What are the lessons for today, taught by Dante Alighieri 700 years after his death in September 1321? How did he consciously create the Italian language, not just to free Italy from the oligarchy which dominated at that time, and establish the basis for a sovereign nation-state dedicated to the principle of the general welfare – but to breathe a spirit of impassioned poetic imagination into all of history, religion, statecraft, economics and science? How has his journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise in his Divina Commedia, become a universal metaphor for Schiller’s assertion that mankind is “born for that which is better?" At this week's Midwest Meeting, Tim Rush and Denise Ham discussed this and Dante's importance for us today.English poet Percy Shelley, in his In Defense of Poetry demonstrates his understanding of the power of Dante and the power of poetry: “A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens that faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb.” “Dante was the first awakener of entranced Europe; he created a language, itself music and persuasion, out of a chaos of inharmonious barbarism. He was the congregator of those great spirits who presided over the resurrection of learning, … of that starry flock which in the thirteenth century shone forth from republican Italy as from a heaven into the darkness of the benighted world. His very words are instinct with spirit; each is as a spark, a burning atom of inextinguishable thought; and many yet lie covered in the ashes of their birth and pregnant with a lightning which has yet found no conductor. All high poetry is infinite… A great poem is a fountain forever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight; and after one person and one age has exhausted all its divine effluence which their peculiar relations enable them to share, another and yet another succeeds, and new relations are ever developed, the source of an unforeseen and an unconceived delight.”

The new "strategic partnership" announced yesterday between the U.S., Britain and Australia represents a reaffirmation of British geopolitics, with the U.S. again providing the muscle to enforce an imperial world order. This is not just about selling nuclear submarines to Australia. Despite claims that this targets no nation, the Chinese know better. That this occurs so soon after the U.S.-NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan lends credence to the charge that, while the decision to leave was right, using it to free up the allies to adopt a "Pivot to Asia" sends the signal to the Chinese that they should be prepared for war.

In her weekly dialogue, Helga Zepp-LaRouche blasted the U.K.-U.S. deal to incorporate Australia into a new strategic alliance, based on the sale of nuclear submarines to Australia. She said they claim that this "partnership" is not aimed at any country, but the Chinese know differently, and responded sharply -- as did the French, as the new deal scuttled an agreement they had to sell submarines to Australia.She provided an update on the humanitarian catastrophe developing in Afghanistan, contrasting the U.S.-NATO approach, of walking away from a catastrophe caused by their war, to that of Afghanistan's neighbors, which are mobilizing development aid. The problem in the West, she reiterated, is the kind of British geopolitics which underlie this new deal, which she described as a "No Good Deal." What is needed instead is a fundamental change in western attitudes and thinking.

In reponse to the announcement that Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States are forming a new alliance called the AUKUS scarcely two weeks after withdrawing from Afghanistan after twenty years of disaster, Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche said that this new alliance is a mindless extension of the policy of endless war. Instead of abandoning Afghanistan to the hell that twenty years of military intervention followed by a shutoff of international funds have created and leaping into a new and totally unnecessary escalation of conflict with China, the United States and other NATO countries must immediately act to do good, to repair the damage of Afghanistan and the other unjust military adventures of the past two decades, through a policy of real development.Zepp-LaRouche laid out the needed approach in her September 5 statement "Can ‘The West’ Learn? What Afghanistan Needs Now!"The needs are urgent; the situation today in Afghanistan is horrendous. Despite a much-hyped sum of $1.2 billion assembled early this week from donors conference, Afghanistan remains largely cut off from sources of funding that are required to keep its people alive. Over $9 billion of the country's banking reserves are frozen by the United States. The World Bank has shut down a major health program required to maintain the system of clinics and hospitals that serve the population. The World Food Program warns of tens of millions of people already facing food insecurity or threatened with it.But after withdrawing from Afghanistan following 20 years of disaster, instead of working to rebuild that nation, the United States has rushed into a new catastrophe — a new British Empire alliance targeting China as NATO already targets Russia. The Australia-United Kingdom-United States AUKUS alliance among what its imperial masters charmingly call "maritime democracies" was announced on Wednesday, focused squarely against China.