The Power of Reason Can Contain the Factor of Insanity in Politics

June 24—At the conclusion of the weekly International Peace Coalition meeting No. 55 on Friday, June 21, Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche spoke about the importance of the Executive Intelligence Review and its Daily Alert. The publication EIR, founded just over 50 years ago, devoted to a method of inquiry and investigation practiced and promulgated by its founder, Schiller Institute co-founder, and economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche LaRouche (1922-2019). Using his approach has enabled LaRouche and his associates to not only propose solutions, such as the LaRouche Oasis Plan, to problems others deem insoluble, but it has also provided a means to know and discover underlying processes which actually determine “what’s really going on,” and which others, including “pedigreed” professionals, “just can’t see.”

In humanity’s present civilizational crisis, knowing how to discover what one doesn’t know, by deliberately overturning one’s either obsolete, or perpetually faulty axioms, in order to understand how to change course before disaster occurs, is the only “information” that truly counts. It is that “human intelligence” which Executive Intelligence Review aspires to. An illustration:

Last Thursday, following the publication of his June 20 comments on the significance of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s trip to North Korea, analyst Gilbert Doctorow responded to a question posed to him by Judge Andrew Napolitano on the latter’s eponymous interview show: “What is the significance, in your view, of President Putin’s trip to North Korea?” “He changed the world,” Doctorow said. "I think he did a lot to save all of our necks, because, regardless of how it’s being played by the mainstream media, there are people, surely in the Pentagon, who understood this, as I understand it: the game is up.

“The media—I just read the (London) Financial Times this morning, their lead article … and you wouldn’t know that anything in particular happened in Pyongyang … as to the substance of what was signed, very little was described in the Financial Times. Then I picked up our lead French-speaking newspaper here in Belgium … and they had an article appraising what was accomplished, or not, and they said, ‘Well, at least we can breathe easy; there was no military alliance concluded.’ But, friends, that’s exactly what they did conclude. And it’s not my estimation. On Russian news last night, they have, still in Pyongyang, they gave the microphone to [Russian Foreign Minister] Sergey Lavrov, and Lavrov said, ‘Yes, the term isn’t there, but the substance, the reality is, this is a military alliance.’”

One day later, the Korean News Agency would report on the just-signed June 19 “Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership between the D.P.R.K. (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) and the Russian Federation,” among other things, that, “In case any one of the two sides is put in a state of war by an armed invasion from an individual state or several states, the other side shall provide military and other assistance with all means in its possession without delay in accordance with Article 51 of the UN Charter and the laws of the D.P.R.K. and the Russian Federation.”

Readers of EIR and its Daily Alert were told of this development and its implication, including its economic aspect, something that Doctorow did not discuss. So why did the Belgian and British press—let alone anyone in the American media, despite the deep embedding of scores of “intelligence professionals” in the nation’s so-called “newsrooms”—completely miss, or refuse to report, what had actually happened? And what are the strategic implications of what Doctorrow referred to, in his June 20 evaluation of the North Korean move, as Putin’s “asymmetric” response to weeks of bombings of Russia by NATO, using its Ukrainian proxy?

Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson referred to Putin’s foreign policy actions as “horizontal escalation” in his Friday weekly appearance, June 21, on the Napolitano show. “So what he’s (Putin’s) demonstrating is, ‘Ok, you want to target us in our country? We’re going to create some additional problems for you. We’re going to back the North Koreans. We’re going to take them out of their economic isolation.’ I wouldn’t be surprised to see North Korea brought into BRICS…. So, by bringing North Korea into that, to try to integrate it into this multipolar economy that sits outside of the G7. And in doing this, Putin is reminding the United States that Russia has plenty of room to escalate, and he doubled down by going to Vietnam! Because the truth of the Vietnam War, is that it was Russia, not China, that played a critical role in helping Vietnam stand up to and defeat the United States.”

The folly of the hubris of “Vietnam syndrome” was also cited by Robert Pape in his June 21 Foreign Affairs piece, “Hamas Is Winning: Why Israel’s Failing Strategy Makes Its Enemy Stronger.” “The central flaw in Israel’s strategy is not a failure of tactics or the imposition of constraints on military force—just as the failure of the United States’ military strategy in Vietnam had little to do with the technical proficiency of its troops or political and moral limits on the uses of military power. Rather, the overarching failure has been a gross misunderstanding of the sources of Hamas’s power.”

Perhaps. Consider, however, that it is not “a gross misunderstanding of the sources of Hamas’ power,” but a gross misestimation of the very nature of power itself. A thinking person, perhaps of a religious persuasion, might even ask, whether the source of the problem might lie in the morally transparent polar opposition between the present Israeli “depopulation war” campaign, and the principles of Judaism—the Judaism of Philo Judaeus of Alexandria, of Moses Mendelssohn, and of Sholem Aleichem and I.L. Perez.

“Vietnam?” An approximation of the truth, perhaps—but it is much bigger than that. Lyndon LaRouche in July of 1978, as he announced his second Presidential campaign, and first bid for the nomination of the Democratic Party, spoke to his assembled associates of “the power of Reason”: This was the power of ideas in general, and of LaRouche’s ideas in particular, as being their effect on the minds of those in government, and on the broader populations to whom those ideas were addressed and offered on street corners and public squares. “Our power, is their Reason,” he asserted. The Ten Principles for a New Strategic and Development Architecture are that “power of Reason.”

That is the method underlying all actions for change being undertaken by the Schiller Institute, The LaRouche Organization, and by those individuals in agreement with those principles now taking a public stand, including independent candidates for office now running in elections in France, the United States, and possibly even in some races elsewhere. These individuals, with meager material means, but with the power of Reason, have proven to have an effect far beyond their apparent capability. They gain that power from “human intelligence,” the capacity to inspire changes in the thinking of those governments, institutions and individuals that must act in concert with their purported enemies, to contain the factor of insanity in politics.