EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2021

With Our Eyes on Mars, We Terraform the Earth

Feb. 19 , 2021 (EIRNS)—Mars has a new guest. NASA’s Perseverance rover has landed successfully on the Red Planet, where it joins two other new visitors to that body: the U.A.E.’s Hope orbiter and China’s Tianwen-1. These three countries represent very different traditions: a relatively new nation with the world’s oldest constitution, an extremely new and relatively small nation founded the same year as the first spacecraft to land on Mars was launched, and the most populous country on the planet with one of the world’s oldest continuous cultures. This confluence of celestial messengers draws the world’s eyes to the stars, and provides us a more enlightened viewpoint for considering our earthly affairs.

Considered as a whole, the Earth has many shortcomings: deserts here and floods there, high mountains, rough terrain, deadly diseases, poisonous organisms, not to mention the hideous culture of oligarchism that has gripped nearly all of humanity for millennia. While the most natural course is to work together to terraform this Earth—as practice for improving other heavenly bodies—an enormous level of political and financial power is concentrated among a grouping that seeks to reduce human population and productivity, and plays an active role in creating cultural currents to prevent opposition to these aims.

This present-day empire—with its centers of power and control in the City of London, the British Royal Family, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the Five Eyes intelligence services, and the legacy media—wants you to see yourself and your neighbors not in terms of your common humanity but in terms of the shades of your skin, promotes a form of discussion whereby ideas are not considered on their merits but are instead rated based on who presents them, and spreads tall tales about those most able to challenge their power: Russia, China, Lyndon LaRouche, and, over the recent period, Donald Trump.

China’s meteoric growth has brought the better part of a billion people out of poverty. Russia’s strength and independence have checked the military designs of the Anglo-American establishment. For more than half a century, Lyndon LaRouche developed, promoted, and at times succeeded in effecting the policies capable of eliminating poverty worldwide and ushering in a renaissance of infrastructural, scientific, cultural, and economic growth, as well as the method by which those policies were crafted.

In Africa, an enormous potential is sprinting into being, made possible by a new paradigm of economics that can unleash the growth that has been held back by decades of neo-colonial economics imposed by the IMF and World Bank. As Schiller Institute leader Sébastien Périmony explains, “The industrialization of Africa has already begun. A new paradigm is emerging, the paradigm so dreamed of by the great Pan-Africanist leaders. It is that of a multipolar world based on co-development, of a world based on ‘physical’ economy rather than monetarism ... or Malthusianism.” Unleashing the enormous potential of this fast-growing continent will mean achieving standard-gauge, continent-wide high-speed rail not by the deadlines of the African Union’s Agenda 2063, but within a dozen years. It means greatly improved agriculture benefitting from capital inputs and mechanization. It means rural electrification, an expansion of nuclear and other power (including the massive hydropower of the Congo River and the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Nile), continent-scale inter-basin water management systems, bridges, roads, manufacturing, education, science, and technology. And it means moving forward in all of these ways, right now.

The collision between physical reality and the ideological narratives designed to prevent any challenge to the anti-growth trans-Atlantic system is manifesting itself in the energy disasters in Texas and beyond and in the remaining great challenges in establishing the pandemic-prompted excellent health infrastructure needed worldwide.

Achieving a victory for human growth will mean redirecting anger from such misplaced or ill-conceived enemy images as Russia, China, immigrants, or whiteness, to defeating the modern British financial empire. Free from the Green religion of guilt for existing at all, and the financial fantasies that demand to dictate policy, the World Land-Bridge concept of Lyndon and Helga LaRouche can become a reality.

Let us make a garden of the Earth, and, soon, other planets too!