Ibn Sina and Christmas 2021: Why Generosity Is the Trans-Atlantic World’s Only Demonstration, Now, of Its Moral Fitness To Survive

As we rapidly approach “the moment of truth” in the tense dialogue concerning the future of humanity involving the Presidents of the United States, Russia and China, consider the chilling remarks to TASS by Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, spoken with respect to the Russian proposals regarding the securing of written guarantees against further NATO expansion eastward: “I said that we would find forms to respond, including by military and military-technical means [if NATO ignores Moscow’s concerns again]. I reaffirm this.” Consider, also, the briefing given by Defense Secretary Sergei Shoigu to Vladimir Putin documenting the intention of American private military companies (PMCs) to carry out a staged provocation in eastern Ukraine using chemical weapons. Finally, note that Vladimir Putin was President of Russia at the time of the attack of September 11, 2001, and was the first head of state to speak with President George W.Bush, telling Bush that he had directed the Russian nuclear forces to “stand down” in a situation that appeared to potentially involve even a possible illegal takeover of the U.S. Presidency.

Where is the sane leadership response in the United States? Competent interlocutors, speaking on behalf of the once-cogent, but now no longer trustworthy trans-Atlantic world, have to now emerge from the “dark wood” of post-9/11 neo-con/neo-liberal war diplomacy. The British-instigated “American homeland defense strategies” that have resulted in the past two decades of unprovoked conflicts and destabilizations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and many other locations, punctuated by the wanton killing of civilians in pursuit of dubious “geopolitical” ends, must stop.

Take the unlawful, Victoria Nuland-managed “F..k the EU” Feb. 21-22 2014 coup in Ukraine. There, 100 casualties in the Maidan were the apparent prescribed “threshold level” for a public, full-throated endorsement of the Ukrainian “independence forces” by the United States and NATO, according to Professor Ivan Katchanovski, School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa. He investigated the Maidan Massacre for four-and-a-half years, and was interviewed in Oliver Stone’s 2019 Revealing Ukraine. "There were two interviews published in a recent book by a Ukrainian pro-Maidan journalist. And in this book they produced interviews of two far-right leaders of Ukraine…. And they and Maidan leaders met with some senior western officials. And this western official told them, basically, that killings of a few protesters is not enough for western governments to change support.

“They said specifically, [the] end of recognition of the Yanukovych government basically would change only if the number of the victims would be 100. The western government policy changed immediately after the Maidan massacre. Not an accident, because you have exactly 100 people who were killed.” (The total list of those killed now totals 130.) Stone’s two documentaries, the other being Ukraine On Fire, contain extensive interviews with Putin, and several scenes of Biden in Ukraine, including Biden speaking before the post-coup Ukrainian parliament in 2015. How does this inform the demands of Russia for written guarantees from the United States today?

Today, death, be it through pandemic, famine, flood, or war, including potential thermonuclear war, seems to be all around us. No efficient solution from institutions of government in the trans-Atlantic sector seems forthcoming. Yet the solution to this lower-order “entropy of doom” has been advanced in the form of the persistent call for a P-5 summit (Russia, China, the United States, France, and Great Britain), in the method called the “Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites,” and in the economic and strategic outlook contained in the World Land-Bridge and “Operation Ibn Sina.”

Regarding the latter, a greater familiarity with the thinking of the great Islamic physician and thinker is essential to apprehend why his name is not attached to Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s Afghanistan policy-initiative as a mere symbol. Here, we quote from section 36 of Ibn Sina’s Metaphysics to illustrate how, for example, the recent U.S. Congressional call for the unfreezing of Afghanistan’s assets, to be deployed by the national bank of that nation, in the name of the principle of justice, equity, and sovereignty, can be morally upshifted to ensure that it actually succeeds in that objective in the short term:

THE ONTOLOGY OF HUMAN DIPLOMACY

“Benevolence and usefulness come from one thing to another by means of transaction or by generosity. A transaction takes place in an exchange where something is given and something is received. What is received is not always concrete since it can be a good name, joy, or a prayer, or gratitude. Though the object of a transaction is called and recognized by the vulgar as merchandise which is exchanged with another merchandise, a good name or gratitude are not considered exchangeable in a transaction…. Generosity is that which is not the result of an exchange, of recompense, or of a transaction. From the will which directs generosity a good thing results, while no ulterior intention is associated with it. Since the Necessary Existent acts in this manner, Its act is characterized by absolute generosity.”—Ibn Sina, Metaphysics, Section 36

How can Ibn Sina’s philosophical outlook regarding generosity be applied, in this present moment, in Afghanistan? Linda Everett, a decades-long organizer for the Schiller Institute who played a central, most notable role in the creation of the Institute’s Club of Life (an organization created to counter the depopulation schemes of Aurelio Peccei and NATO’s Alexander King’s organization, the Club of Rome,) addressed this same matter in a recent strategy session of organizers, addressed by Helga Zepp-LaRouche. In response to Helga, Linda began by referencing the Schiller Institute’s December 18 Sunday Christmas concert, performing works by composers Antonio Vivaldi and Johan Sebastian Bach, and traditional Christmas music.

“Why was the concert that we just gave so important? Because it went right to the soul of people. Some of us have lost loved ones in these last three weeks…. But for the people that we will be organizing in these several days before the holiday, when they also have losses such as this, it cannot be something that holds them back. In other words, they have lost part of their hearts. But as you have often said, we must adopt the world…. We must ask people to open, don’t feel so, as though a part of the heart has been taken. No, the heart is like the earth…. It expands to hold the necessities, the needs, of its children. Of the women, the children, the huge part of Afghanistan, and the rest of the starving that will die. The heart has to open up to that. It is as a dove, as a swan, as a crane that would open its wings to hold all of these needs within those that we are organizing. It is the fact that they have lost someone, as some of us have in these last few weeks—you can just be sure that that is out there among the people that we are organizing. It should not be something where they feel that they have no ability to celebrate, whether it is Christmas or whatever the holiday…. They are capable of doing it. Perhaps they have never had to, but they are capable. And we are the ones that have to ask…. We are able to expand our hearts, and open them to these people and move. The worst would be to say, No, I’m hurting, I can’t do it. No. The way to get beyond hurt, is to give, and that is what we need at this moment, when millions are dying.The heart has to open up to that….”

It is that generosity, not only as a sentiment, but as a weapon against despair, that was the content of “the benefit of the other” policy of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. It is what informed General George Washington’s unique doctrine of treatment of captured Hessian and British soldiers in the American Revolution. It is the method of a truly human diplomacy, exercised especially in times of war.

Lyndon LaRouche famously stated that “the content of policy is the method by which it is made.” While the State Department will obscure and dissemble, it cannot deny that to not act, now, in the Afghanistan crisis, is to condemn, unnecessarily, tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, to death in the next weeks—not only in Afghanistan, but in other areas threatened by famine and disease. Is this being done in the name of “protecting the democratic rights of the people” we have condemned to death?

The content of that policy toward Afghanistan, the present policy, is depraved indifference, the same indifference reported in the killing of more than 1,500 “civilian casualties” through “precision drone warfare,” and the withholding of medical assistance to the continent of Africa for the past 18 months in order to “make sure Americans [and Europeans] are safe first.” Reversing that depraved indifference is the most efficient way to signal to Russia and the world that those that broke their word, in pledging that “NATO would not expand one inch eastward” in 1990, have now shown a willingness, if not to reverse, to at least amend their behavior, in order to move away, at nearly the last moment, from what must otherwise be deemed a self-doomed debt-driven drive toward total, unwinnable war.