Are You ‘Responsible’?

by Jason Ross

[Print version of this editorial]

Oct. 14—Who is responsible for the carnage now taking place in Southwest Asia? Was it Hamas, by perpetrating a violent attack? Was it Israel, by effectively incarcerating millions of Palestinians for years?

Or was it you? Better said, will it be you?

Who is responsible, not for the past, but for the future? Who, rather than working out how best to assign blame, will take responsibility for creating a world in which conflict is a thing of the past? A world in which “security” is thought of in terms of health, of environmental security against droughts and floods, in moral security—the personal peace that comes with living a just life?

At a conference on Sept. 2, 2001, Helga Zepp-LaRouche challenged her audience:

[Lyndon LaRouche] has said repeatedly, and he has written it many times, that the only hope for the United States to get out of the depression, is that the United States becomes an active part of this Eurasian Land-Bridge, and that the United States must support it—that this is the absolute sine qua non, the condition without which it does not function that mankind can avoid plunging into a new terrible Dark Age.

She spoke from decades of work. Two examples: In December 1994, the Schiller Institute held its first conference on the New Silk Road with Lyndon LaRouche, freed in January that year from his unjust imprisonment. She spoke in Beijing in 1996 at the International Symposium on Economic Development of the Regions Along the New Euro-Asia Continental Bridge.

In 2003, just hours after the unjust U.S. assault on Iraq had begun under the authority of the befuddled President George W. Bush, and Vice President Dick “Lady Macbeth” Cheney, Lyndon LaRouche addressed an audience of hundreds in Germany. LaRouche insisted that the Iraq war was only a pretext for a world war: “It cannot be stopped, unless the war as a whole is stopped.” So far, that process of global conflict, launched following the United States’s Reichstag Fire of 2001, has not been stopped. “China is one of the nations targeted by this war, which gives you some sense of what the dimensions are, what we’re up against,” continued LaRouche. “We must stop this war.”

So, who is “responsible”?

Who is responsible, not for the killing, but for bringing an end to the killing?

LaRouche, in the referenced 2003 presentation:

No peace movement could ever stop a war, even though it may be useful. Somebody has to pull the strings of power, to set into motion the action around which popular opinion can then mobilize, and grow. And be mobilized for what? For action! Not for negative action, but for positive action. The positive action, of course, is to create a new international monetary-financial system … to create a just new world economic order … whose immediate goal is to lead the world out of the present depression.

This coming week, Beijing will host the Third Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, an opportunity for international discussion on refining China’s efforts to export infrastructure and development, and for the creation of a new world economic order more broadly.

When will the countries of Anglo-American NATO act on their true self-interest, by joining hands in creating a world of peace, not through strength alone, but through development? Will the United States again become a productive nation, rather than a parasitical consumer society living by its power to extract concessions from other parts of the world?

Who is responsible, not for evil, but for good?

Are you responsible?