01/06/2026
Nu finns videor och tal tillgängliga fån Schillerinstitutets fredskonfenerens och konsert i Berlin den 30-31 maj 2026.
Finn videorna här:
https://schillerinstitute.com/blog/2026/06/01/the-end-of-500-years-of-colonialism-for-a-dialogue-of-civilizationsthe-urgency-of-a-new-global-security-and-development-architecture/
Talare:
Helga Zepp-LaRouche (Germany), Founder of the Schiller Institute: “We will not let European civilization go under!”
Professor Zhang Wei (China), Director of the China Institute at Fudan University: “Building a Profitable Multipolar World Order”
Dmitri Trenin (Russia), President of the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC):
“A New Eurasian Security Architecture—and Beyond” (via video)
Pino Arlacchi (Italy), former UN Deputy Secretary-General:
“Are we sure that the coming economic storm will be global?”
Chas Freeman (USA), former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia:
“The Birth, Death, and Prospective Rebirth of the World Order” (via video)
Sevim Dagdelen (Germany), former Member of the German Bundestag, BSW
Sanjay Tripathi (India), former senior official in Indian ministries:
“The Urgent Need for a New Global Security”
Panel 2: Sovereignty and Consensus of the Governed
Jacques Cheminade (France), former presidential candidate, President of Solidarité et Progrès: “A New Beginning to Prevent the Extinction of Humanity”
Jürgen Schöttle (Germany), Engineer: “Economical Energy Supply and Sovereignty Are Inseparable”
Patrick Baab (Germany), German journalist and author
Retired Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Bosshard (Switzerland), former military advisor to the OSCE Secretary General
Dr. Jasminka Simić (Serbia), Editor, Radio-Television Serbia, Belgrade: “The China-inspired new form of cooperation among the states of the Global South from a Serbian perspective”
Dr. Theodore Postol (USA) , Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology, and National Security at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (via video)
Concert and Dialogue of Civilizations – Artists from China, Russia, Germany, Albania, and others
Almira Emiri (Albania) – Albanian concert pianist
Irina Zhuravleva (Russia) – Soprano
Fan Xu (China) – Chinese baritone
Almishba (Bulgaria) and Bulgarian singer,
Martin Kaptein – Russian pianist and author; Mozart, Fantasy in C minor, K. 475
Gabriele Gysi – Actress and author
Andrea Röschke Video presentation (Iran)
Dr. Bittner (Germany), Autor, Poems
Dr. Mostafa Maleki (Iran) – Iranian diplomat and Germanist: “Hafiz and Goethe, a spiritual encounter between Persia and Germany”
Artists’ Association Europe and Asia in Germany e.V. (Germany/China): “The Song of Lotus Picking”
Poetry from Various Cultures
Sunday, May 31
Panel 3: The End of 500 Years of Colonialism
Harley Schlanger (USA), 250th Anniversary of the American Revolution
H.E. Eskindir Yirga Asfaw (Ethiopia), Ambassador of Ethiopia
H.E. Majid Nili (Iran), Ambassador of the Islamic Republic of Iran
Charles Onana (France/Cameroon), political scientist and author
Purnima Anand (India), President of the BRICS Forum India
Abbey Makoe (South Africa), journalist, founder of the Global South Media Network (via video)
Jérôme Ravenet (France), Professor of Philosophy, Sinologist (via video)
Mrutjuanjai Mishra (India), Journalist (Commentator for the Times of India)
Sammanfattning av första panelen:
Panel One, titled as the headline above, was opened by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, President of the Schiller Institute-Germany, and Editor-in-Chief of the EIR. Spokesmen followed from China, Italy, the United States, India and Germany. Zepp-LaRouche’s watchword, “We Will Not Let European Civilization Go Under!” struck the note of passion and commitment then seen in the following remarks by each of the speakers from other lands. Several expressed appreciation for the role of this forum to provide the ideas needed.
“We are in a reverse Cuban missile crisis” right now, was Zepp-LaRouche’s opening evaluation, stressing that we are close to world war breaking out, from the proxy war NATO is conducting through Ukraine against Russia. She recounted the history leading up to this crisis, including how NATO went eastward over recent years, despite the pledge not to do so. Now we are in a crisis situation in which the European Coalition of the Willing is disrupting any efforts for peace coming from Russia, and even the United States. Meanwhile, other confrontations continue. She pointed to the policy conflict of the United States and China. The unipolar order, she asserted, requires, by definition, waging wars and maintaining enemies. She closed with an appeal: the United States and Europe must rediscover their souls.
Zhang Weiwei from China, Director of the China institute at Fudan University, and a nationally prominent commentator, put forward the principle that inclusion of all nations is a prerequisite for a shared future for the world. Under the topic, “Building a Profitable Multipolar World Order,” He discussed the concept of “win-win” in terms of improving world governance, using specifics of China working with ASEAN nations. It requires cooperation and neutrality. In line with the dialogue approach of the conference, he stressed that for there to be “a transformative era, it requires transformative ideas.”
Pino Arlacchi from Italy, a professor and former UN Deputy Secretary General, addressed how essential is the role of the United Nations, confirming that the UN needs updating to reflect the reality and interest of the Global Majority. His topic was, “Are We Sure that the Coming Economic Storm Will Be Global?”
Chas Freeman from the United States, scholar and former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, gave an eloquent presentation, via video, with hard words for his home country, under the general rubric, “The Birth, Death, and Prospective Rebirth of the World Order.” Putting it bluntly, he said that when things don’t go well, nations become “monsters.” He analyzed the United States from that viewpoint. Over the last 500 years of European civilization, despite positive moments such as the heritage of the Peace of Westphalia (1648), we can see devolution. At present the United States is isolated and locked into the philosophy that “might makes right.” The cure? There have to be the right ideas, and these ideas must become action. Freeman raised such ideas, including, for example, the necessity to curb finance capital. He explicitly said that this weekend’s forum can provide the needed ideas.
Sanjay Tripathi from India, former senior official in the ministries of India, also addressed key points of foreign relations, under the topic, “The Urgent Need for a New Global Security.”
Wolfgang Bittner from Germany, scholar and author, explicitly endorsed Zepp-LaRouche’s call for “a new security architecture,” and thoroughly discussed many aspects of the status of Germany, under the topic, “Sovereignty, Neutrality, and Culture.” Germany is not sovereign at this time, Dr. Bittner stated. He volunteered that in the grim German situation right now, he gets hope from the kind of interchange at the Schiller Institute’s forum.
Let us act together on the common idea that we must change others, change ourselves, and change culture. Zepp-LaRouche summed up the opening dialogue, as having “uplifted” everyone.
Här följer inledningstal av Schillerinstitutets grundare och ordförande Helga Zepp-LaRouche utskrivet på engelska:
‘We Are the Creative Species of The Universe’ – Speech Of Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Founder Of The Schiller Institute and Initiator Of The International Peace Coalition, May 30, 2026
May 30, 2026 (EIRNS)—Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, dear friends of the Schiller Institute! It is a great pleasure for me to welcome guests from so many countries, but also from Germany—and thus, I am sorry to have to add a significant fly in the ointment to this joy—a country that could very soon, 81 years after the end of World War II, find itself at war again. For the policies of the leading institutions in Germany, as well as those of the EU and the states of the so-called “Coalition of the Willing,” do not seek peace. They do not seek dialogue or diplomacy, but simply assert the coming war with Russia is inevitable. That is why, they say, we must initiate a massive rearmament; the German army must become the strongest in Europe. This war will break out by 2029 at the latest, but it could happen even sooner; military historian Sönke Neitzel even claims that the summer of 2026 will be the last summer of peace. Given how the situation is currently escalating, we must first get through the Spring.
“A global war may have already begun,” said Sergei Naryshkin, director of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), describing the international situation a couple of days ago at the Moscow Security Forum. “Expert circles are seriously discussing at what exact point a global war will begin—or has already begun—and whether humanity has a chance of surviving it.” Events are unfolding rapidly: On May 22, a total of four salvos of Ukrainian drones struck a dormitory at a vocational school in Starobelsk in the Luhansk region. The attack killed 21 students aged 14 to 19 and injured another 63, including many who were training to become elementary school teachers. Kyiv claimed that the building was a training center for Russian drone pilots, prompting Russian authorities to invite no less than 50 journalists from over 20 countries to visit the site and verify that there were no military facilities anywhere within miles of the area. This clearly constitutes a violation of the 1949 Geneva Convention.
On the night of Saturday, May 23 to Sunday, May 24, Russia subsequently carried out a fierce missile attack on military and industrial targets in Kyiv and the city of Belaya Tserkov, using, among other things, the hypersonic and nuclear-capable Oreshnik, the hypersonic cruise missile Zircon, as well as several dozen Iskander ballistic missiles, and around 700 drones. European leaders from Kaja Kallas, von der Leyen, and Macron to Merz, unanimously condemned “the reckless escalation,” while the media quickly downplayed the situation, claiming the Oreshnik was not all that effective and served only to spread fear; yet neither they nor the German mainstream media even mentioned the attack on the vocational school as a trigger, or at best in a half-hearted aside.
On May 25, the Russian Foreign Ministry issued a statement declaring that this attack on the school was “the last straw,” that an unprecedented number of military strikes against decision-making centers in Kyiv were imminent, and that diplomats should leave the city and Ukrainian citizens should stay away from these centers. In response, the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry informed foreign embassies that the threat level was no higher than in previous years and months, that these were Russian attempts at blackmail, and that diplomats should remain. EU Ambassador to Ukraine Katarina Mathernova posted on Facebook that the diplomats were not going anywhere, and that the Russian Foreign Ministry’s statement was a masterpiece of hypocrisy and should not be taken seriously.
Where will this end? With Western support, Ukraine is crossing the red lines which Russia has established, one after another. Russia warns of the consequences of these actions; the West downplays these warnings, claiming that Russia has no red lines, etc. Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Sergey Ryabkov, stated on May 26 at the aforementioned International Security Forum in Moscow, ipso facto: “The chances that the nuclear powers will enter into an armed confrontation with potentially catastrophic consequences are greater.”
One must realize that we are talking here about the complete annihilation of the human race. For the attack on the school in Starobelsk is merely the latest escalation in a series of aggressions and crossings of red lines—which, during the Cold War, would have been regarded as NATO’s entry into the war. First, the Kursk offensive, during which Ukrainian troops advanced 35 km into Russian territory from August 2024 to March 2025. Then, on June 1, 2025, the so-called “Operation Spider’s Web,” in which Ukraine launched an attack against four Russian military airfields that are part of the nuclear triad. Then, on the night of December 28–29, 2025, there was an attack with 91 long-range drones on President Putin’s residence in Valdai, which the West dismissed as a staged event, but for which Russia has presented video evidence. In particular, the last two of these three attacks could already have led Russia to use nuclear weapons based on its nuclear doctrine updated in November 2024, as this has been a proxy war by NATO against Russia from the very beginning. None of the aforementioned Ukrainian operations could have taken place without technical assistance from the U.S., the U.K., and NATO.
The possibility of using nuclear weapons has long been on the table, not least due to the joint exercise of the nuclear forces of Russia and Belarus from May 19 to 21, which, according to the Russian Ministry of Defense, involved the “highest state of readiness” for nuclear weapons. Likewise, the deployment of the most powerful combat missile ever developed, the Sarmat—a maneuverable hypersonic glider capable of flying 35,000 km with a variable trajectory and which cannot be intercepted by modern missile defense systems, such as the Oreshnik, is imminent.
Until recently, one could have dismissed Sergey Karaganov’s threats that only the use of tactical nuclear weapons could bring Europe to its senses and prevent a global nuclear war, and that by continuing their aggression the Europeans are willing to risk total nuclear war even if that means they risk the complete destruction of Europe as an extreme position. But there is now a broad discussion across the entire spectrum of the “expert community” and among politicians about how to stop the forces behind the pro-Ukrainian war effort—namely the EU and NATO, and ultimately the U.S. as well. We should be absolutely thrilled that the Russian President’s name is Putin.
It should be clear to any first-grader that Europe cannot win a war against the world’s strongest nuclear power. What in heaven’s name, then, motivates the forces driving the current massive rearmament? German industry is in free fall, and traditional companies are trying en masse to avoid insolvency by switching to defense production, in a kind of collective psychosis fueled by the still-secret “Operation Plan Germany” and the almost daily propaganda of Boris Pistorius, who, to be honest, should call himself the “Minister of War” just like his colleague Hegseth! The alleged saving of jobs through this arms build-up threatens to become a self-fulfilling prophecy of the coming war. A study by the University of Mannheim led by Prof. Tom Krebs concludes that investments in arms represent “a risky bet with a low macroeconomic return.” In fact, financing through ominous “special funds” with no upper limit is a rehash of Hjalmar Schacht’s rearmament via Mefo bills, which were actually intended to have a term of only three to six months, but were repeatedly extended by government decree because the regime relied on concealment and subsequent war financing. Has the entire German establishment forgotten German history so thoroughly that no one notices this parallel?
I fear the reason for this flight into a renewed arms race frenzy is obvious. The whole world is openly discussing how the West, in its attempt to impose a unipolar world order under its dominance after the end of the Cold War, has failed spectacularly. The political elites of the West bear the heavy blame for having missed the unique historical opportunity of 1989—the fall of the Wall and the end of the Cold War—to establish a peace order for the 21st Century. The Russian leadership at the time acted with extraordinary generosity in agreeing to German reunification despite its history and even agreed to a reunified Germany’s membership in NATO—albeit with the stipulation that no foreign troops be stationed on the territory of the former GDR.
Today’s warmongers are counting on us all suffering from political amnesia, but we must not allow the attempt to rewrite history to succeed. Hundreds of documents, now available for review at the U.S. National Archives, the U.S. State Department, the Pentagon, Presidential libraries, and various national archives and university libraries in several countries, provide a veritable flood of security assurances against NATO’s eastward expansion—“not an inch”—which were given to Gorbachev and Shevardnadze by Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Wörner. These documents clearly show that the Russian complaints of having been deceived are entirely justified. Former CIA Director Robert Gates has publicly admitted that Gorbachev and others were deliberately led to believe that NATO would not expand eastward.
Is NATO’s six-time eastward expansion and the deployment of offensive weapons systems on Russia’s border—which amount to a de facto reverse Cuban Missile Crisis for Russia—supposed to have been no provocation? The Helsinki Accords explicitly established the principle of indivisible security, but all of Russia’s repeated warnings regarding the deployment of so-called defensive missile defense systems—which can be converted into offensive systems within hours—in Poland and Romania were ignored.
In his 2001 speech to the German Bundestag, which Putin delivered partly in German, he was still optimistic about future cooperation in Europe. By the time of the attempted “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine in 2004 at the latest, Russia had become aware of NATO’s geopolitical objectives. At the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, Angela Merkel and François Hollande opposed George W. Bush’s demand for Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO because they knew that this would mean war between NATO and Russia. Professor Mearsheimer wrote that “the Russian invasion of Georgia in August 2008 should have dispelled any doubts about Putin’s determination to prevent the accession of Georgia and Ukraine.” My late husband Lyndon LaRouche also warned at the time that this was an attempt by Putin to avoid a Third World War.
The 2014 Maidan coup was a Western-backed coup—Victoria Nuland boasted that the State Department had spent $5 billion on NGOs—whose primary task was to prepare the ground for further color revolutions. Nuland’s infamous “F-the EU” phone call with U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt also remains unforgettable. On February 21, 2014, then-Foreign Ministers Steinmeier, Sikorski, and Fabius guaranteed an agreement with President Yanukovych that was supposed to enable a peaceful resolution of the conflicts with the opposition. Exactly one day later, the coup took place with the involvement of various intelligence agencies—all of which Steinmeier, at the very least, must have been aware of. But there was no longer any mention of the so-called guarantee. A year later, Merkel took the lead in negotiating the Minsk II agreement, which concerned the autonomy of the Donbas; both Merkel and Hollande later admitted that they had done so only to give Ukraine time to carry out a comprehensive rearmament.
In a 13,000-word article published on March 31, 2025, the New York Times released the findings of a year-long investigation based on 300 interviews, documenting that the U.S. had been directing the war in Ukraine from the Clay Barracks in Wiesbaden since at least mid-April 2022. This fully confirmed that the war in Ukraine is a classic proxy war between NATO and Russia. And now, as a consequence, Germany is on the brink of war with the world’s most powerful nuclear power. One could argue that Germany’s lack of sovereignty ultimately made it a victim of Anglo-American policy, but at the very least since the so-called “Coalition of the Willing” has sought to undermine Putin and Trump’s attempts to bring the war in Ukraine to an end and normalize relations between the two strongest nuclear powers, this sounds like the defense of a teenage parricide who asks the judges for mitigating circumstances, pointing out that he is, after all, a minor.
The immediate threat of war in Germany and throughout Europe, however, is merely a consequence of the elites’ hubris in seeking to establish a unipolar world order based on the Anglo-American special relationship after the end of the Cold War. The policy of regime change, color revolutions, unilateral sanctions, and wars of intervention has led to a massive boomerang effect, as a result of which the nations of the Global South are now determined to finally overcome the 500-year period of colonialism and realize their inalienable right to develop into fully developed modern industrial nations. Even if the West’s official narrative will indignantly reject this, it is ultimately the determination of the Global Majority to establish a new, just world economic order that is driving the geopolitical wars against Russia and Iran; wars that are ultimately aimed at destroying Russia and China, the two pillars of the new world order currently in the process of development.
But now President Trump, who actually began his second term with the promise of being a President of peace, has been waging—together with Israel—the second unprovoked war of aggression against Iran for the past three months. Neoconservative Robert Kagan characterized the outcome weeks ago as a more far-reaching defeat for the U.S. than those in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. Indeed, we are witnessing the world order—as it was established after World War II and then again after the end of the Cold War—in the process of disintegration. Trump has officially declared international law invalid; the security architecture based on the presence of U.S. military bases in Southwest Asia lies in ruins; NATO and the EU are crumbling; and in trans-Atlantic relations, the elites—whom the otherwise culturally uneducated Samuel Huntington once aptly described as “Dead Souls” and “Davos Men” and who have since become notorious as the “Epstein Class”—are trapped in their “socio-cultural bubble,” as Huntington also termed it, in which they have completely lost touch with the interests of the majority of the population, a fact reflected in their poll numbers.
Instead of reacting to the failure of the liberal economic model with a desperate attempt to cling to power through rearmament and war preparations, we in the West must instead correct the inherent systemic flaws in our current economic and financial model. When President Nixon replaced fixed exchange rates with floating exchange rates on August 15, 1971, Lyndon LaRouche, an American statesman and economist and my late husband, made the prophetic prediction that a continuation of the now-adopted liberal course would necessarily lead to a new systemic crisis, a depression, and a new threat of war, unless a completely different economic system were implemented. LaRouche updated this forecast in the following decades each time a further step in liberalization and deregulation was taken. The precision of his analyses can be verified in hundreds of articles and videos. But he did not stop at analysis; each time he also presented concrete programs, not least his Four Laws for overcoming the global economic and financial crisis, which are contained in my Ten Principles. A global Glass-Steagall Act; the creation of national banks in every country; the establishment of a new international credit system designed primarily to ensure the development of the Global South; and a massive increase in the productivity of the global economy through targeted investments in nuclear fusion and other future technologies, as well as space exploration.
There is actually a simple way out of this existential crisis. Starting with sovereignty in our own minds, we in the Western nations must reach out to the nations of the Global South and signal that we support their attempt to establish a new, just world economic order and thus wish to cooperate as partners on an equal footing. China has just emphasized, in a special session of the UN, the necessity of strengthening the UN system and fostering a sense of community for an undivided future. President Xi Jinping’s four global initiatives, particularly the Global Governance Initiative, are in essence very much in line with what the Schiller Institute has been advocating for many years through the idea of a new security and development architecture that represents the interests of every state on this planet and the Ten Principles. Key components of this include the Expanded Oasis Plan for Southwest Asia and joint cooperation in implementing the Africa 2063 Plan.
But the most important thing is that we in Europe and America must rediscover our souls. America, as it was founded 250 years ago was an anti-colonial and anti-imperialist bastion of freedom. And we in Europe must rekindle in our hearts and minds the love of humanity that was self-evident to Dante Alighieri, Joan of Arc, Leibniz, Schiller, and Beethoven. We must send a clear message to Russia, to China, to Africa, indeed to the whole world, that we neither intend to perish in a Third World War nor allow our magnificent cultural tradition—the School of Chartres in France, the Andalusian Renaissance in Spain, the Italian Golden Renaissance, or the Classical period in Germany, to name but a few, to continue to fade into oblivion. Rather, we must make a sacred commitment to let these pearls of human culture, through a dialogue of cultures and civilizations, together blossom into a new Renaissance of humanity.
Thank you.
