Iraq War
Reiterating the grave concern expressed by the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, about possible U.S. military adventures, German Ambassador Wolfgang Ischinger wrote in a recent article for the Fox News weekly newsletter, "Why should anyone want to criticize Germany for not doing something we haven't even been asked to do?"
In spite of all the press hype about an Iraq war, Ischinger said that the U.S. had not yet indicated to any of its allies what it intended to do. Stating that Germany has always been a good friend to the U.S., as well as to Israel, he added, "My fellow Germans want to be 100% sure that what they might participate in would be legal beyond a reasonable doubt. Have all other means been exhausted?" Ischinger asked. "What are the regional and strategic implications of our action? Are we sure there are no better alternatives to military actions?"
"These are important questions," Ischinger said. "And that is what Chancellor Schroeder is getting at when he says that he does not want to participate in adventures."
On Aug. 17, the New York Times reported that the U.S. Ambassador to Germany was deployed to deliver a message to Chancellor Schroeder, expressing American displeasure with his statements on Iraq. One official described this as "a highly unusual event between such close allies."
German-Iranian Economic Cooperation Irritates American 'War Party' (SEE ECONOMIC NEWS DIGEST for story)
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