The Future of Germany and China
Lies in Joint Space Exploration
by Helga Zepp-LaRouche
Jan. 17—The strategic situation is stretched to the breaking point, pitting an existential threat to mankind's existence against the hope for a much better future. The battle is unresolved. On the one hand, there is the war faction, which is playing with fire in many world hot spots, trying to consolidate a global empire; on the other hand are those who are actively trying to prevent war, such as former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, with his recently published memoirs. And beyond both of these, at a much higher level, there is a vision of a new era of mankind, which is absolutely within our reach.
If we compare the situation on our planet today with the chessboard of 1914, when the shots at Sarajevo triggered the First World War, it is obvious how much more dangerous the situation is now. First there is Southwest Asia, where terrorist groups, mostly financed by drug money, are destabilizing the entire swath from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and parts of Central Asia, to the Middle East and North and Central Africa. The Russian intelligence agency FSB is said to be in possession of evidence that there was a Saudi hand in the recent bombings in Volgograd, with Saudi support of the al-Nusra Front and al-Qaeda in Syria groups, as well as the Saudi Wahhabis, who were crucial in trying to set up a Caliphate based in Fallujah, Iraq.
Despite significant progress in the UN's P5+1 talks on Iran and the Geneva II talks on Syria, thanks to the peacemaking efforts of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, and the Vatican, the repeated failure of these negotiations is a matter of the greatest concern. The role of Israel's Netanyahu government, both in its ongoing settlements policy and its rejection of a diplomatic solution between Iran and the United States, is one of the major dangers. In short, the situation in Southwest Asia today, given the existing alliances, could be the trigger for a global war.
The Pacific is a no less dangerous theater of strategic tensions, both because of the strategy of encirclement of China with the U.S. Air-Sea Battle doctrine, and the dangerously escalating tensions between Japan and China. Here too lurks the potential for catastrophe, whether by provocation or accidental escalation. The situation in North Korea is more murky than ever and is considered by some analysts to be the most dangerous of all.
The demonizing of Russian President Putin and of China should definitely be considered part of the alarming pre-war atmosphere. Instead of realizing that it is thanks to Putin that the crisis in Syria did not become the trigger for World War III, a considerable portion of the media is sympathetic to the terrorists of Volgograd and the propaganda of the activists financed by George Soros, rather than understanding that the same terrorists and drug networks also threaten the West.
The 'Western Alliance'
And what is the situation in the so-called Western Alliance? Under the present circumstances, we [in Europe] are doubly vassals of the oligarchical Empire: Obama made clear in his much-anticipated speech today on the promised reform of the NSA, that "foreigners"—that means all of us—will continue to be spied upon; with the exception of heads of state (if you believe that), governments will also continue to be monitored. He didn't even bother to mention the scooping up of data from Internet communications and the undermining of encryption standards.
In effect, this means that all the data skimmed off by the NSA and the British GCHQ will be fully shared among the so-called Five Eyes: USA, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, with the addition of Israel. And is the EU, which is increasingly becoming a superstate, somehow protecting citizens with some kind of EU data protection regulation? Far from it. Within the EU, citizens are subjects; the Brussels bureaucracy sees itself a high-and-mighty power elite, for which the characterization that it has a "democracy deficit" is the euphemism of the century.
Karl von Habsburg-Lothringen, the son of the late head of the Pan-European Union, Otto von Habsburg, went right to the point in his recent interview with the Guardian, when he said that he was very pleased that the EU has evolved just as his father had envisaged. "The EU is the continuation of the old idea of a super-national empire by other means," he said. "That's what Otto von Habsburg saw in Europe and what he wanted. The circumstances have changed, that's right, but we are working on the idea of a super-national legal structure and a subsidiarity principle."
The reality of the EU today is certainly equivalent to von Habsburg's concept of "Europe of the Regions": total loss of sovereignty of nation-states—which, in the event of a crisis, are the only institutions that could defend the common good—to a supranational corporatist bureaucracy that rules over relatively powerless regions. This corresponds exactly to the ideas of Giuliano Amato, one of the authors of the EU's Lisbon Treaty, who gushed at one time about the Middle Ages and feudalism as a vision for Europe. That is the Europe that we are experiencing today: Whole regions are dying out, the standard of living is sinking dramatically, the death rate for southern Europeans and the poor in general is rising, while entire generations have no future.
To the Moon!
The good news is that there is an alternative to the current dynamics in the trans-Atlantic region. With the first soft landing on the Moon since the Russian Luna 24 mission almost 40 years ago (1976), the landing of the Chinese spacecraft Chang'e-3 (Moon Goddess) on Dec. 14, 2013, and the deployment of the rover Yutu (Jade Rabbit) just hours later, opened a new, more optimistic chapter in human history (see this week's Science section). The Chinese mission to the Moon is not conceived as an isolated event, but rather as a springboard to a long-term space program, with which China has come a giant step closer to its stated goal of becoming the leading spacefaring nation. This perspective includes using the rich helium-3 deposits on the Moon as a resource for a future industrial revolution based on nuclear fusion. Scientists agree that the helium-3 deposits on the Moon can ensure the energy security of all mankind for up to 10,000 years.
The Moon landing is a qualitative breakthrough for China, because it was by no means a mere repetition of the American and Russian programs of 40 years ago. It was the first time that, along with the first landing of a rover, detailed data was transmitted on the composition of the lunar rock to a depth of 30 meters, and less precise data, even to a depth of several hundred meters. China is thus by no means a youngest child who has to wear its older siblings hand-me-downs! It is outflanking the other powers, which are currently trapped in their green negative-growth ideology—a perspective that is also evident in other areas. For example, the People's Liberation Army on Jan. 9 tested an experimental hypersonic missile, the Wu-14, which is expected to reach a speed of Mach 5. Beijing had already, in May 2012, put into operation the world's largest wind tunnel, which allows the simulation of flights between Mach 5 and 9.
The good news is that the European Space Agency made an essential contribution to the Chinese lunar landing, by supporting it with the ESA network of ground stations. The 15-meter antenna of the ESA station in Kourou, French Guiana, provided telecommunications and functioned as an interface to the Chinese mission control. All the spacecraft's movements are monitored by the control center of the ESA's ESTRACK ground station network, at the European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt. A Chinese engineering team will be in Darmstadt for the duration of the mission.
Rather than being the paymaster for Europe within the imperial EU—for payment of debts that could never be paid anyway, because of the derivative structure of the casino economy—and supporting the austerity policies of the Troika, which makes Germany hated in all the affected countries, where it is being compared to Germany under the Nazis; and rather than remaining stuck in an imperial dynamic, which can only lead to a third, this time thermonuclear, world war, why don't we ally ourselves with the Asian countries that are forging ahead with a future-oriented policy of scientific progress?
We need a total paradigm shift, breaking with the axioms of the current trans-Atlantic policy, which is based only on profit maximization and geopolitical power games by the oligarchical financial elite, and is playing Russian roulette with the existence of the human species. We must put politics on a completely different basis, on which human creativity and the ability to continually discover new laws of the universe, for the benefit of the human race, is the foundation of politics, economics, and science.
Many of the scientific breakthroughs that are the basis of today's cutting-edge science were developed in Germany: Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Otto Hahn, Krafft Ehricke, and Wernher von Braun, to mention only a few, came from the 19th-Century humanist scientific tradition of Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt and many others. It is high time that Germany find its way back to its true Promethean identity, as a land of poets, thinkers, and inventors, and free itself from the oligarchical, green clutches of the EU and the Anglo-American Empire. There is not a single objective reason why we cannot again become the land of poets, thinkers, and inventors. But we need you, as fellow campaigners for the Promethean alternative!
Translated from German by Susan Welsh
