EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR THURSDAY, JANUARY 28, 2021

When Precedents Are Lacking, Leadership Requires Universal Principles

Jan. 27 , 2021 (EIRNS)—“There are no direct parallels in history” for the present, said Russian President Vladimir Putin in his speech at Davos. “However, some experts ... compare the current situation to the 1930s.... As you are aware, the inability and unwillingness to find substantive solutions to problems like this in the 20th century led to the World War II catastrophe.”

Will the growing tensions in the world reach a similar, and this time, final conclusion?

Over the past few decades, living standards have, on the whole, improved, particularly when measured in terms of eradicating poverty, a process in which China has led the way. But the natural human tendency towards discovery, growth and development has been countered by a paradigm that seeks to send the human race backwards, to an economic platform capable of supporting only a billion people, using remarkably unproductive forms of power—a paradigm that uses finance, coupled increasingly with spying, blackmail, and big tech as a means of supranational control. This paradigm has increasingly concentrated financial profits in the hands of the 1% (or the 0.1%), while the trans-Atlantic physical economy has declined dramatically compared to the growth rates of which it was capable. To this paradigm, there is no greater international threat than the meteoric growth of China, and that nation’s policy of exporting its infrastructural and manufacturing capabilities. Although efforts to contain China’s growth (and efforts to curtail Russia’s independence) are doomed to fail, such efforts are still being made!

Where could this lead us? Putin:

“There is a chance that we will face a formidable breakdown in global development, which will be fraught with a war of all against all and attempts to deal with contradictions through the appointment of internal and external enemies and the destruction of not only traditional values ... but fundamental freedoms. We have a shared responsibility to prevent this scenario.”

This means overcoming efforts to create enemies where they do not exist.

In the United States, the leader of a supposedly pro-Trump group has been revealed to have been a “prolific” informant for law enforcement. How does this factor into investigations of the motivators of the Capitol break-in of Jan. 6? Legislation has been introduced into the House of Representatives to deny security clearances to anyone involved with “conspiracy theories.” (Who will define the term?) The tech giants continue to refine their censorship of opinions that run counter to those of the ruling elites, shutting down Twitter accounts, YouTube live streams, and social-media income for people who dare to buck the narrative of the legacy news media. Thousands of troops are to remain in Washington, D.C., at least through March. How would provocations similar to Jan. 6, but which might take place anywhere in the country, be used to advance an agenda of crushing free expression under the guise of defeating domestic “terrorism”?

Internationally, the creation of enemies takes the form, most notably, in British-orchestrated attacks on Russia and China, to prevent those nations from cooperating with the United States. China has been accused of laying debt traps, of military expansionism, of deliberately spreading Covid-19, of genocide and assaults on democracy.

The latest claims against Russia center around the preposterous botched poisoning of Alexey Navalny with a top-secret Russian poison that has a track record of being decidedly non-lethal. The attempt to use Navalny’s arrest on re-entering Russia to shut down the Russia-Europe Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline is meeting an icy response from the countries most involved. German firms and the German government are not pleased about unilateral sanctions from the U.S. against a project that is over 90% complete, was agreed to years ago, and has involved private investment and contracting work from dozens of companies and countries in Europe.

The other live wire is Israel, which is loudly announcing its preparation of war plans against Iran, in the event that sanctions are removed under a return to the JCPOA.

The greatest enemy image of all is that of a simple molecule, carbon dioxide. The most defamatory propaganda is being created to slander this friend of photosynthesis, and goals for “decarbonizing” the world’s economies are held up as the most saintly of aspirations. An executive order signed by President Biden on Jan. 27 expresses plans to “put the United States on a path to achieve net-zero emissions, economy-wide, by no later than 2050.” While the “emissions” referred to here are of the CO2 variety, it is equally true that under such a regime, factories would not “emit” products, farms would not “emit” food with anything near the current level of productivity, and space rockets would be grounded, unable to “emit” their propellant.

The contradictions between the urgent need for development and the barriers that CO2-reduction goals erect to achieving that development will become more and more apparent.

The task lies to the LaRouche movement to unmask the deadly effects of the Great Reset, defeat the false enemy images created to confuse and perplex, and lay out the agenda for the Earth’s next fifty years.