In reviewing developments of the last days, Helga Zepp-LaRouche said that the battle between two mutually irreconcilable outlooks is escalating. This can be seen in the depraved indifference of the U.S., the U.K. and their NATO allies in response to the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan — which they caused — in contrast to the efforts underway by Afghanistan's neighbors, using joint projects coordinated by the SCO, the BRICS, and the BRI for economic development of the war-torn country. It can be seen in the disgusting deportation of Haitian refugees, who are being sent back to a country which lacks the means to care for them, due to a recent succession of natural disasters. It can be seen by comparing the speeches of Biden and Xi Jinping at the UNGA meeting. And it can be seen by the escalation of regime change operations being directed by British intelligence against Russia and China.An attitude of depraved indifference is not consistent with the founding principles of the United States. She said, "We have lost our way." Instead of imposing policies which are neo-colonial, with a Malthusian intent, "We must raise our voices," and return to those principles, adopted by the Founding Fathers, which commit the government to concern itself with the "Happiness of the people."

The freezing of Afghanistan's national funds held in the N.Y. Federal Reserve Bank, ordered by Treasury Secretary Yellen on August 15, is setting the stage for further chaos in that war-torn country. You don't have to love the Taliban to demand the unfreezing of those funds -- they belong to the sovereign nation of Afghanistan, and are needed to feed people, provide medicine, purchase fuel, etc. By withholding those funds, the U.S. and its allies are starving children, exactly as the British colonial administrators did to their colonies. Is this what the Biden administration intends, when it says the era of endless wars is over???

The statement of Sept. 5 by Schiller Institute Chairwoman Helga Zepp-LaRouche, “Can ‘The West’ Learn? What Afghanistan Needs Now!” has gotten wide circulation and support. It lays out that the United States, having withdrawn its troops from Afghanistan at last, has the opportunity and the responsibility to cooperate in rebuilding its crushed economy. This is how to really end perpetual wars: The United States, China, and Russia cooperate in bringing economic development, along with other nations in Asia.But a terrible decision made by U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Aug. 15, and not reversed since, tries to make Afghanistan a basket case instead, a failed state, by seizing all its national financial assets. For the past six weeks Yellen’s Treasury has been holding colonial dominion over Afghanistan like a British colonial currency board administrator in Africa, Asia or South America. This is preventing Afghanistan’s few financial resources from being used in developing the nation in cooperation with its Central Asian neighbors. According to Ajmal Ahmady, the Ghani government’s head of Afghanistan’s central bank (the Da Afghanistan Bank, DAB) at the time the Taliban took over Kabul, Afghanistan had approximately $7 billion in assets at the New York Federal Reserve Bank. These consisted of $3.1 billion in U.S. bills and bonds, $2.4 billion in World Bank Reserve assets, $1.2 billion in gold, and $300 million in cash. Afghanistan also had $1.5 billion in other assets, according to Ahmady’s tweet on Aug. 21, held in “other international accounts” (apparently private banks in New York and London). Ahmady also said that Afghanistan was “reliant on obtaining physical shipments of cash every few weeks” from the New York Fed, in order to have any currency in the country for the population to use. So New York banks led by the Fed also had complete colonial financial control of “our” government in Afghanistan, before the Taliban takeover. No surprise, then, when NATO forces withdrew, that Afghans showed they did think of it as their government, and abandoned it. But Yellen’s brutal decision made the country’s subjection even worse—freezing the funds. Already on Aug. 17 it was reported in the Washington Post that on Aug. 15, as the Taliban forces approached Kabul, “The Biden Administration froze Afghan government reserves held in U.S. bank accounts…. The decision was made by Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen and officials in the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control…. An administration official said in a statement, ‘Any Central Bank assets the Afghan government have in the United States will not be made available to the Taliban.’” However: These were not assets of the Taliban; they are assets of the nation of Afghanistan. And the assets of this nation were held in banks in New York, with the U.S. government having unilateral authority for disposition of them. That is colonialism; it is wrong; Americans should not tolerate it. The same thing is true of the oil revenues of Iraq up to this time; they are deposited in the New York Federal Reserve Bank until used. Where NATO could not win or end its wars, the Treasury is trying to exercise colonial domination by financial seizure. Afghanistan’s neighbors agree: Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi told the press he would say, at the UN General Assembly: “I think freezing the assets is not helping the situation. I would strongly urge the powers that be that they should revisit that policy and think of an unfreeze.” Reuters headlined Sept. 17, “Unfreeze Afghan Assets Abroad, Neighbor Uzbekistan Says.” Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev said at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization heads of state/government summit on Sept. 17: “Considering the humanitarian situation, we propose looking into the possibility of lifting the freeze on Afghanistan’s accounts in foreign banks.” The Biden Administration must give up colonialism and join in economic development. Janet Yellen must abandon her usurped power as a colonial administrator. Both the assets of the Afghan nation, and the oil revenues of the Iraqi nation, must be ceded back to those sovereign nations. President Franklin Roosevelt already made this commitment to the then-colonies of the European empires, in the Atlantic Charter and the UN Charter. And it is the “American System” method to follow through with high-technology industrial development.

China’s President Xi Jinping gave the closing speech at the 76th session of the General Assembly of the United Nations. During his speech, he said: “Facing the severe shocks of COVID-19, we need to work together to steer global development toward a new stage of balanced, coordinated and inclusive growth. To this end, I would like to propose a Global Development Initiative.”At the close of her discussion with the European organization on Tuesday, Helga Zepp-LaRouche said: “We have to escalate our intervention, counting on the fact that the majority of countries are moving in a different direction, of cooperation and not a military confrontation. But it is going to be, for sure, a roller coaster ahead. But we have to steer with the clearest strategic conception— that we have to get out of it with a New Paradigm, that has to start with a world health system, and the modern health system has to start in Afghanistan. So as long as we keep an absolute focus on that, I think we can catalyze whoever is a decent person, and that’s what has to be escalated on our side.” The statements of endorsement by Surgeon Generals Jocelyn Elders and David Satcher of the Schiller Institute Afghanistan perspective should be thought about, now, from the standpoint of the international potential of response to Xi Jinping’s speech of yesterday. The proposal for Pino Arlacchi to play a role in negotiating with the Afghanistan government, as a trusted and trustworthy senior figure committed to the eradication of the drug trade and the establishment of a health platform for that nation, should be endorsed wherever possible. Indeed, we have been escalating on our side. The LaRouche forces have in the last 48 hours made the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche resonate in Pakistan, China, France, and the United Nations, in addition to the various other places where organizers conducted physical deployments in the world, or spoke to people on the phone, or intervened in various conferences and gatherings. Sometimes we have been applauded, sometimes denounced, but never ignored. The polemical drive for a new era of cooperation through the principle of the Coincidence of Opposites, deployed as a strategic intervention in the Afghanistan theater, is the higher complex domain of military strategy, the “Paradiso,” a domain of power that creatures that dwell within the Inferno of geopolitics cannot even imagine to exist. In France, one think tank denounces the Schiller Institute in a 637-page document as involved in what they call “The Chinese operations of influence - A Machiavelian moment.” Machiavelli’s History of Florence was not consulted by them. It should have been. The two contrasting speeches of Biden and Xi—one from Venice, and the other from Florence—can be seen as the emerging book-ends of the debate on the topic, “development or depopulation,” that the philosophical association founded by Lyndon LaRouche must now propel to prominence worldwide. The LaRouche work, “There Are No limits To Growth,” from volume I of the LaRouche Legacy Foundation is, after all, the counterpole to the still-dominant Club of Rome’s Limits To Growth and later 1991 The First Global Revolution. This is not to stoop to the level of identifying the United States and China as two opposing teams in a soccer match. “Florence” and “Venice” here refer to the axioms actually underpinning the outlook of the two speeches given yesterday. The premises underlying Biden’s speech spell disaster. The premises underlying Xi’s speech define a productive future for mankind. Our association should conduct classes, wherever possible, on There Are No Limits To Growth, to allow our fellow citizens, especially youth, the choice to overturn the axioms they don’t know they have, so that they may take up a global development initiative in the form of the World Health Platform. Lyndon LaRouche, in a 1989 interview from his jail cell in Alexandria, Virginia, offered this useful advice on how to teach: "In knowledge, in teaching, you have two problems. One, you have to get away from sheer, arbitrary irrationality, the prejudices that people bring into the classroom, so forth, and say, well, let’s get this in an orderly fashion, at least. Let’s give that much to Aristotle, let’s get your knowledge in a consistent, logically organized form . And then say, well, now, we know this is not the truth, but it’s very useful to put it in this form because this enables us to conceptualize what we have to do to correct formal knowledge, to arrive at what really is the truth. And so, I was using all kinds of devices to try to get students to focus to that point. But my idea of the course was always to bring the course to precisely that point, (that) is, to present an orderly, logical form of representation of the field; then show paradoxes which flow even from the cleanest, most rigorous presentation of that field, and then show what the solution to the paradox is, and hope that the light would go on in the students’ head. And the student for himself or herself would have realized, “oh yes! This is the solution.” And experience the creation of the solution, so to speak, in their own mind. Which is always my pedagogical… I like to teach that way. I wouldn’t enjoy teaching under any other circumstances." Dante Alighieri’s forecast of the tragedy that would befall Florence, the Commedia, used this Socratic method of teaching. This is demonstrated through Dante’s dialogue with Virgil, and later transformed the higher dialogue with Beatrice on matters of scientific method. In this way, Dante used Plato’s dramatic method to provide a solution, both to the contemporary calamity that Dante richly described, and to our own. He not only placed many of his contemporaries in the appropriate circles of a Hell of their own design; he not only instructed the reader how to extricate oneself step by step from that Inferno, into Purgatory, through the intercession of the poet Virgil; he also demonstrated the power of the mind could discover new physical principles, new degrees of freedom, as later seen in Florence in the form of the Brunelleschi Dome. The United States need not be condemned to conflict with China on behalf of Orcus, the god of the underworld, who was, by the way, also the punisher of broken oaths. (France, take note.) President Xi offered this alternative: “We need to seize the historic opportunities created by the latest round of technological revolution and industrial transformation, redouble efforts to harness technological achievements to boost productivity, and foster an open, fair, equitable and non-discriminatory environment for the development of science and technology. We should foster new growth drivers in the post-COVID era.” The proposition is “There are no limits to growth.” Who will oppose it and who will defend it? Let the Great Debate begin!