And Now, We Build Our Way
Out of This, Conquering Space, Or
We Keep Our Chains in a New Civil War

by Barbara Boyd

[Print version of this editorial]

Today, May 30, the United States successfully resumed manned space exploration. Those who know their economics know that space exploration and discovery are central to full-bore economic progress. It produces the new intellectual capital and excites the creativity that causes huge leaps in human progress. And, now is the time to build, and build, and build. New cities, new infrastructure, a modern manufacturing economy where the majority of our citizens, condemned to grinding poverty by the presidencies of the last 50 years, can visualize an actual, prosperous future, can live a life which means something for humanity’s future. LaRouche PAC has just released an economic prospectus that outlines how we can begin to do that, right now.

But then, on Memorial Day, Monday, May 25, 2020 a black man, George Floyd, handcuffed and lying face down on the ground, not resisting arrest in any fashion, was murdered in Minneapolis by a white cop who pressed his knee into his neck for a full eight minutes. George Floyd can be heard on the video of the incident pleading, several times “I can’t breathe.”

The video recording of Floyd’s lynching was played over and over again by the national news media, and riots are now widespread throughout this nation’s cities. In Minneapolis, and elsewhere, black and immigrant businesses are being burned to the ground. On Friday night, rioters attempted to scale the fence at the White House, barely avoiding the moment when a Secret Service agent would obey standing orders. The U.S. military is now being called out to quell the rioting, including in Martin Luther King’s hometown, Atlanta.

This nation is now experiencing the type of shocks that previously destroyed an entire generation in the 1960s, making them, in Lyndon LaRouche’s view, incapable of rational scientific thought and deliberate progress. We have had now, a sequence of similar shocks.

There is an ongoing coup against an elected president, in which everything the president says or does is distorted through a malevolent partisan political lens and madness. We have had a virus rampage through our population and populations throughout the world. The primary victims of the virus are the economically dispossessed. The healthcare system designed by Wall Street’s profiteers and predators, the just-in-time lack of planning and chiseling of the general welfare, persistent for 50 years, has taken a horrible toll in the black and Hispanic populations and on our nation’s seniors. And now, our cities are aflame and Antifa and other paid operatives seek to fan those flames.

Lyndon LaRouche, in his article, “Shrunken Heads in America Today,” noted that:

It is a fair rule-of-thumb that until he thinks of himself as just another victim of the situation which the legacy of Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” has re-imposed upon those fellow Americans considered to be of African descent, no citizen of the U.S. is capable of seeing reality, that his own rights as a human being are impaired by the systemic defects in our nation’s present culture.

The truth of this matter, does not lie in the situation seen as the usual individual victim views it, as if with eyes in shrunken heads, from inside-out, and bottom up. Instead of the usually expressed, “TV talk-show” view of the issues, the individual must develop a scientifically efficient grasp of the centuries-long, even millennia-long historical process which has placed the victim, whoever you are, in that position.

From the Top Up

So, George Floyd was not just another faceless black man killed by a white cop in the scripted national narratives. As recounted by his friends to the Associated Press, Floyd moved to Minneapolis from his native Houston several years ago in hopes of finding work and starting a new life. He had lost his job as a bouncer at a bistro due to Minnesota’s COVID-19 stay-at-home order. In Texas he had played football, and then got hit with a robbery charge and, under a plea deal, spent time in prison. Determined to turn his life around and get a new start, he moved to Minnesota where other Houston friends had gone before. He worked at the Salvation Army store, drove trucks, and worked as a bouncer at the bistro where he was known as “Big Floyd.”

Floyd’s horrible death was immediately taken advantage of by the shock troops of Antifa, white college kids with skateboards, and the Black Lives Matter crowd, all funded by the Democratic National Committee, Silicon Valley, and George Soros. The actual black population in Minneapolis already in grief, unfunded by anyone, watched helplessly as these professional rioters, bent on creating their own new green order out of the economic destruction wrought by COVID-19, burnt black neighborhoods to the ground.

When Martin Luther King was killed in 1968 in Memphis, Bobby Kennedy stood on a flatbed truck in Indianapolis and implored that the human spirit and reason must prevail over immediate rage and emotion. Here is part of what he said:

For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times.

My favorite—poet was Aeschylus.

He wrote:

“In our sleep, pain which cannot forget

falls drop by drop upon the heart,

until, in our own despair,

against our will,

comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black….

Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.

Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.

It is the space launch today which gives us the essential path for getting out of the intellectual and emotional strait jackets that the actual enemies of humanity, the would-be colonial masters of the modern British Empire, seek to place on all of us. It is a path first forged by such as Katherine Johnson, the African American math genius who was essential to the success of the Apollo program. It is the Earth, as viewed from space, which should dominate our earthly perspectives.

How can you not see that the rawest emotions in our history are now being manipulated in an effort to drown and destroy the sheer optimism and hope embodied in this launch?

We are monitoring this situation and its actors and we will keep you apprised of our counterintelligence analysis. In the 1960s, history proved, a hand then largely invisible was guiding events—a financial oligarchy housed in the modern British Empire. Its objective, and intent, was to destroy the American idea of fundamental scientific and technological progress. The same is at issue in the here and now. But, the simple answer in the present, is to build, and build, and build, and to do it right now.