EDITORIAL

One Single Human Mission

June 6—Today is the 75th anniversary of the Normandy Landing, which led to the final victory over fascism in World War II. June 8 will be the date of a Manhattan Memorial for Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., who passed away Feb. 12. July 20 will be the 50th anniversary of the first manned landing on the Moon—an anniversary which is suddenly sacred not because it is the 50th, but because it is the first anniversary since mankind has determined to return to the Moon to stay, and to prepare there for the Mars mission.

Call it coincidence, but the resonance between the Normandy invasion and the Moon landing evokes in an extraordinary way the life and achievement of Lyndon LaRouche, of his “mission to mortality” as he once put it. In this way, it forces us to confront the question: “Where would mankind be today if this one man had not lived and fought as unrelentingly as he did, decade after decade? Would the present potentials for advancement exist, or would we be at a dead end?”

President Trump captured the spirit of the World War II generation throughout his remarks in Normandy, as when he said, “The GIs who boarded the landing craft that morning knew that they carried on their shoulders not just the pack of a soldier, but the fate of the world. Colonel George Taylor, whose 16th Infantry Regiment would join in the first wave, was asked: ‘What would happen if the Germans stopped them right then and there, cold on the beach—just stopped them? What would happen?’ This great American replied: ‘Why, the 18th Infantry is coming in right behind us. The 26th Infantry will come on too. Then there is the 2nd Infantry Division already afloat. And the 9th Division. And the 2nd Armored. And the 3rd Armored. And all the rest. Maybe the 16th won’t make it, but someone will’.”

Lyndon LaRouche was one of the few of that generation who kept and deepened his commitment to the war aims of President Franklin Roosevelt through the months and years after the war, while most of his fellows turned aside to try to make up for the relative material deprivation their families had experienced in wartime. Later, under Trumanism-McCarthyism, they gave up all right to independent thinking, while LaRouche would never yield an inch to Joe McCarthy.

Lyndon LaRouche is no longer with us in the flesh, but he is very much with us. Now, immediately after his passing, he has become the vital link between the World War II Generation, and the “Artemis Generation” which NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine discussed in his May 23 address at the Florida Institute of Technology—where he stressed, as LaRouche had done more than 30 years earlier, the need to rebuild our culture around the Moon-Mars mission. Like the World War II generation, but unlike the Gen-X’ers and Millennials in between, the Artemis Generation gets its name from its mission, rather than the year in which it was born.

The Four Powers and the Moon-Mars Mission

Lyndon LaRouche saw, as we must now see, the mission of the Four Powers (the United States, China, Russia and India) to establish a new international credit system and bury the British Empire forever—he saw this mission as one and the same as the Moon-Mars mission, which he also worked tirelessly to develop and propagate. LaRouche put this all together vividly in a brief, videotaped address to a Moscow meeting in 2009 on the occasion of a Russia-China economic development agreement, the transcript of which is reprinted in this issue of EIR. There he said:

The future of mankind, even though it’s some generations distant, now, depends upon the development of the colonization of the Moon, as a manufacturing center for building pieces of equipment which will convey man to the colonization of Mars. This will be a fundamental change in the character of the apparent human destiny, over this period of time. And this program, which is now agreed upon, so far, by Russia and China, will be the starting point.

Those in the United States who know their history, who know their strategic history, realize this is a fundamental change. The world is now going to have a trans-Pacific orientation, as opposed to a trans-Atlantic orientation. And that will be for a long time to come. Because combining the populations, which are numerous, but underdeveloped, with a process of development of the raw-materials areas of Siberia and related places, is the solution for the present world problem. And we should look at these things in that way.

We also have to look ahead to Mars, the Mars colonization, which this will help to make possible. It will be several generations distant, before we do that. There are numerous problems, scientific problems, that have to be overcome, not so much in getting to Mars—we already know how to get to Mars—but to get men and women safely to Mars, and back, there are some problems that have to be worked out, on that one.

So, therefore, this will be the character of the coming period of history, provided we get through the present crisis.

But, there are certain parts of the world, which are not willing to accept this. The British Empire, for example. . . . But, in general, you’re going to have opposition from what we call the British Empire, which is not the empire of the British people; it’s an empire which is based on London and the British interests, which is international. It’s the international monetarist system.

And what we’re going into, with this reform, with the Russia-China agreement, is the inception of an alternative to a monetarist system: a shift to a credit system. That is, instead of having an international currency, which exerts imperial power, authority over the power of nation-states, and over their economy; instead of a globalized system, we’ll have a system of sovereign nation-states, in cooperation through their credit systems in the development of the planet. That’s the direction we should be going in. That’s what my purpose is in this.

However, in order to meet that mission—the mission not merely of starting this development, which the Russia-China cooperation begins, including Russia-China-India and other countries—we have to develop the science and technology which goes together with a Mars orientation. . . .