Kicking the Axioms of the ‘Anglosphere’

by Dennis Speed

[Print version of this editorial]

Aug. 30—The New York Times ran a cartoon last week characterizing—but not satirizing—how the recent Indian Chandrayaan-3 Lunar Mission triumph was seen by various closed minds of the Anglosphere. It depicts two smug, fat, older, affluent and “cultured” gents in a drawing room-cum-library setting, called the “Elite Space Club.” At the door is an Indian man, dressed poorly, in sandals, with his cow, knocking.

Indian journalist Palki Sharma, in her regular broadcast, characterized the cartoon as racist, pointing out, for example, that British politician Nigel Farage was downright apoplectic about India’s triumph. He fulminated:

As they spend their money on space probes, as they spend their money on the military, they spend their money on nuclear weapons, still half of the country lives below the poverty line.

Sharma pointed out:

It may have slipped [Mr. Farage’s] notice that India is the world’s fifth largest economy. It is, in fact, ahead of his country, the United Kingdom. But it seems he can’t get rid of his colonial mindset. How can poor India have aspirations? How can a former colony reach the Moon before the so-called Great Britain?… And since he’s so keen on discussing priorities, we have a question for him. Why does Britain keep paying for the Royal Family? The citizens cannot afford their electricity bills. Maybe help them, instead of paying for the king and his retinue.

In a larger sense, however, India, and the nations of the BRICS-Plus alliance, are creating, particularly through their joint commitment to the electrification and general industrialization of Africa, an ocean in which the jaded and obsolete neoliberal and neoconservative Anglosphere imperialists cannot swim. The very existence of the BRICS is a challenge, not to “capitalism,” but to the merchants of total war, including thermonuclear war, plying their bloody trade in Ukraine, and perhaps soon Taiwan, or even the Sahel, as was the case with Libya.

The BRICS-Plus have, alternatively, embraced what will demonstrate itself to be, if it is not betrayed, an inevitably anti-Malthusian, pro-population-growth economic stance, a stance which, as professor Franco Battaglia of Italy has pointed out, equates the optimization of the use of fossil fuels, including coal, oil, and gas, and nuclear power, and the building of “full-set,” machine-tool-producing economies, with true “national liberation.”

The International Development Bank (IDB) proposal of the late economist and statesman Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. contains a crucial, unique idea that resolves the cry for justice from the developing sector nations, looted for centuries by the likes of “the great Winston Churchill” and the East India Company.

In contrast to the imperial predator view regarding the nations of “the developing sector,” Lyndon LaRouche, writing in 1975, said this:

If, as is necessary for global development, the developing nations exploit their petroleum, natural gas, coal, and mineral raw materials resources to the extent required for industrial expansion in both the industrialized and developing sectors, how shall we determine both the price of those resources and the compensation for the implied depletion of such assets? Without a “brute force” commitment to development of CTR (Controlled Thermonuclear Reactions) technology, there is no price level or forward depletion compensation which could be considered “equitable.” The general basis for treaty agreements covering prices, and depleting compensation is fundamentally 1) a commitment to applicable CTR technology installations proliferating from 1985 onwards and 2) a commitment to bring those regions up to the level of employment of CTR-oriented technology by the 1985/1990 period.

Nearly five decades ago, when LaRouche made his IDB proposal, China had yet to begin to recover from the Cultural Revolution. Now, China is the largest productive economy in the world, a “space power,” and leads the world in several areas of fusion and controlled thermonuclear reaction research. As RT pointed out Aug. 26, “the five (BRICS) members account for almost a third of the global economy.”

In 1975, LaRouche proposed what amounted to a 10–15 year “brute force” program, similar to the Manhattan Project, to transition national economies worldwide to nuclear/thermonuclear-based power-source economies, with fossil fuels being naturally, decreasingly used over time, because of the much higher energy flux-densities, as well as the higher absolute amounts of energy produced by the higher-order systems.

Instead of having to depend on the whims of the rich, whether corporations or individuals, for the usual, usually dishonest “Bwana”-style proposals (“Why doesn’t Elon Musk give $1 billion to the South African government for joint space research with the successful India program?”), the BRICS New Development Bank and other such mechanisms are the beginning of the hard work, hard thinking, and hard discussion about the right ways to do what former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, now President of that Bank, has insisted must be done:

We’ll transform ourselves into an important bank for developing countries and emerging markets. Our focus has to be that: a bank made by developing countries for themselves.

Advanced technology-transfer, in exchange for essential commodities, as the only actually equitable means of repayment by the trans-Atlantic nations for the natural resources patrimony of Africa, Asia, and South America, would not only result in an exponentially increasing energy consumption per capita and per square kilometer essential to Africa, South America, and Asia’s economic progress, but would, equally importantly, do the same thing in those trans-Atlantic nations themselves, reversing their otherwise-unstoppable economic (and moral) decay. This approach, of course, is the opposite of “energy conservation.”

In a 1979 speech titled “The Myth about Equilibrium Economics,” LaRouche observed:

When sections of mankind have, at any point, resorted to “energy conservation,” societies would have collapsed, biological catastrophes of famine, epidemic and desertification would have plunged such a society back toward savagery. It is to be emphasized that various now-dead societies did choose the Malthusian, “energy conservation” policy, and did slide into savagery or even oblivion….

There is something more profound than mere calories of energy involved in effecting the successful branches of human cultural development. The source of the new energy is the creative mental potentialities of the human mind. In those courses of development of technologies which we comprehend coherently as progress in scientific knowledge, man increases his knowledgeable, willful mastery of the lawful organization of our universe....

On Sept. 9, the Schiller Institute will, in this newly-changed intellectual environment, hold an international conference, titled “Let Us Join Hands with the Global Majority To Create a New Chapter in World History!” to discuss the physical-economic, scientific and cultural determinants of a new, just economic order, in which the creative potentialities of the human mind, and not the rank, financial status, number of academic degrees, or hat-size of the individual, matter.

Days before the 60th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, the nation of India reaffirmed the immortality of Lokmanya Balgangadhar Tilak, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Rabindranath Tagore; of Indira Gandhi, and of Gandhi follower King himself, through achieving one of the most advanced scientific engineering achievements in human history, “at the fraction of the cost of a Hollywood movie.” India had paid a debt to not only its founders, but, as Prime Minister Modi noted, to all of humanity. The BRICS-Plus Space Commission proposed by Modi the morning of Chandrayaan-3’s landing on the Moon is the knock on the door of a nearly-deceased imperialism.

Through our upcoming conference, we can help open that door.