It is time, in the context of the American military withdrawal from Afghanistan, to turn the attention of bamboozled Americans to the task of reacquainting our nation with the American System of physical economy, as expressed in the LaRouche Four Laws. Simultaneously, we must also cure the widespread addiction to self-destructive ideas and practices, the tragic effect caused by a genetic defect in today’s "entertainment culture."A rapid immersion in Classical art, particularly the tragedies of William Shakespeare and Friedrich Schiller, is the most economical means to cure our present compulsion to tragic factionalism in politics. The American System, on the contrary, emphasizes "the harmony of interests," not ethnic or class warfare. It insists on economic development as the basis for peace , and introduces a practice of self-government which is the opposite of the American military's British-style occupation policy in Afghanistan. As we move the world to joint collaboration for a world health platform, and with the Belt and Road initiative, so we must move the individual citizens away from tragedy to reason through Classical culture. Speaker: Harley Schlanger. A special tribute to actor and Ed Asner (1929-2021) will be featured.

The American and NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the entire 20-year military occupation there, are widely recognized as the worst disaster in NATO’s history. But have the lessons from his failure been learned?Shortly following the suicide bombing that killed a dozen U.S. troops and over 100 Afghans at the Kabul airport, President Biden announced to those responsible: “We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay.” While making such a statement (and using drones for revenge) was obviously far superior to extending the date of U.S. withdrawal, that such a statement would be considered politically necessary or expedient points to a deep and widespread sickness in the trans-Atlantic establishment. This sickness is seen in far more advanced form in Britain, whose institutions are frantically trying to assure themselves of their ability to continue to project force anywhere in the world, and to continue their endless war policies, with or without the United States. The sickness comes in a denial of the nature of the human species, a denial that looks towards a future of maintaining past dominance, rather than one that looks towards an era of new development, of growth, and of changing dynamics. Aeschylus captured this tension in his Oresteia trilogy, in which a series of revenge killings, including a demand for revenge in the form of the Furies—the Erinyes—is transformed, through the mediation of the goddess of wisdom Athena herself, to a concern for the future. The furious Erinyes become the Eumenides (the Gracious Ones), and serve as a constructive force for the future of Athens. The “forever war” policy that has come to characterize the trans-Atlantic approach since the murder of U.S. President Kennedy, against which Trump inveighed in his campaigns, and against which Biden took what could be a significant step with his Afghanistan withdrawal, must be replaced with a policy of peace through development. In the Eastern Economic Forum, held in Vladivostok, Russia, aspects of this principle were raised by Presidents Putin and Xi, who insisted that development is the path forward, and that “democracy” could not be instilled at gunpoint. Will Biden’s executive order on declassifying 9/11 reveal truths that will cast the 20-year experience in Afghanistan in a new light? Terry Strada, the leader of 9/11 Families United, rejoiced: “We are thrilled to see the President forcing the release of more evidence about Saudi connections to the 9/11 Attacks. We have been fighting the FBI and intelligence community for too long, but this looks like a true turning point.” Biden’s move for declassification, following his decision, taken despite enormous pressure from media and political layers, can be a powerful flank against the intelligence agencies whose lies have been used to maintain the forever war policy. Will the momentum away from permanent warfare continue through improved relations with Russia and China? Will a growing portion of the world’s leaders and thinkers—aided by you—come to understand that the true, immortal self-interest of the human individual lies not in maintaining power over others, but in doing good? If so, this present era can be a singularity, an inflection point, a change from one geometry to another, in which we defeat empire and raise our heads from the muck of conflict to look to the stars that hold our future. Lyndon LaRouche devoted himself to fighting for such a world, a commitment carried on by Helga Zepp-LaRouche and the LaRouche movement, internationally, today. Will that movement, and its allies, succeed?

The level of panic, and outright horror, being expressed by leading spokesmen for the British Empire, is unprecedented in modern times. Perhaps a review of the British press in October 1781, following Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown, would find a similar public gnashing of teeth. Perhaps also in April 1865, when the Empire’s Confederate Army under Robert E. Lee surrendered to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, ending the Empire’s last great hope for the military destruction of the Union. Since then, the Empire has depended on subversion rather than military power. In the Great War, the British succeeded in dragging the racist, Anglophile Woodrow Wilson into saving them at the last moment, while in World War II Franklin Roosevelt joined the war only because the Frankenstein monster the City of London had created in Germany was an even greater danger—and he forced the British to accept an alliance with the Soviet Union and China, without which the war would possibly have been lost.Unfortunately, after the death of Roosevelt, and Harry Truman’s capitulation to the Empire and help to the European imperial powers in retaking their colonies, and especially after the successful assassination of Jack Kennedy, the City of London has systematically replaced the Hamiltonian American System of directed credit with the British System of free markets and deregulation of banking and industry, while also flooding the U.S. with their drugs and their Malthusian “environmentalist” delusions. Despite Lyndon LaRouche’s clear explication of this subversion, and his presentation of the steps necessary to return to the American System, his ideas were suppressed and he was slandered and persecuted, while America became the dumb giant to the British financial oligarchy, waging wars on behalf of the Empire in Indochina, Central Europe, and Southwest Asia. When Donald Trump appeared out of nowhere (or so the Empire’s minions believed), threatening to end the endless wars, be friends with Russia and China, reject the fake science of anthropogenic climate change, and rebuild American industry and infrastructure, the British control of the U.S. media, the intelligence community, and Wall Street left Trump impotent to do anything but fight the coup attempt led by MI6 and GCHQ. In the end, none of his promises were realized, and the Empire heaved a huge sigh of relief. But look what has happened now! The aging, stumbling Joe Biden has done what Donald Trump failed to do—end the endless war in Afghanistan, without listening to or even consulting John Bull. Biden acted on the basis of what Tony Blair called the “imbecilic political slogan about ending ‘the forever wars,’” And, horror of horrors, the Empire is suddenly seeing the ghost of FDR drifting overhead, threatening to bring the World War II cooperation between the U.S., China, and Russia together again, to address their common aim to develop Afghanistan, to end the miserable backward conditions which foster terorism and drug production, and extend the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor into Afghanistan as part of the New Silk Road. See below for the hysteria coming from the British today. Biden is not promoting this himself, at least not publicly, although representatives of his government have participated in international forums where these issues were put forward. But even the Empire senses that decisions in the U.S. are not always made by the President alone, but by what Lyndon LaRouche called the “institution of the presidency.” Just as that institution during the Trump Administration was dominated by the military-industrial complex and their Wall Street allies, so today the Afghanistan decision, and Biden’s capacity to stand up against the almost universal denunciation from the Congress, the media, and the military-industrial crowd, demonstrates a powerful resistance from the current institution of the presidency. As demonstrated in the last year-and-a-half of Schiller Institute conferences, leading scientists, political leaders, policy experts, retired military, health professionals, farmers, and more, from all over the world, including from Russia and China, have engaged in dialogue at the highest level on the urgent need for a new paradigm based on global “peace through development.” The Empire is not omnipotent. In fact, it is decadent and dying. It is capable of provoking chaos, even a nuclear war, but only if the people fail to live up to what Friedrich Schiller posed as the responsibility of all human beings to be “patriots of one’s nation and citizens of the world.” This is our moment.