EDITORIAL

The British Empire Senses
Its Pending Doom

by Mike Billington

[Print version of this editorial]

Sept. 2—The level of panic and outright horror being expressed by leading spokesmen for the British Empire, is unprecedented in modern times. Perhaps a review of the British press in October 1781, following Charles Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown, would find a similar public gnashing of teeth. Perhaps also in April 1865, when the Empire’s Confederate Army under Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, ending the Empire’s last great hope for the military destruction of the Union. Since then, the Empire has depended on subversion rather than military power. In the Great War, the British succeeded in dragging the racist, Anglophile U.S. President, Woodrow Wilson, into saving them at the last moment, while in World War II, Franklin Roosevelt joined the war only because the Frankenstein monster the City of London had created in Germany was an even greater danger—and he forced the British to accept an alliance with the Soviet Union and China, without which the war would possibly have been lost.

Unfortunately, after the death of Roosevelt, and Harry Truman’s capitulation to the Empire and his help to the European imperial powers in retaking their colonies, and especially after the successful assassination of Jack Kennedy, the City of London has systematically replaced the Hamiltonian American System of directed credit with the British System of free markets and deregulation of banking and industry, while also flooding the U.S. with its drugs and its Malthusian “environmentalist” delusions. Despite Lyndon LaRouche’s clear explication of this subversion, and his presentation of the steps necessary to return to the American System, his ideas were suppressed and he was slandered and persecuted, while America became the dumb giant to the British financial oligarchy, waging wars on behalf of the Empire in Indochina, the Balkans, and Southwest Asia.

When Donald Trump appeared out of nowhere (or so the Empire’s minions believed), threatening to end the endless wars, be friends with Russia and China, reject the fake science of anthropogenic climate change, and rebuild American industry and infrastructure, the British control of the U.S. media, the intelligence community, and Wall Street left Trump impotent to do anything but fight the coup attempt led by MI6 and GCHQ. In the end, none of his promises were realized, and the Empire heaved a huge sigh of relief.

But look what has happened now! The aging, stumbling Joe Biden has done what Donald Trump failed to do—end the endless war in Afghanistan, without listening to or even consulting John Bull. Biden acted on the basis of what former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair called the “imbecilic political slogan about ending ‘the forever wars’.” And, horror of horrors, the Empire is suddenly seeing the ghost of FDR drifting overhead, threatening to bring the World War II cooperation between the U.S., China, and Russia together again, to prosecute a common and mutually-beneficial policy of developing Afghanistan, to end the miserable backward conditions which foster terrorism and drug production, and extend the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor into Afghanistan as part of the New Silk Road.

Biden is not promoting this himself, at least not publicly, although representatives of his government have participated in international forums where these issues were put forward. But even the Empire senses that decisions in the U.S. are not always made by the President alone, but by what Lyndon LaRouche called the “institution of the presidency.” Just as that institution during the Trump Administration was dominated by the military-industrial complex and its Wall Street allies, so today the Afghanistan decision, and Biden’s capacity to stand up against the almost universal denunciation from the Congress, the media, and the military-industrial crowd, demonstrates a powerful resistance from the current institution of the presidency.

As demonstrated in the last year-and-a-half of numerous Schiller Institute conferences, leading scientists, political leaders, policy experts, retired military, health professionals, farm leaders, and more, from all over the world, including from Russia and China, have engaged in dialogue at the highest level on the urgent need for a new paradigm based on global “peace through development.”

The Empire is not omnipotent. In fact, it is decadent and dying. It is capable of provoking chaos, even a nuclear war, but only if the people fail to live up to what Friedrich Schiller posed as the responsibility of all human beings to be “patriots of one’s nation and citizens of the world.” This is our moment.