From the website of – cough – Lyndon LaRouche:
As of January 19, 2015, the list of prominent signers to the Schiller Institute’s petition, “Why the US Must Join the BRICS” continues to expand, totaling now over 200, with the newest signers including author, activist and Princeton Professor, Dr. Cornel West and filmmaker Sean Stone from the United States. From Italy, Paolo Grimoldi, member of the Italian Parliament and founder of the Parliamentary group, “Friends of Putin,” [“Amici di Putin“; Grimoldi is with Lega Nord – RB] has added his name to the petition this week, along with a number of other prominent Italian, Swiss and German leaders.
The list includes other prominent politicians, businessman, academics, scientists and artists from 20 countries, who have all publicly endorsed a resolution calling on the U.S. and Europe to collaborate with the “BRICS” nations in the interest of peace and economic development. The resolution, sponsored by the Schiller Institute, was issued in response to the offer of China’s President Xi Jinping for the United States to join China’s New Silk Road development program and abandon the policies of confrontation with particularly Russia and China.
The statement itself then follows, under the headline “The U.S. and Europe Must Have the Courage to Reject Geopolitics and Collaborate with the BRICS”. It has garnered the “prominent” signatures despite the bad faith easily detectable in the headline and increasingly self-evident in the text itself: first, some bland comments about “cooperation” against ISIS, al-Qaeda and ebola; then, support for Russia’s opposition to “a Nazi coup” in Ukraine, and condemnation of the US and Europe’s current “suicidal geopolitical policies of the past which led to the two previous World Wars”; and after this, some portentous waffle about “Johannes Kepler’s vision of mastery of the laws of the solar system for the benefit of man” and the Treaty of Westphalia.
And that’s before we get onto the document’s discreditable provenance: the Schiller Institute is famously run by LaRouche’s wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, and forms part of the wider LaRouche network. LaRouche’s conspiratorial anti-Semitism is notorious, and there’s still the outstanding matter of the mysterious death of Jeremy Duggan in 2003.
The petition was created following Zepp-LaRouche’s participation at “an international conference on the New Silk Road that was held Aug. 25 and 26 at Lanzhou University in Gansu province in northwest China”. Also present was Vladimir Yakunin, a member of Putin’s inner circle who has featured on this blog a number of times, and I speculated at the time that Yakunin may have facilitated her participation: she has spoken at events organized by Yakunin’s World Public Forum, and in 2009 LaRouchePac claimed that Yakunin had endorsed and promoted Lyndon LaRouche’s economic views.
The petition has also been promoted on the World Public Forum website, and its signers include Fred Dallmayr, the WPF’s ?o-Chair.
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